Introduction: A Few Words

My first thoughts are "Wow. It's actually done." ::blinks in amazement::

The idea for this story hit my back at the beginning of last summer, the result of multiple character-exploration plot bunnies mingled with the traditional Post-Registration plot bunnies. I started out thinking it would be a nice, regular length story. Ha. I should know better than to turn the Muse loose. I think this is my longest work to date.

Eleven months ago, I discovered the X-men fan fiction universe, most specifically the beautiful relationship between Logan and Rogue, and I have been blissfuly obsessed ever since. Although this ardor has not dimmed in the slightest, I have been forced into semi-lurkdom lately due to a very, very heavy real life schedule. I just wanted to offer my apologies for having to play Invisible Girl. It's not fun, but I think I'll have to keep it up until things calm down. I'll continue reading and offering feedback when I can, although this will probably be my last story for a while. I may continue to post the occasional poem or vignette, but nothing much longer unless the Muse hits me hard.

I have tried to put this off, but I'm at last resorts and there seems to be nothing else I can do but cut back. I hope this story will be a viable contribution to the post-registration genre, a field of fan fiction that I respect and love.

Thank you all so much for welcoming this little fan fic peon and making her feel at home in the big, wide world of X-men. I have never been in a fandom that is as warm and open to newcomers (and antique members :P) and I am continually amazed by your kindness and by your inspiration.

---

Prologue: Marie

How did the end surprise you all? How did it form, how did it coalesce? What gave it life? What hatreds, what blindness, what fears? What blood and smoke? What politicians, what legislation? What mobs?

They weren't the only ones to go blind. You couldn't see either-- happiness got in your eyes, the by-product of living and loving and being loved. No one was prepared for what was coming, but suddenly it hit. The roof caved in, the ruins burnt. Right around you.

The time after is black and white. For survivors, it is a reel of old news footage-- jerky motion, grainy faces, stilted dialogue-- like remembering a war your grandfathers fought. For those who try to escape, there is an excess of color: garish reds and yellows smeared across the eyes like paint. It all happens too fast and too slow. It happens like an explosion moving backwards, starting out as light and heat and sound, then roaring into black silence.

You could read of it in the papers, but the headlines are all the same. You could see it in a theatre, splayed and vulgar across the big screen, but all movies are sterilized and edited to make you the enemy. You are at the mercy of humanity, and by now you have learned that humanity has no mercy to give.

You could leave this place...

No, you couldn't. Not really. There are wire fences and German Shepherds (to keep them out or to keep you in?) and beyond that an entire nation waits to lynch you on discovery. Discovery in your case would be inevitable. You can't control your skin, and eventually, someone would want to touch. They wouldn't listen when you tried to stop them. No one else would be around to stop them for you. Or rather, there is someone...but Logan is not here. He is not anywhere close to you. Dead? At times you hope so; it'd be so much easier that way. As it is, you
don't know what to feel. Part of it's love, part of it's hate, part of it just aches, and if you saw him again, you wouldn't know whether to hug him or spit in his face.

At least here there is someone else. It is strange, the sudden wrench fate throws into your well-oiled life. You thought of Scott as many things-- teacher, friend, brother-- but never as this. Never as the one thing standing between you and Jean and the hands of strangers. The other men hate him, fear him, envy him.
They look at Jean and you as trophies, living proof of Scott's manhood and prowess.

It's not really like that. This is the truth--

You are here because you wanted to survive, and because there is no other place to go. Scott only makes them fear him because he thinks it will keep the men away. He prevents them from pushing too close, from looking too long, from touching. You pretend to submit because that's how it's done here; you let them think you need him to keep you safe, that you could not do it yourself. It used to all be pretense-- your dependence, his boasting.

But sometimes you don't know if it is, anymore.

That scares you most of all.

I was told of a distant land
where tortured souls often cried together in anguish
and the scenes that were shown
were of a cruel and violent nature
Scenes of pain and cruelty were there to be seen.
The arena, the time, and the place were set
for all to watch and see.
I was told of a place in a distant land
where the oppressor ruled with an iron hand,
and of nations who sat in
complacency, left cold and emotionless by history.
Scenes of pain and cruelty were there to be seen
and all the while I should have known
it was you killing me.
Somewhere east of Eden the designs will never change,
Infected through others
fear the world stops at the end of the hall.
We watched the life force fade away,
The eventual price you will have to pay.
(Once you are dead how could the children have known?)

--- East of Eden, Dead Can Dance

---

Phoenix Compound
Southwest Nevada
August 31

Think of it like a wedding.

That is what the old women whisper into our ears when the white dresses slide over our heads, sticking to our skin in the early morning heat. Their bony fingers press cold circles against our shoulders and the ridges of our spines as they fasten each button one at a time. Their words drone all around us, within us, through our heads. Ms. Sophia-- the coldest and boniest of them all-- taps her cane against the floor in rhythm to the liturgy.

(May you bear many young. May you honor your bondmate with a son. May you brighten the steps of his dwelling with a daughter.)

The voices rattle like bones in the dry air, but I never listen to them. I listen to his voice. I have kept him safe from this place, tucked far back into a corner and buried under memories of better times so they will never find him. It is to prevent them from taking him from me. It is to prevent me from destroying him myself.

The lace falls over our faces, smothering us with the scent of incense and jasmine. Everyone bows their head to accept the veil. Everyone submits. Even Jean, and even me, though I would like to say I did not. My dresser tugs a pair of white cotton gloves onto my arms, sheathing my skin in protective cotton from fingertips to elbows. Ironic. I am the exception, even here, when we are all supposedly equal at the genes. An urge to laugh pulls at the back of my throat, but it is bitter like semi-sweet chocolate. That is the taste of all laughter here. That is, for those of us who still indulge.

They press flowers into our clasped hands, a single white carnation. Then they whisper to us again, squinting out of the wrinkles at the corner of their eyes.

(Think of it like a wedding. Think how you all will make such beautiful brides.)

Jean told me this is a lie. She had a real wedding, two springs ago, in a little stone church in the country. There were candles in the windows and pink roses in her hair, and Logan kissed me in the back of the sanctuary when everyone else went outside for the reception. Does he even remember that now? Wherever he is, whomever he's with? I do.

As we kneel for the final benediction, I watch Jean's hands twist and turn her wedding band around her finger. Sophia's caned her three times so far for refusing to take it off during the Ceremony. None of them understands her stubbornness.

(It's just a ring, dearie.)

Her dresser pats her hand or smoothes her hair as she talks.

(It doesn't even mean anything anymore.)

Jean says that I shouldn't be angry, that the women are just trying to make it easier for her. I think they're just jealous. All of them. She still has what they've all given up-- her spirit.

It's her survival, her one small defiance, but it costs her. I wonder if she tells Scott about the beatings, if he finds the marks on her body at night and asks what happened. If she feels his pain when he touches the bruises. If she lies to him to make him think he really is protecting us like he promised. I could say it's worse for her than it is for me. She knows what love is supposed to be; she holds the memories of what she and Scott had before all this.

But then, I know what love is not. I learned the hard way, and there are still nights when I can't sleep because it all plays back in my head. I guess I'm still the lucky one because it's easier to lose something if you never had it to begin with. I don't have her kind of memories, and at this moment, I am grateful.

/Grateful that the one who'd ask you about your bruises is far, far away from here. He's not coming to save the day any time soon, or maybe he's not coming at all./

Some mornings I wake up with this fierce sort of gladness that he is free from all this. Sometimes I hope he's locked up too. I don't know what's worse-- the idea that they have him again, or that he's alive and has just stopped looking for me.

I'll be angry with both because on these days, anger is the best sort of drug. When it's in my veins, I feel nothing. Nothing at all. I disappear between the white rage and the white veil and hope no one notices me and calls my name before the Elders.

The door opens and we walk one by one into the stifling heat of the courtyard. Jean flashes the sunlight off her ring into Ms. Sophia's eyes as we walk. The hag glares at us like she'd cane us both if she had more time. But there is not time.

The glare of desert sun on white cloth stings my eyes, causing them to throb with tears. The throbbing closes in on my chest as well, a second pulse that races to the frantic shouts of men ready to fight. Ready to claim a prize. I fight the urge to run.

My eyes pull away from the crowd, pushing up through the disgusting pallor of the veil to drink in the deep, wet blue of the sky. For one beautiful second, all I see is sky and clouds and all I hear is the wind and his voice in my head, and we all are free again.

Then the drums throw me back to the earth, and I kneel with the others in front of the Elder's platform, shifting to find the softest spot on the hard cushion beneath my knees. The flower in my hand shrivels, wilting in the baking air It looks like me. Shining and white and beautiful for a moment, but drying up fast in the desert sun. That's what they're really doing to us. They dress us up and parade us out and suck our life away until we're brittle and old like Ms. Sophia and the other women. Until we're nothing but dust and dead flowers on the inside. No spirit. No life.

/I swear, I'll never give it up. Jean will not give up her ring and I refuse to lose what's left of who I am. If they couldn't take that outside, then a bunch of survivalist freaks can't take it from me in here./

The High Elder, an old man with no hair and wan yellow skin -- part of his mutation or malnutrition?-- rises to his feet and addresses the crowd.

"Brothers and sisters, it is my privilege to invoke this month's Bonding Ceremony. I call on the Powers that they may give skill to our brothers competing today and grace to our sisters who await their bonds to these warriors."

I ignore him....it's the same David Koresh mumbo jumbo every month. If I strain my eyes hard enough, I can see Scott through the veil. His visor makes him easy to recognize, even through a blur of lace. From this distance, his posture and body language paints a deception of total confidence. Cockiness, even. He always does know how to put on a face. Not quite as good as Logan, but he comes close when the occasion calls for it.

"May the strongest hand prevail and may the womb of his bondmate be fertile with hope for our future."

Yeah, like a compound full of squaling little mutants is going to help us win back our freedom on the outside. Sure.

This is our third Ceremony, but my stomach still twists into little hard knots when the fighting begins. The helplessness is worst-- the knowledge that control of my body is again taken from my hands. We're china dolls on a shelf, waiting to be passed to the winners here today. If I'm lucky, he'll be a friend. A protector. If I'm not lucky... A month can be a very long time.

It is on these mornings when I think of Logan the most. He was built to fight. He lives for it. That's not the way Scott works. All he ever wanted was a family and a safe place for them to live in peace...

"Let the challenges begin."

The cry of a child interrupts the anticipation, and Jean's head snaps over to the shade where the Nurses are watching the young children. She knows the sound of her son. Will just turned three months old; he still cries when she leaves him alone for longer than a few minutes. I don't have to have her telepathy to sense her craving to leave her seat and comfort him. But she can't. Scott can't. He has to fight and she has to watch and maybe when it's all over, they can hold their son again.

It'll cost him something in the mean time. Always does. Jean is contested every month; last Ceremony, Scott fought three different challenges for her, and one more for me. Sometimes the fights are easy. Other times...not so easy. I never know exactly what to say to him when it's over. It makes sense that he'd do this for his wife, for his son, but he doesn't owe me a thing. All he gave me was his word that if I stayed with him, nothing bad would happen again. So far, he's proved it.

Thank you just doesn't cut it for something like that. At least my mutation makes it easier for him. Not many men want to risk his kind of beating for a girl with poison skin. Most of my challengers take him on just for prestige. Everybody wants to be the first to take the head X-man down.

Oh yes, his reputation preceded him. Here's another irony --we had to run to this freak show in the first place because the humans hated us for trying to save our people. As it turns out, the mutants hate us just as bad because we failed. Maybe even worse.

Jean's name is called twice. The challenges are clean and quick; Scott's getting faster every month. Ms. Sophia has orders to cane us if we soil our eyes with the fighting, but I risk a glance at him from time to time in guilty fascination. His fighting style is so different from Logan's. Logan is steel, hard and rough and angry all at once, one big metal fist crushing anything in his way. Scott is not metal, but liquid. He's not allowed the use of his mutation, but it is not needed. Each motion is calculated, graceful, darting between his opponent's defenses before any reaction can stop him. The more you watch, the more the spin of his body and arms seems like an intricate dance. In this manner it is almost beautiful. But sometimes I see him bleed, and then there is no beauty, and there is no grace.

Five challenges into the Ceremony, Ms. Sophia tells me to stand.

"Are there any challengers for ownership of this bondmate?"

A moment of silence. I can almost hear the thoughts of the men as they look at me.

(What's she hiding under that veil? Does her skin really suck out minds? Can I find a way to get around it? Is it really worth fighting her man?)

A lean but muscular young man steps out from the crowd and peels off his shirt, grinning as he winks at me.

"I am called Paul. By the Powers, I challenge for her ownership."

"Who accepts this challenge?"

Scott's voice, weary but firm.

"I am called Scott. I defend ownership."

"Powers be with you. Let the challenge begin."

My stomach dives straight for my toes as they move into the white chalk circle where the challenges are fought. This time I can't look. Not even once or twice. I close my eyes, pulling very far back into the dusty black, and I begin to count backward from six hundred. Very slowly. Jean taught me this as a method of keeping your sanity when you hear the fighting. Counting fills your mind with an abundance of nothingness. You don't think about what's at stake. You don't think about what could happen to you.

Six hundred. Five hundred ninety-nine. Five hundred ninety-eight. Five hundred ninety-seven...

I fill the space between the numbers with snapshot memories of a past more real than my life now.

/Goldfish in a plastic bag, a present from my aunt for my fifth birthday./

Five hundred ninety-six.

/The first time I played the violin, startled but enraptured by the sound./

Five hundred ninety-five.

/His smile, the day before he left me.../

As I said, Scott's getting faster. I barely reach two hundred before the cry of "yield!" ends the match and allows me to open my eyes again. The kid is down, bleeding hard from his mouth. I think Scott broke teeth. Good.

The Elder confirms the victory. "The Challenge belongs to Scott. Ownership is retained. May the Powers bless the continuation of this union."

A quiver slides down the length of my spine, like ice, like cold hands. I'll never get used to this part. I hate it.

"Scott, you will now publicly bond this woman to you as your mate until the next Ceremony, or until the bond is extended by creation of a child. Rogue, you will now rise and accept his bond."

My knees shake as I stand. Bad memories die hard.

My eyes are still lowered, waiting his command before I will be allowed to look up, so I do not see him until he is directly in front of me. My gaze falls level with his chest. Beneath the streaks of dirt and sweat, the skin is tinged with purple or yellow splotches that will turn into bruises before nightfall. I smell the fight on him-- blood, adrenaline, anger, more animal than human. It reminds me of Logan when he came out of the cage the first time I saw him. Scott's breathing is ragged when he speaks to me, reciting the formula of the bonding ritual.

"You may raise your eyes."

I look up to read the silent apology in his gaze. He knows the degradation of this. The disgust. Every month I see a plea for forgiveness in his eyes. I give him what I can, but I have to stifle the urge to pull away. The revulsion can't be helped. Possession is still possession, even if the owner is nice.

He reaches for the edge of my veil. Bright smears of red stain the white lace where he touches. As he pulls it back from my face, he tries to smile. I try to smile back.

"I bond you, Rogue, to my side for as long as the Powers decree."

"I accept your bond with gratitude and hope I may honor your house with many children."

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Jean watch us. She is impassive; a portrait in stone.

His face moves closer to mine, until I can no longer see the sun but only my own reflection in his visor. My eyes are wide, flared. Will he see it as fear? This is not supposed to be that kind of kiss. It is a form, a ritual. Nothing more.

The rock-bottom truth of it is that I have no choice. I couldn't move away even if I wanted it. That makes me cold inside. I need the right to turn away. But if I do, I'm as good as banished-- maybe even Scott too -- and there are things outside the fences so much worse than a kiss.

Scott pulls the bottom corner of the veil over my mouth. I close my eyes and pretend with everything in me that it's Logan. That it is simple and beautiful and something I want.

But when his lips touch mine, it's not that kind of kiss either.

It's mechanical. Stiff. A touch of lips through lace, a taste of blood from his split lip, the suspicion that he's left another apology in my mouth. And after that, nothing.

As I follow him from the courtyard, I am relieved. I am also empty inside.

El Cantina de Plata Soledad, Mexico
August 31

There is nothing like the silence of heat.

It's a baked dead sound that coats jeans and boots and the palms of my hands or the roof of my mouth until I gag on it. The taste is dry, gritty, like the water holes in the days when no rains come. The locals call it ardientes los dias. The burning days. The days when cattle go mad with thirst and the old women whisper chants to dead saints. It's also when the sons of the ranchers and the dope farmers and the factory workers come into town in twos and threes, looking to become big time hombres in a fight.

I'll be waiting.

I've learned a lot since I left her, mostly about things I never asked to know. I know what it's like to be driven like the cattle, crazy with the desire for something simple yet vital to sanity. To life itself. It's the kind of thirst that makes me ache when I reach out to take her gloves off and she's gone. When I turn to smile at her and find only empty air. My search for her left a trail of cockroach motel rooms and cheap beer from Vancouver to Mexico City and back again. A different town or refugee centers or city ghetto every night, but never a solid clue.

Sometimes I cross paths with some of our friends in the Mutant Registration Bureau who try to brand a number into my hip and ship me to a labor camp. I make them pay for what they might have done to her. I've relearned the finer points of how to make a grown man scream and cry, how to push him to the point where he'll confess to anything. But it always turns out to be a lie. They can't tell me how to find her. How to save her. Too bad you can only kill a man once. I die twice, three times, eight times, but then again I'm not a man. Death isn't the way out for me. Just a punishment for losing her in the first place.

Believe me, I've tried. I've looked for Marie on both sides of life and in all the cracks between but still...nothing.

I also know the whispered desperation of the old women, the quieter agony in the struggle for meaning in the meaningless. When I walked away from her, I didn't think I had a choice. She accused me of playing hero, but that wasn't it at all. I was the only one who could come back alive. It saved the others, but most of all, it saved her -- at least from one type of death. How was I supposed to know that there were twenty other kinds waiting in line? That they were just as bad, if not worse?

We were both innocent back then, her in her own way, me in mine. It cost me one of my many lives. I still have nightmares about what it cost her.

After I knew I wouldn't be getting her back, my life disintegrated with record speed. I wake up screaming five times every night, her big brown eyes staring at me in silent accusation, just exactly how they looked when I pushed her away from me that night. Love. Sadness. Fear. On top of it all, a plea. Stay with me. Don't leave me alone. Protect me.

Since then, I've seen things that only add a new dimension to the nightmares. My imagination-- that I didn't even know I had-- puts her in the mass graves at the camps, the brothels in the cities, the operating tables in the labs. I hear her scream and it pushes me over the edge, and I break into a bar determined to fight every last man in the building. I want to go down hard and bleed like she bled, like she might be bleeding still.

Does she still remember that day we kissed in the church? It was right after Jeannie and Scooter got married. I took off her gloves and kissed her, and she showed me a painting of St. Francis. Said he was her favorite saint because he believed in love.

What am I supposed to believe in now?

I spent six months looking for her before the dead ends led me to this godforsaken middle of nowhere in futile hopes she had made the border after all. The only way I can describe it was like looking for a rain that will never come. After a while I realized that this was my life from now on.

Empty. Dusty. Barren.

I won't say I've given up. Just dried up.

I sit in the backroom of bars that all look the same, in greasy Mexican towns with names I can't pronounce. These are dead towns, where nobody knows or cares what I am. It's not a bad life, really. I sit and smoke my cigar and wait for the boys to come. Word's spread along the border fight clubs that there's a white man traveling the circuit who's never lost a fight. So now, I'm a test of manhood. The first would-be heroes show up in June and the last crawl back home around September. They pull up in their daddy's pickup with their good boots and a new shirt, and throw a wad of American dollars on the counter.

I beat the crap out of them, of course, but as a whole I take it easier on them than I should. Maybe I feel sorry for them, stuck in a life they didn't ask for and a world they can't escape. The sad part of it is that every one of them still has that gleam in their eyes, the notion that if anyone is going to get out, it'll be them. I wonder at times if I'd be doing them a bigger favor to go ahead and pound the foolishness out of their heads before it hurts them. Before it hurts the ones they love...

Whoa, whose world am I describing here? Theirs or mine? I'm never too sure, anymore. I never meant to hurt her. I should have told her to stay away from me. I should have made her listen. I should have walked away while it was still safe, while she could find someone else to give her everything she deserved. But to be honest, I could never swallow the thought that leaving meant living the rest of my life without seeing that face. I'm living that way now. It's like dying every day without ever getting the luxury of official death.

I finish my tequila just as the next Geronimo wannabe struts through the door of the bar. Boots clapping against the hardwood. A sweaty wad of money in hand. A sneer on a face that is barely old enough to shave much less hold up in a brawl. The money lands on the bar beside my glass. The sneer turns in my direction.

"I hear you never been beaten, hombre." They all say the same thing. "Nope."

Not by some kid in fake Levis and a cheap cotton shirt. Just by a girl with eyes darker than anything I've ever seen, more human than humanity will ever be. She took me down using nothing more than a smile. She sucker-punched me with a beauty I had never seen before, then finished the knockout with a love I thought I'd never know. But where is that love now? The beauty? Lost, in a very big, very angry world and I've run out of places to look.

My fingers tighten on the glass as the Mexican keeps talking. "I'm here to change that, gringo." I shrug. "Why not."

I peel off my shirt and follow the kid out back. No, I'm not gonna take it easy on this one. Not today. I'm gonna hit him hard and fast and show him exactly where fancy dreams end up. He'll thank me someday, when he's all grown up and jaded enough to fit into the rest of the world.

But I'm not really thinking about the boy or the fight. I see her face every time I try to swing a punch. The smack of my fist striking his flesh mutates into the sound of her scream. I close my eyes to escape only to see her clinging to my shirt, fingers digging into my bones, screaming in my face that she needs me to stay with her. That she doesn't care what they do to her as long as I'm there ... and then I push her away...

It takes me fifteen minutes to score a simple knockout.

When it's all over, I walk back to my hotel room with the kid's blood on my skin and one hundred dollars in my pants pocket. I'm sick of this joint. Time to hit the road again, find a way to the next dead end. The next town that I'll only remember as a Place Marie Is Not.

I get halfway down the road before I realize I paid the clerk twice the cost of the room. For a minute, I think about going to get it back, but I end up walking on. I can get more money. All I have to do is hit one of the big fight clubs in Mexico City, and I'll have all the cash I need. Maybe someone will have heard of her there. I can't shake the illusion that I'll turn around in a cage fight and she'll be sitting at the bar watching me, just like the first time I saw her.

/C'mon, baby, tell me where you are. You're still out there, I can feel it. Come to me in a dream, give me a vision, and I'll follow you anywhere, no matter the cost. I'll even let them brand me and lock me up, if that's where they've got you. But you gotta give me something. This vague hope is killing me even faster than the momentary belief that you're dead. Or maybe that's just it. Maybe all I'm feeling is a ghost./

I leave the town without a second glance, but the blood is still on my hands and the tequila is still on my breath. I still see every detail of her eyes. The image burns, burns my mind as I walk three miles into the desert. I stand like the Geronimo kid stood in the bar and face the storm over the mountains.

Purple thunderclouds hover above the horizon, hurling white tomahawks of lightning to the desert floor. The thunder pounds a war dance against the stillness. If I try hard enough, I can almost smell the rain. But it won't reach me. I get all of the thunder and the lightning and the chaos, but none of the softness. None of the hope.

I take my gun out of my duffel bag. By now it's becoming a ritual. Death can be both a religion and an addiction when you can get as much of it as you want and keep on coming back for more.

No more pain, not tonight. No more thirst, no more darkness. No more being alone. I'll shatter into sparks against the sky, free until my body heals and pulls me back to earth. By dawn, I'll be on my way to the next town. The next fight.

The next step in the futile race to outrun myself.

I remember the first time it really hit me that I'd lost her. I couldn't handle it. I broke into a fight club just inside the Canadian border and started hitting everyone within reach. Once they started hitting back, I quit. I wanted to take a beating, wanted it hard and fast because maybe the pain would push her from my mind. Once they were finished, they threw my body into the snow behind the building. I don't know how long I lay there, watching the snow turn red underneath me and spitting up blood and crying for the first time in my memory.

Somehow I convinced myself that it would get better in time. That I'd find a way to move on, to live without her. That it wouldn't hurt.

My fingers slide along the metal to embrace the trigger. I speak my thoughts aloud because maybe, just maybe, she hears me.

"I'm gonna tell you a secret, baby...."

Click the safety off, push the barrel against my heart.

"It always hurts."

Squeeze.

---

Double Violin Concerto: Logan

You'll never be able to remember it exactly as it happened; the events refuse to correlate in straight lines and neat rows, but insist on surfacing one piece at a time, glinting like flecks of gold drowning in oil. You snatch up one to find it is of yesterday; the next is the same day a year ago. Pain isn't linear to you, it's spatial. There is no simple beginning and simple end, but rather endless variations on degrees of guilt and loss. In between it all, you even remember the happy time. That hurts most of all, like the ache of your teeth when you eat something much too sweet.

You collect these fragments of past and hide them in the palm of your hand, clenching them tightly beneath metal-laced fingers to make sure no one can pry them away. You go back and count them when you are alone at night, touching each one to reacquaint yourself with its unique ridges and textures. Sometimes the edges are sharp. Sometimes they draw blood. The greatest clarity comes when you are neither dead nor alive, awake nor asleep, but somewhere in the middle, waiting for your body to heal from your latest rage. You'll have plenty of time tonight. You felt the bullet pass clean through your heart. Even before you closed your eyes, you knew that this time it would be worth it. This time you got a good fix, a rush that will set you free. You knew because you heard her violin.

A melody that is clean, sharp on the edges, classically rigid, but diffused by the warmth she brings to every song she plays. She pours herself out through her fingertips, into the bow, across the strings, dripping from the instrument to pool on the ground around her feet.

(Marie is by the lake.)

Charles anticipated your question, again, a small smile on his face. A smile that was older than he should have been.

You could close your eyes and find her just by the sound of her finger dances, but you want more than a melody. You want to absorb every piece of the afternoon, to stain it across your soul in vibrant color. Scarlets, oranges, yellows, the colors of trees burning with life even as their leaves drop to the ground in layers of ash.

(We're all glad you've chosen to return.
I've only been gone two months, Chuck. Not like I was leaving permanently.
Perhaps you should consider it.
Kickin' me out so soon?
Certainly not. This will always be your home, but I fear it will not be a safe place much longer. I trust you've seen the news?
Why do you think I came back?)

The wind splatters the colors across the sky like finger-paints in swirls of leaves and bending branches. It smells of earth, of rich dirt and rotting leaves and bonfires. Of Marie. By nightfall, the chill will deepen and bring out an early frost. The clouds will freeze; more leaves will die. But you do not think of that. You are too close to her to think of that.

(Sometimes I believe Eric may have been right about them after all. We shall have to wait and see.
Do you think they'll pass it this time?
Yes. Can't we do something to stop it?
We will try. Now go, find Marie. Enjoy this weather while it lasts. Winter is coming early this year, I believe.
Why do I get the feeling you aren't just talkin' weather?
Now you are starting to understand.)

A step farther, another, and you can see her through the trees. She is on fire like the leaves are on fire, hair blown like a scarf in the wind, her lips set in a firm line as her eyes stare out into something you can't see. Her hands are bare. Unashamed. The fingers a blur of white across the bow and strings. Her gloves are neatly folded on top of the violin case.

You smile. She remembered.

She doesn't see you, at first. She is intoxicated with her music, and you are intoxicated with her, and for a moment you almost walk away. To break abruptly into the sound seems almost a sacrilege. Screaming in a church. Cursing in a prayer.

But you can't help it.

You step out from the trees. You don't say a word; she sees you now. The music dies. You wait for her reaction, wondering how you would react if she left for two months then appeared again from nowhere. She grins.

(Hey stranger.
Two months and I'm a stranger?
The deal was two weeks, originally.
I kept in touch.
A redeeming grace.)

Her eyes sparkle the way they do when she teases you.

(So what brought you back to the fold?
I missed Scooter terribly.
Ha. That'll be the day.)

This is it...you're going to say it right now. But what are you going to say? The moment is upon you but the words have gone. He wonders if she knows what Charles knows, what he knows. If she feels the inevitability, creeping up her spine, cold spider legs against the nerves.

Of course she does. But that is not the truth you came to discuss. There will be time for that. Now is time for ... You can't.

(Violin sounds real nice. What is it?
Bach. Double Violin Concerto. Me and this other girl in my music class auditioned for a state honors recital and this is the piece that got us in.
Congratulations. I've always wanted to go to one of those.
Liar. It's formal. You break out in hives at that word.
I'll wear a tie and my good jeans and we'll call it even.
So why did you really come back? I thought you said you had a solid lead this time.)

You've been moving closer to her as you talk, and now you need to touch her. Your fingers curl around a piece of hair that's blown over her eyes.

(Didn't work out like I thought it would.
Was it really the lead or was it the fact that they're going to make it legal to burn numbers into our skin?)

A wince, yours, at her honesty. When it all breaks down, she can take reality a lot better than you could. You fight it. She drinks it down black, straight, without cream or sugar or any other denials.

You wrap your arms around her, pulling her close enough to whisper in her ear. She smells of a strange mix of perfume, black coffee, and oranges. Or maybe you just think it is oranges because her sweater was orange and you had your face buried in it.

(I came back because there was something you had to know.
What? I already know that we're not going to win this one. I already know that.
I came back because I love you.)

You expect her to laugh, or smile, or maybe even cry a little, but she pulls back enough to look you in the eye and you don't see anything.

(You never had to tell me that. I knew.
And so?
So what?
So is it just me?
No, I'm pretty much in up to my neck in it too.
I want to hear you say it.
Now you sound like Scott.
Humor me.
I love you.
Good.
Good.)

And you hold her by the lake until the sun falls and the frost comes to drive you both inside.

The Phoenix Compound
August 31

Midnight. Tangible darkness wraps around my body in a thick black film decorated with specks of starlight as it slips through holes in the window screen. Orion's left elbow across my hip. The Milky Way spread out in creamy white across my stomach. The North Star hidden in the hollow of my throat.

I wear the starlight to bed in one last hope that when all the stars fade, they will think I am one of them and take me away. Out of this place. But every morning, I wake in the naked sunlight, and always I find myself here.

I am always without him.

On some nights, in spite of my determinations not to remember, I close my eyes and wear him like the stars. A kiss on the forehead, brushed across the smooth curve of my temple. The subtle indentation of fingers spread over the back of my hand. A smile hanging carelessly above my lips.

All of it, like my starlight plans of freedom, vanishes with the sun.

I don't wear them tonight. I can't. The nights after the Ceremonies are always the hardest. They remind me of what I escaped; they remind Jean of what she lost; they remind Scott of what can be taken from him. We see most clearly what we have become. Quiet, desperate people fighting a quiet, desperate struggle to bind our humanity to ourselves. Tonight, we realize that the cords are not steel but string. Fragile. Easy to break.

There are two kinds of people lying under the darkness tonight-- those who have been broken and those who will be broken. I have come to believe it an inevitability, one of those slow, dry desert inevitabilities like weeks without rain. No one wins every battle they fight. No one can protect everything they love. Scott may fight very well for a very long time, but sooner or later he will fail. It's only a question of when. Not if.

Logan and I learned this by experience.

The man and the woman across the room from me have not. They have their suspicions, but they are in love and blind like lovers who refuse to admit they will be separated. I can hear this blindness through the night. It makes me ache in places I can't explain, old scars and new wounds. I remember when I was blind in that way too. I want it back.

As it is, I sit very still and try to lose my sight by proxy as I listen to his whisper in the darkness. It's soft, like the sound of a burning candle, something I am not meant to hear. No one is meant to hear, but the room is small and I have learned to catch his every word.

"Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence:"

This is their ritual: poetry and whispers in the dark. Scott holds his wife and whispers the words into her ear. Jean listens and allows her husband the pretense that he is making her feel exactly as if they are in their bedroom in New York. The poetry itself depends on his mood. Sometimes it's Shakespeare, or Donne, or Eliot, or Browning. Sometimes it's love, or it's hope, and other times it is none of those things.

I recognize tonight's poem as one of his favorites. An image forms in my mind; a sliver of a past. He's standing in front of literature class, reciting the words from flawless memory. His smile is the warm, contented smile that men get when they say the name of a lover. He talked that way about all his books, all his philosophies and ideals. The words don't sound quite the same now. Something in them is strained. Breaking.

"In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which I cannot touch because they are too near."

Scott believes he can keep her with him just because it is the Right Thing and the Right Thing always triumphs in the end. Or at least he tries to believe it. The weariness in his eyes tells me that it's getting harder and harder with each month. With each challenge. Charles never prepared him for this. He taught that every fight must mean something, that every act of violence would be justified by the common good and salvation of our people. Honor was to be preserved at all costs. And after honor, logic. Reason. Control. No battle must be fought without those things. They were the rules Scott lived by, the way he defined himself as a man.

And we came here-- where there is fighting without any meaning beyond survival. Where violence abounds but not reason. Not honor. Every time the Ceremonies come and he steps into the circle to fight, another part of his identity and his idealism disappears. This is not easy knowledge, the burden of realization that he's done this all for us. For Jean, for his child, for me. He brought us to this place thinking it would save our lives, and then we found out it was almost worse than the nightmares outside the gate. (Almost, but not quite. He knew this because he remembers how I looked when they found me. The bruises. The blood.) He promised to do whatever it took to keep us safe. To keep us together.

At times I wonder if it's killing him. But of course it is. It's killing all of us.

"Your slightest look easily will unclose me, though I have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself, as spring opens (touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose."

For Jean, it is enough to believe in Scott. It's easier for her that way. She knows so much more than he does how futile it is to hold onto a marriage in a society designed to destroy it. She believes anyway, even harder than Scott sometimes, because the alternative would be to believe the truth. And that terrifies her. I see the burn in her eyes when strange men challenge for her or stare at her in the streets....even when she holds her baby and tries to sing lullaby. Who am I to judge? If I had something left to lose, I'd be afraid too.

What do I believe in? Good question. I think I believe in the dream that someday I'll get the guts to get up and walk away from this place. Even if there is nowhere to go. Even if I know what's out there, what's waiting for me. Maybe one out of fifty girls like me makes it to the border and true freedom. I believe that I will be that one. That Logan will be waiting for me. Everything will be reversed between us; I will love him and he will love me.

I'm still here because I don't believe that enough. Because I still remember what happened the first time. Maybe I'm more like Jean and Scott than I thought. I stay because, like him, I still have something to lose after all. Or maybe I'm just paralyzed like her, because when you simplify my reasons, I am too scared to move.

"Or if your wish be to close me, I and my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending."

I imagine snow carefully everywhere descending. A calculated smothering. Cold and premeditated. It sickens me. The sticky layers of midnight press too close around my face, clogging my nose and filling my mouth with heat. I'll suffocate if I can't get out of this building. Away from his empty words and his old man's voice.

/Gotta get out. Out. Fresh air, starlight./

My bare feet land without noise on the cement beside my mattress. Hands brush the floor until they meet a fine arch of wood and close around it. They won't hear me leave, and even if they do, they won't try to stop me. They know we all need to breathe, sometimes.

/Scream. Scream and it will all go away. If you don't get through that door right now, you'll explode. Make it stop. Just make it go away. Don't want to hear him talking. Don't want to hear it all breaking down. Make it stop. Stop.Stop. Stop.../

Outside.

My feet rush over the sand, skin tingling as individual grains lodge between my toes. The breeze untangles itself from my hair and slides down my bare arms, hollowing out air pockets beneath my t-shirt. I lean back against the wall and taste the wind to learn where it has been. Hints of oil and grease and fast food trucker stops, the closest "normal" thing to this place. No trace of his brand of cigar smoke, the sign that he's coming back for me.

I never find that smell. I've done this too many times to cry, or to feel anything besides vague disappointment as I slide down to sit yoga-style on the sand, my violin across my knees. My fingers trace the curves of the instrument. The smooth lines, the nicks, the cuts, the scrapes that it accumulated since we left the mansion. All in all, it's survived better than I have. Could I still play it like I used to?

I don't know. I haven't touched the strings since he left. I've tried, but no sound comes. There is nothing in my head; no music or light. Just silence.

Scott never asks me why I don't play. Just like I don't ask him what happened to the others at the school, those who tried to run or those who tried to stay. Conversations like that have been marked strictly off limits, locked somewhere that can't hurt anymore. I suspect that if we did open them, we would find that neither of us remembers what we were trying not to say.

Five feet away from me, the wire cuts away the rest of the world. I could reach out and touch it. Let it cut my skin, shed my blood. I almost need to feel it, to prove that something about this is real. To prove that I'm real. I can still hear him through the window.

"Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility...."

I'm tired of fragility. Tired of white dresses and lace veils and barbed wire and the fear keeping me from finding the only person left that I can love. Tired of not loving him. I am worn to the bone, unable to do anything about it but listen to poetry outside the window of a dirty house in a broken down reservation.

I set the violin down and stand up.

"Someday, Logan, I'm gonna tell you about this place. I'll sit down and write you the longest letter telling you how much it kills but how I've managed to survive. How I survived everything, even when you were gone. I'll mail it to Nowhere and maybe you'll get it."

My fingers curl around the wire, a delicate grasp like picking a flower instead of squeezing cold metal. I touch it like I touch his claws. I imagine him imagining me, and this is a small salvation. Too small to count.

"I'll tell you the same they told me. Think of it like a wedding."

No more delicacy; now it begins to bleed.

"Think of it that way and maybe you'll believe that I always pretended it was you."

Fifteen seconds of pressure and blood and sharp pain brings sharper memories and a sensation of standing somewhere else. Under a purple sky, watching lightning over the mountains, a man standing in the distance. I almost ask him to turn around. I almost ask him to wait. Then I hear the gunshot and my chest explodes into a red-white-black ball of pain.

I let go of the wire to feel nothing. When I let go, he disappears.

And it's silent because Scott's finished his poetry and I've finished my memories. I wipe the blood on my pants and walk back inside to pretend to sleep. Jean says no one really sleeps here. She's listened, and she can't even hear their dreams. Not even Scott's. Not even mine.

No, we don't sleep, she says. We all just die for a little while.

I dream, but it comes out in nightmares. Where does that put me?

---

The Upper Room: Marie

His coat falls across your shoulders; you try not to wince when it hits bruises. No time for apologies or gratitude, his hand closes around your elbow and steers you up the stairway. The hall is narrow: rotten wooden stairs and peeling walls that close in on all sides. The smell of liquor, of decay, a damp underground smell like the earth underneath a stone.

The door opens; his wife stares at you in shock.

(Rogue? Scott...how...)

He pushes you inside a small room that is more shadow than light-- one yellow light bulb flickering in the ceiling, a glow of burnt orange neon from the sign outside the window. You let him move you, your arms and body stiff, autopilot. You're shaking and there is blood under his coat. He hasn't seen that yet.

(Found her at the bar when I went down to pay for our room.)

His hand is shaking; you feel it through his fingers on your arm. Anger.

(Some trucker tried to sell her for a drink. Take care of her.
Where are you going?
He's still down there.
Don't--)

You are invisible between them. You bleed onto the frayed carpet while they argue.

(She's one of us, Jean.
You know the rules here. No questions asked; no trouble caused. They'll kick us out and there's no other place that takes people like us. Unless you want to spend the night on the street again.
I can't just--
You're a father.)

She thrusts a bundle of cloth to him. The bundle kicks, squirms, screeching like a tiny red lizard. It's not a lizard. You remember attending her baby shower before you and Logan left. Scott takes the bundle, holding it out from him, arms skewed at odd angles.

(Does he need to be changed or something?
Babies cry.
So what am I supposed to do?
Hold him.
How?
Closer to you. He's not a bomb. He just needs some attention.)

Their voices smear together and drip off the sides of your mind like dirty rainwater. You find it increasingly difficult to stand; the floor undulates beneath you, shifting left...right...front... back...

(Jean, take the baby. She's falling--)

Arms stop you from hitting the floor, although you have no memory of falling down. More like falling up, out, everywhere at the same time, tumbling over and over. A dim sensation of purposeful movement; he picks you up.

(God, she's bleeding...Jean...we have to do something....
Get her onto the bed.
Ok.
Watch her skin. Hand me the first aid kit from the suitcase.
Can I help?
Yes. You can take Will and go outside. I'll let you know when I'm done.
Ok.
And Scott--
Yes?
Leave him alone.)

The longest pause. (Fine.)

And these are your memories of the night they found you: a burnt orange room, a bed with one mildewed blanket, antiseptic rinsed across the cuts on your shoulders and back and feet. Questions you can only half answer.

(What happened?
Wouldn't...let me...leave. Paid for my ride....but when we got to town...decided he didn't want money....
Are there any other injuries you want to tell me about?
No.
Are you sure?
Yes.
You can tell me--
My skin, remember? He didn't get the chance.)

Not this one, at least. But what would it matter if you told the whole truth? The past is the past and no one can heal it.

(Where's Logan?
Dead.
How?
Border police.)

You don't know why you lie to protect him. Maybe you've already forgiven him and just haven't admitted it. Or maybe you are only protecting your wish to see him dead.


(I'm sorry.)

She is; she is sincere and you believe her. You feel the slightest guilt at adding new sadness to her face when it's so obvious that she and Scott have had it rough. Not as bad as you have, maybe, but maybe worse, in a way. Survival is a different sort of hell for everyone. She's lost weight, even though you've always heard that women are supposed to gain once they're pregnant. You wonder if something went wrong. Her face isn't quite as smooth as you remember, her hair a bit thinner, falling in strands out of the ponytail she always used to keep so neat. The charcoal gray dress she's wearing emphasizes these changes. Two wet circles cover her breasts; she's nursing. It surprises you. You always thought she would be too clean for it. Not that she'd have much of a choice, now, would she?

Footsteps outside the door. Scott paces back and forth the whole time. The lizard baby cries twice. She finishes bandaging and questioning, and then walks outside to join him. The door shuts behind her. You listen to them talk through the walls.

(How is she?
She'll be fine, I think. The beating wasn't too bad...the cuts on her feet are going to give her the most trouble.
Cuts?
He cut her feet so she couldn't run.
I knew we should have never let her leave. We should have taken care of her. Where's Logan, anyway?
She claims he's dead.
Do you believe her?
Yes. I felt loss in her. Scott, her eyes. They're just broken.
We're taking her with us.
I don't know if she'll want to come.
Why?
Rogue may have trouble trusting people; even us. It's common in victims of--
Victims of what? You said she was fine.
I think it was worse than a beating, Scott. Maybe not with this man, but somewhere along the line, it was worse.)

A muffled thud, like something has hit the wall. His fist, maybe. You close your eyes. Telepaths. You should have remembered to shield.

The door opens again; he's there.

You're between realities; for a moment you think it's Logan. But it's not. It's someone else. That's the story of the past six months of your life....it has always been someone else. At least this time it is a friend. You think. Neither of you quite recognizes the other. You would never have imagined him in this kind of place. He would never have imagined you. The sudden recognition unsettles you both, like you are staring at the other's ghost. A dual hallucination.

(Jean says you'll be fine.
I will.
You sound like you don't believe it.
I do.)

He sits down on the edge of the bed; runs his hand across the stubble on his chin. You've never seen him unshaven before; it is disturbing because it lets you know he's changing already. The Scott you remember would die before parting with his razor.

(I'm sorry about Logan.
Thanks. Really.
Listen, Rogue, I know you've been on your own for a while. You might feel a bit edgy about us, might not know what to trust...your memories or your instincts. I know how that is. I spent time on the streets too, before I got to Xavier's. And that was back when they weren't hunting us down.)

He stands up; walks back and forth, hands in his pockets.

(What I'm trying to say is, we want you to come with us.
Where?
A safe place.
Does that exist, anymore?
It's called the Phoenix Compound. It was home to a mutant survivalist group before the laws passed. Now I hear it's a sanctuary of sorts. They're accepting anyone who's got the cash.
I don't have any money.
Doesn't matter. I have enough.
I can't ask you to--
You aren't asking. I'm insisting.
Safe places usually come with a catch...
Don't worry about that. Let me worry about that. If you come with us, I'll take care of you. I promise.)

You ask yourself how they stayed so sincere; you don't know yet that it's not sincerity at all but desperation. Two people, drowning, fighting to breathe.

You take a deep breath and remember the last time someone promised to keep you safe. Logan. You remember where it got you.

But you don't really have a choice.

(OK.)

El Cantina Senorita de Rojo
Mexico City, Mexico.
September 15

Hard right to the jaw. Head flying back, spotlights in the eyes. Powerhouse to the gut. Cheap shot. Shouldnt've let him get away with it. Ah well, gotta give them their money's worth. I'll be pounding on this guy's butt good and hard soon enough.

Another right, deflected off my ribs. Gotta go down on this one; making it look convincing. That one hurt a little. Caught me right over last night's exit wound.

A couple weeks ago, I'd decided I'd had it with the desert cantinas. The big city fight clubs offered a nice change of scenery, and since Mexico City was only a couple hundred miles away, why not give it a shot? Yeah, they have their reputations, but it's really nothing spectacular. More money, more sluts wanting to spend your money, more jerks looking to get a piece of you, more chances to get drunk on better whisky.

Of course, I don't necessarily want whiskey right now. Or even a smoke. I crave lead. Hot, liquid-solid-metal relief pumped straight into the brain.

Snap-kick straight to the groin. Ouch. Flying back into the barrier, growling a little when some drunk girl tries to wipe my sweat onto her shirt through the fence. Everyone's crazy down here, I swear. Everyone including me. I've just about had enough of this punk--I roll to my feet, catching him mid-jeer with a fist straight to his dirty little mouth. And I really mean dirty...his teeth are just about black. Or at least whatever teeth he'll have left after he finishes spitting blood out.. I just hope none of that junk came off on my knuckles...

When you break it all down, suicide is nothing more than a bad one-night stand. It's fast. It's messy. It takes you places you don't want to go and then dumps you there until you wake up feeling like mano y mano with a sledgehammer. But in the process of all that, it takes your mind off who you are, what you are, and that's what keeps me coming back for more.

/Speaking of sledgehammers, I think I'll repay an eye for an eye and play with his ribs a little while. Yeah, see how he likes it. He didn't even take a bullet last night./

Death's got a real racket going on with all this mystic garbage. She's not some regal queen on a throne; she's a cheap prostitute in a gutter alley. She doesn't care how or when or where just as long as she gets her payment in flesh. A payment that I am in a unique position to provide, which makes me one of her favorite customers. Oh yeah, she leaves the light on for me every time I come around. Stands in her doorway wearing her best black lace with a blood red smile on her lips.

/Finished with the ribs; I heard a couple things crack that weren't meant to crack. You gotta play rough in this town; if not, the guy you took it easy on in the ring will catch you in an alley and his hombres will hold you down while he slits your spine with his switchblade. Never happened to me; never gonna happen to me. They want to fight hard, that's ok. I'll fight harder./

You're not supposed to dream when you're dead, so I don't know what to call the things I see. Memories? Premonitions? Sometimes they're even good things, fragile, beautiful things that I almost can't recognize as mine. Last night, for example, I remember detail-by-detail the first time I told Marie I loved her. I even remembered how she smelled. Oranges and coffee. Or I'll remember dancing with her, walking with her...just plain looking at her. It's like death taunts me with all the lives I lost the chance to live. She sells me make-believe futures in exchange for bullets and blood.

/Uppercut to his nose; shattering the bone. Blood splatters on my face, on the crowd through the fence. They cheer. It's just about time to put this guy out. One more good one ought to do the trick./

Other times, the suicide queen deals out the past, every single memory of the road that brought me to this dead end life. That's the darker half of the addiction-- she keeps me pumped full of a hundred and one reasons not to live, a never-ending feed of logic telling me why I need to come back for another fix.

/Winding my arm back for the killer blow; blood in my eyes, blood in his eyes. Wanting to scream and make it all just go away. Wondering, in the last second before my fist connects with his temple, what Marie would think or say or do if she saw me here, if she saw me like this./

I play my games with suicide, she plays her games with me, but at the end do you want to know the real, gritty truth? At the end, I'm never too sure which one of us is really the whore.

Knockout.

---

"So, you're the Wolverine. Impressive. Not as tall as I thought. Wider though."

Great. Another one. What does this one want...my money, my pants, or both? Maybe if I ignore her, she'll just go away.

"Bartender....a drink. Tequila, like my man Wolvie's drinking. Order him another one too. On me."

And she expects me to thank her for this?

"I ain't your man." I growl over my shoulder, not even bothering to look at her. Seen one; seen 'em all. I'll be surprised if she's not stone drunk. No one here is that perky naturally.

"Good, cause I ain't your woman."

She leans against the bar beside me, and I turn my head until I can just barely see her out of the corner of my eye. Not what I was expecting. She's a short little thing. Dark brown eyes just like....no, I won't think about it that way. Blue hair. No kidding. It's the color of Marie's favorite pair of opera gloves, a midnight blue so dark it could be black. She's wearing dark purple lipstick.

"Buzz off, kid."

She sounds young. Eighteen, maybe nineteen. Twenty would be pushing it. Marie will be nineteen this year. No, don't think of it that way either. It'll hurt you too bad.

"I bought you a drink. You have to give me five minutes."

I slide around sideways so that I'm half-facing her, half-facing my tequila. "Thirty seconds."

"Xavier never taught manners at his fancy house?"

My hand freezes around my glass, all my senses instantly flaring to alert. The claws prick the back of my knuckles.

"Xavier?"

"Hello? Your old boss. Leader of the X-men? Ah, don't look so paranoid. I'm an information broker. It's my business to know things like this."

"Then this conversation is over because I ain't got information to sell."

She glares at me like Scooter used to when I said something exceptionally dumb at dinner.

"My uncle and I are part of an underground for people of a certain...genetic persuasion. Word has it that there's a tough guy on the fight circuit who's paying a thousand for information about a mutant once associated with the X-men. Rogue."

"You got the wrong man."

"And do you know anyone else in Mexico who comes equipped with steel claws in his hands?"

Ok, heard enough. I'm leaving now before her back-up team gets here to shoot a tranq dart into my spine. She grabs my jacket as I swing off the stool. Gotta admit; that's gutsy for someone who knows about my...capabilities.

"Relax." She says. "I'm one too. Radiation's my thing. Comes out through my skin when I get mad."

"You always tell your mutation to strangers? I could take you across the border and sell you for that."

Maybe it's the eyes, maybe it's the fact that she sounds too much like Marie, but I figure I owe her at least a warning. She's too young to end up rotting in a camp or a laboratory or hooked on heroin in the brothels waiting for the next fat businessman.

/Like Marie?/I growl at the thought.

"You won't." Her voice is still calm, edged with a bit of cockiness.

"What makes you so sure?"

"Because we can tell you how to find her."

Every muscle in my body turns to stone. I can't even swallow my tequila; it pools in the back of my mouth, burning holes in my tongue. Five seconds pass. Ten. Fifteen.

"What makes you think I'm still looking?"

She tilts her head to the side a little and looks at me.

"Because you wouldn't take a pounding like you did tonight if you'd found her or found a way to live without her."

Now that, I don't have an answer for. I try, but I don't. She stands up from the bar, waving her hand for me to follow her.

"C'mon. Talk to my uncle. He can help you. I promise."

We cross the room to a small booth filled with a greasy little man who might just have more metal on him than I do. Thick gold chains around his neck, falling down the neck of a yellow silk shirt worn Vegas-style. Rings jammed over rings on Polish sausage fingers. The scent of tarnished metal hovers around him; a nearly imperceptible corruption and decay. The smell of dealing in flesh, in secrets. In men and women and hope.

"The name's Reggie. Reggie Vargas."

He reaches out to shake my hand. I don't move.

"Jilly, darlin'," He pats his niece, or the girl who claims she's his niece, on the hand. "Make yourself scarce while the gentleman and I get to business." He grins up at me. A silver grin.

"So you're the Wolverine. I was wonderin' when I'd get the chance to meet you. Your reputation precedes you, as always seems to be the case."

"What reputation?"

"Seventy fights on both sides of the Rio Grande, all won by knock out. Sixty-eight before the first round was over. What happened to the other two? Get tired or just bored?" He laughs; it sounds like grease splattering on cement.

"Just get to the point. Kid said you got some information I'd be interested in."

"All in good time, my friend. Would you like a drink?"

I tense my knuckles; six blades of metal glow dully in the smoke-filled air.

"You heard I had these, right? Part of my reputation? Because I tend to use them if I get impatient. I feel that comin' on real fast now."

His grin wavers, oil under heat, but he regains composure with practiced speed.

"You're looking for a girl. Have been for some time. It would have made it easier if you'd spread it that you two were with the X-men in the first place. Me and Jilly busted our chops tracking that down, when all we would have had to do was ask....everyone knows about you guys. Or at least, what's left of you. Your buddies took it hard when the Big Apple cracked down."

I relax my muscles, watching the skin split then regenerate as the steel slides back into my flesh.

"So you've found her?"

"Tracking down a mutant on the run these days is like looking for a rat in the sewer. The trick is to find the biggest nests. I keep tabs on most of the places that get the heavy traffic. Her particular talent makes it a bit easier, but I wouldn't go so far to say I've found her."

"But you do know where she might be."

"Call it an educated guess."

"Where?"

"What do you think this is? Charity?"

A scrape of metal against metal; I pin him to the table by his necklaces.

"Charity is me letting you keep at least one or two vital organs if you keep me waiting any longer."

"Ok, ok, point taken."

His face is red; sweating like water running off lard. Why do I think it's more over concern for his jewelry than his life?

"No more stalling."

I let him up. He coughs; swallows the rest of his drink; scoots back from the table before he talks to me again.

"Three thousand for the information and an additional four to get you across the border."

"How bout you tell me while you can still talk and then I cross the border on my own?"

"How long you been down here? A month? Two months?"

"Long enough."

"It's gotten worse up there. They barely even tolerate the registereds, now. You get three choices-- reservations, camps, laboratories. But you're smart...you're strong...I'd give you three weeks before they picked you up as an unregistered. And even if you did stay on the streets, you'd never be able to find her. You gotta be able to move around."

"You can make that happen."

"We offer our clients total mobility-- gene therapy treatment to hide the mutation as long as you want."

"How?"

"Implants, drug cocktails...that's not important. What's important is that you'll be able to go anywhere a human can go. But that kind of freedom comes with a price. I only asked you for seven thousand. I've had offers of up to seven hundred thousand. And I'm even willing to make it easy on you."

He pours himself another glass of tequila; charm oozing from his smile to clog every pore in his face.

"I know you don't have that kind of money. I'll cut you a deal. There's another mutant playing the circuit who's undefeated. He'll be here in two weeks, and I want you to fight him. I'm not talking this fight club crap you put up with. I'm talking high stakes fighting. I'll put ten thousand on your victory. You win and I'll consider it your fee. I'll even let you keep two thousand for expenses."

I don't have to think. Not really. It's an instinct; a craving, just like the twitch of my finger that sends a bullet into my bones.

"One condition."

"Name it."

"Tell me what you know about her now. I'll fight for you and pay your fee. But I need some kind of guarantee."

"They call it the Phoenix Compound. It belonged to a whacked-out group of survivalists before the legislations. Mutants exclusively. It had to be some kind of weird cult thing, but now it's turned into a sort of sanctuary for those who can afford it...and those who can put up with that kind of craziness. I've been hearing lately that an X-man showed up there not long ago; with two women. A redhead and a girl with white streaks in her hair. That was your description of Rogue, right?"

"Yes."

You can hardly force the word out between your teeth. She's alive. She's safe.

"Where is the compound?"

"First you fight for me. Then we'll talk location."

"Fine. Just let me know when and where."

"Certainly. You need anything in the mean time, just let me know."

One last tarnished silver smile.

I walk away.

Marie is alive. I knew it; I always knew it, even when I gave up. Even when I buried her in my mind. It was so much easier to gain the forgiveness of a ghost. A ghost can't say they hate you for leaving them. A ghost can't bleed because you failed to protect them. A ghost can't say they don't love you anymore. That's the fear, isn't it? That's the ice water dumped straight down the spine.

I need another drink.

---

Dancing In Rooms: Logan

You promised her you'd be across the border by now; you're not. Another delay; the usual apologetic message received at the usual designated pay phone. We're sorry, but the security is getting tighter. You'll have to wait. At five hundred dollars a head, you expect better service. You hang up the phone and try not to look at the hope in her eyes when you shake your head.

(Not yet. Next week, they said.
Isn't that what they said last week?)

She rubs her hands together, you smell the cold on her. A thin, dry smell like old ice.

(So where are we supposed to go this time?)

A basement, a cellar, an attic room-- these are the places you have been, the places you have bought or begged to hide until the arrangements are finished that will get the two of you across the border into freedom. Such places are safe, unquestionably, but they are also expensive. You don't want to tell her you're running low on cash. The smugglers want a thousand to take you across the border, and even if you get there, it takes just as much money to live in Canada as it does in New York City.

You have to take her somewhere, though, can't expect her to spend the night on the streets, not when there's snow on the ground and registration patrols looking for anyone out past curfew. So you take her hands inside yours, pushing warmth into the stiff bones, and you take her to a motel you remember from the one time you hit New York on the fight circuit. That was a long time before you met her. You're surprised the place hasn't burned down by now, or been shut down by the police on drug charges. It's the first time you've done this, and it's a risk, but no one asks questions at this kind of dump, not as long as you can pay the bill. And you can. You slide the clerk an extra twenty to keep his mouth shut, grinning at him around your cigar.

(My wife wouldn't approve of the little lady.)

She smiles at this, a bored, beautiful smile that convinces the man you're not a mutant, just an adulterer. He nods and the cash disappears into his grimy sweatpants.

The room is a bad as you remember. Carpet the color of rotting spinach, spotted with beer stains and cigarette burns and even a little bit of blood in the corner. It smells of stale urine, of decaying teeth. A cotton spread covers the double bed, colored a dull yellow pink like a callus on the sole of your foot.

You drop your bags on the floor; a cloud of dust floats up. She's still rubbing her hands. It's colder in the room than it is outside.

(I'm sorry. You deserve better.
Don't talk like that. I don't deserve anything. Anyway, it's good camouflage.
We won't be here long. Just a couple of nights.
Then there's nothing to apologize for, is there?)

She tests the bed; bouncing as she sits.

(Did you lock the door?
It doesn't lock.
Oh.)

You notice a radio in the corner, battered and corroded as the rest of the room, but a relief nonetheless. The reception is poor; more static than sound, but eventually you find a station that is clear enough to listen to. Public radio; a violin playing something wild and beautiful and sad. She plays like that for you, sometimes, but most of the time now she just looks at her violin. Touches it, like a wish or a prayer.

(Keep it on that station.) she says. (I want that one tonight.)

Neither of you have to say a word about what happens next. It is routine, ritual, as familiar by now as getting out of bed or brushing your teeth. She stands in front of you, slides her arms around your neck, leans her head over your heart. You hold her around the waist, hands together at the small of her back. And you dance. It doesn't matter what kind of music there is. Rock, blues, classical, country. Or sometimes there isn't music at all; just your heart and hers beating out the silence.

A long time before this afternoon, she told you why she loved to dance. When a person dances, she said, they're free. Nothing else matters but the motion and the music and you can close your eyes and be anywhere or anything you want to be. She asked you to dance with her the first night after you left the mansion. Both of you were a little scared that night; she was worried she'd slow you down and you were worried you'd make a mistake and lose her. The dance was meant to calm nerves, to quiet fear.

Now you dance every night as a way to remind yourselves that all this was temporary; transient. A defiance, perhaps, but also an escape. A need to be somewhere else. It made it harder, though, when you knew that every time was, in a way, the last time. Because neither of you knew if you'd still be together by morning, or if you'd even be alive.

The time of the dancing in rooms lasted almost a month, but you never could quite figure out why she loved the sad things most of all-- the dissonant chords, the minor keys. Or rather, you knew all along but never wanted to admit it. You knew she heard herself in the music. She heard both of you, and she knew in advance how the song would end.

The Phoenix Compound
September 31

The world ended at high noon today. It exploded not with a bang but a with whimper, not with a whimper but with a flash of crimson that momentarily blinded the sun and left invisible scorch marks across the surface of my eyes. Even through the veil, it burned. The light itself made no sound, apart from the hiss of panicked energy, but sound surrounded it. A hollow popping of bone, seconds before the explosion. Seconds after, a woman's scream.

Scott's bones. Jean's scream.

And that is how their love ceased to be blind, how the eyes were torn open. It is like a scene from a nightmare: everything is garish, stretched out of proportion and distorted beyond belief. Even the colors are twisted; all I remember is white and red and black. White turning red....she was taken. Red turning black....he was left in the dirt, bleeding.

I am gray; it is not my nightmare. All the colors belong to him. I cry for them both, but not in tears. In hot, liquid, silence.

/Silence like his white-lipped calm when I popped his shoulder back into its socket. My hands were on his muscles; I felt the spasm. The sudden pain. But I don't think it was enough for him. I think he wanted it to be worse. He craved the permission to scream./

William sleeps in the corner, in his tiny crib. The bed beside him is empty-- the mother is gone, and the father pushes his rage into the floor. Muscles in his back and shoulders quiver with each push-up. His body shifts to the right, punishing the weak shoulder, the Judas limb. The center of his visor glows a cold, dark red: the color of jewels. The color of stone. This much is revealed to me by the faded yellow lamplight. There are no stars tonight, no moon to soften the darkness.

I lie flat on my mattress, cocooned in my blanket so that no skin shows but my face, and I listen to a dead man talk. His teeth grind out each word like old coffee grains.

"Will the veiled sister pray for the children at the gate...."

The taste of his bitterness sours my mouth: sour meat, molded bread. His hate, his desperation seeps through the air like kerosene in the rain. I watch his body move up, down, up, down, and then we both close our eyes (or so I like to think) and, at length, allow our minds to replay the truth.

//Bones pop and the sky bleeds red. Scott roars but Jean screams.

"He cheats!" A bellow toward the Elder's platform. "The X-man used his power. He thinks he is better than the rules!"

"He's lying!" Scott's voice, but not so much in words as in short gasps distorted around sound. "He tore my visor away to throw the match."

"Ha! He lies to save his honor, but mine is secure! Why would I throw the match after I've broken his arm?"

Broken! I have to look up. Let them cane me.

Two men stand in the center of the square, streaked with dirt and sweat and blood. More sweat than dirt. Less sweat than blood.//

"Who will not go away and cannot pray..."

I shadow the words behind him. They are the words of Eliot, the author of hollow men and other disillusions. Scott never liked his poetry.

//One of the men is tall, a thick and gnarled dead oak, ugly with brute hate. His name is Levi. The only son of the Elder, and owner of four women. They all come to dinner with bruises, cuts, and sometimes even long, thin burns. Other nights they don't come at all.

This man holds a visor in his outstretched hand.

The man beside him is smaller, leaner, but hard enough to stay on his feet despite the fact that his right arm dangles uselessly at his side. His eyelids press into small lines of flesh, a mandatory blindness. It is the first time I have seen his eyelids. The shock is almost the same as if I had seen him naked. I wonder, briefly, if he thinks the same thing about my hands.

"My honor means nothing. I fight only for the honor of my woman."

Only I catch that he almost said "my wife."

"He defies the rules!"

"I obey them!"

The Elder raises his hand.

"The rules must stand. Voluntary use of a mutation in combat is strictly forbidden. Ownership of Bondmaid Jean passes to Levi until the next Challenge, or until the bond is extended by the creation of a child."

Scott curses, words that he used to tell Logan not to use, and stumbles forward in Levi's direction. But a blind man can't fight. Levi's kick catches him behind the knees. Another kick to the stomach, to the ribs. I wait for him to resist, but he does nothing.

He bites his lip and takes it all in. Stalling, I know, as long as he can.//

"O my people, what have I done unto thee?"

//"Levi.

Jean speaks, but not in a scream, this time, or a whisper, but with the cold flat calm of moonlight over a frozen lake. She moves, ice within the heat, rising to her feet. Ms. Sophia moves to subdue her, but Jean freezes the woman in place with one flick of her icicle wrist. I am stunned as much as the crowd; the idea of a bondmaid displaying her mutation in public equates a vulgarity. An obscenity. I should not be surprised. See, the veil has tainted me after all.

Logan, forgive me.

She holds her other hand toward Levi. The carnation falls between her fingers to the dust, a damp and wilted pile of petals.

Her veil moves with her breath like a mist of snow moves with the wind. The melting, however, starts quickly enough. A thin layer of wetness covers her next words.

"Enough fighting. Come, claim your bond. I'm waiting."

Levi recites the formulas and kisses her. She winces, but I'm not sure why-- the kiss of a stranger or the last surge of emotion she feels from her husband as she releases Ms. Sophia and follows Levi out of the square.

She could have stopped it.

I could have.

Even Scott could have, if he wanted it bad enough.

So that leaves the question, which one of us is to blame? Or more correctly, which one of us is not?//

A baby's wail interrupts the darkness between Scott and me. Will is awake and screaming as if he just now realizes that his mother is not there. What is a baby's idea of a mother, anyway? Is it one concrete image, or many different impressions of soft flesh, kind eyes, lullabies in the dark? Which one of those things is he crying for? Or maybe none of those things. Babies cry, Jean said. They don't always need a reason. Sometimes I envy that. He is the only one of us allowed the privilege to scream just for the sake of screaming.

The baby cries, but Scott has gone deaf. The rhythm of his Exercise never so much as skips a beat.

I am not a mother. The idea of a child terrifies me: something small and innocent depending on my arms for security when my skin could drain it of life it hasn't even lived. My gloves might not be enough; accidents could happen. I don't know lullabies, or the secrets of quieting a fretting little boy. But there is no one else.

Without a word to Scott-- though I watch him out of the corner of my eye-- I cross the room to Will. If I wrap him in my blanket, he should be safe. He protests this with squirming limbs and a red face. I can't blame him; it is a hot night. After baited breath and a few narrowly averted catastrophes, he is bound into a neat bundle in my arms. Like an Indian baby. My little orphaned papoose.

He quiets within moments, the squalling paled to half-hearted whimpering that reminds me of the kitten I had when I was seven. I decide to take him with me to watch the desert, tonight. Maybe I Will tell him one of those nice fairy tales about princesses and peas Or pumpkin coaches and glass slippers. Or maybe we'll just sit in Silence with the wind in our faces and wait for the ones we love to come home.

I pause at the door, turning back one last time to Scott.

Up-down. Up-down.

Sweat in his hair, along his shoulders, dripping down behind his visor into his eyes. Lips moving frantically, reciting thin scraps of poetry he always claimed he hated.

He is kerosene in the rain. Cold. Flammable. Waiting for a match.

---

Two weeks pass, slow and dry like bones bleaching under the sun, Life does not end after all, not even for Scott, but instead it mutates to allow survival. I learn how to tell a baby's need by his cry, even though I don't always get it right. My clumsiness shows up in backwards Diapers and spilled formula. Scott never complains. Sometimes I wish he would say something or do something besides smile and thank me for my effort. My effort, as if his own child is no longer his responsibility.

Wait, that's not totally fair to him. He does the best he can to be a father and friend, but he moves and talks in a delayed shock. It reminds me of the numbness I felt between the moment Magneto hooked me up to his machine and the moment the real pain started. You're tensed, waiting for the eruption. But he learns how to keep it inside. How to bury his anger when his wife comes to dinner with bruises on her skin, when she can't meet his eyes. He learns when not to look.

The three of us learn to subvert the machine keeping them apart. I see her at different times during the day, and use the opportunity to pass messages between her and Scott. I memorize poetry from him and recite it to her as we wash clothes or tend the gardens. One afternoon, she gives me her wedding ring. I wear it around my neck with Logan's dog tags to make sure Levi never touches it. I give her his promise to win.

She smiles too brightly and thanks me. It is her way of crying.

Words and paper and rings are not the only things I smuggle. Other things change hands-- small packages of birth control pills, a finger-sized bottle of Valium capsules. The contraceptives were my idea, but she asked for the drug specifically. One pill prevents mistakes; the other allows her to stay sane. Scott helps me arrange the bribes for the pills, but he doesn't know about the sedatives. Jean swore me to silence. Even if I could tell him, I wouldn't; we all measure our sanity by the illusions we keep.

And all of us-- Jean, Scott, myself-- learn to survive the only way possible. One day at a time.

The Phoenix Compound
October 20

Twinkle, twinkle little star...

I bounce the baby on my knee, smiling in blank maternal Affection at the happy gurgles and the dimples on the cherub cheeks. I smile so hard it hurts.

How I wonder what you are...

It's one of the only three rhymes I remember. I remember stars and hush little baby and one, two, pick up shoe. I know a few more stories, but tonight I don't want to think, only recite. A phonograph mother. A broken record.

Up above the world so high...

At dinner, Jean showed up with a bloody lip. It wasn't swollen Or even spilt, but bitten clean through. Bright red liquid coated her mouth and spilled down her chin like old wine. Only it wasn't wine.

Like a diamond in the sky...

Scott walked very calmly from the room, his face the color of ash in winter. He came back five minutes later, wiping the corners of his mouth with his sleeve. I smelled bile on his breath. He did not eat.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star...

He said nothing to me, but took a wad of bills from under his mattress and walked into the night, a red and black shadow between the shadows.

How I wonder what you are...

He has not come back yet.

I wonder what I'll do if Scott does not return. I tell it to myself Like a story.

The girl isn't afraid anymore. She doesn't care what happened to her last time; she ignores it. She ties Will to her back and clips the barbed wire fence behind the room. Forty, fifty, a hundred fifty miles later, she stops-- most likely at one of those diners with greasy eggs and sludge coffee. No one cares enough to ask what she is. They feel sorry for her, a pretty girl with only one pair of jeans to be her name and a fatherless baby on her hip. So they give her a job. Will plays with the silverware while she washes dishes and takes Orders from truckers who like her short checkered skirt and Mississippi drawl. The cook, a middle-aged woman with wrinkles in her forehead and fat rolls around her waist, becomes her friend. They share a trailer. Life settles down the way life does, even after barbed wire fences. Who knows, she might even date a few of the local boys-- drink ice-cold beers in pickup trucks and line dance to the Dixie Chicks-- but it'll only be practice. Practice for when he walks through the door, chewing his cigar and growling at her customers. She's forgiven him everything, by then.

(What are ya doin' here, kid?
Waiting for you.
Am I late?
No more than usual.
C'mon, let's get out of here.
Okay.)

She smiles.

But this does not happen. Or it does, but in another universe. An alternate dimension of space.

In this world, the world still inside the fence, still behind the veil, I put a sleeping child (not mine, even though it feels like it) into his crib and then walk back to my bed. Waiting up is inevitable, but I should at least pretend to try and sleep. Scott never knows I wait for him, when he's doing his pushups or shadow fighting past midnight. He doesn't know I've been up until dawn, some nights, watching him pummel at his demons, just to make he doesn't forget that the night won't last forever. I did. I forgot. I'm not going to let it happen to him.

I've already crawled under the blanket when the door opens and the shadow with the ruby eye walks into the room. A mix of moonlight and electric light does things to the mind; we stare at each other the way we did when he found me in the bar. Strangers. Ghosts. Then again, how much do I know about him? We've memorized the same poetry and I've held his child, but I've never heard him talk about his favorite color, or food, or television show. He fights for me every month but he doesn't even know my real name.

He watches me a moment longer, the light bulb dripping a thin golden sheen over his visor. It makes the crystal look wet, viscous. Like blood, or is that what I see on the rest of his face? Not in liquid or color but in tangible sadness.

The wad of money lands on the table with a limp thud. All our regrets must be soft; the baby's asleep.

"He won't let me buy her."

I search for anger or hatred but the voice is disembodied from all feeling, from his body itself.

"Five hundred dollars and he wouldn't take it. Wouldn't even let me see her."

He sets a crinkled paper bag on the table and takes out a clear bottle filled with golden brown liquid. It is partly empty. Logan and I used to make bets on what Scooter would be like stone drunk. I don't want to know anymore.

"She told me she loved me. In my head. That I should go before I got hurt. Before she got hurt."

A grate of aluminum against glass; he unscrews the cap and takes a drink.

"I came so close to killing him. If we didn't have Will to think about, I would have."

Another drink.

"Tell me this is better than the outside. Tell me this isn't killing us just as fast."

He wipes his mouth with his sleeve and looks down at the bottle.

"You know, I really hate this stuff."

He picks it up and walks back out the door. The sound of liquid sloshing against sand.

I have said nothing because there is nothing to say. He's right on both counts. I could tell him my story, the story of the outside. I could tell him what they did to me. But I have also seen the blood on a woman's mouth. The desolation in a young man's face.

/Tell me it isn't killing us./

I can't.

The door shuts again. Footsteps echo across the room and the Sound ends beside my bed. I pull the blanket closer. A gesture of protection, like the veil, but not from him. Or not only from him. Shadows, I tell my mind. Instinct. He isn't the only one who's afraid of the dark.

"What does he call you?"

"Who?"

"Logan. What's your name?"

My name. I see. A gesture of intimacy, of trust. My name and my hands are the two things I have always hidden, for part of the same reason he hides his eyes. Partly necessity, partly fear. My fingers trace abstract art onto the blanket and I look at the window as I talk. I talk to the stars not to the man standing beside me.

"Marie."

The syllables dissipate into the darkness, tea leaves stirred up from the bottom of the glass.

"Marie." He rolls the sound across his tongue. "It's pretty."

"He thought so. I mean, he never told me, but I could see it in his face when he said it."

"I'm sorry we lost him."

"Why?"

"Why am I sorry?"

"Why did you ask my name?"

I turn my face to him, and find myself staring at unfamiliar territory. I haven't really looked at him since we arrived here (did that make it easier not to think of him as vulnerable too?) but now I don't know how I could have missed such differences. Wrinkles at the corners of his mouth pull his lips down into a lingering sigh of resignation. His muscles are harder now, more rigid, defined. I always saw him through Logan's eyes-- a boy trying to become a man-- but now I see him as the opposite. A man searching through the pieces of his life for the boy he lost. If I were to pull away the visor, I would imagine that his eyes have aged most of all.

How is my face different? My eyes?

"I wanted to know who you are..."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

Here he pauses, staring not at me but through me, looking out the window.

"You know the tests are coming up soon."

"Not something I'd exactly forget, is it?"

"They're going to find out you're not pregnant, and you're going to go back up for challenge."

"Yeah. I know."

"I might not be able to fight for your next month."

I try not to flinch, but my breath hitches anyway.

"I'm being honest with you....I will try. You know I will. But if Levi beats me again, I may not be conscious much less able to answer your challenger."

He must think I'm taking it well because I haven't said anything. Not true. I'm screaming but he can't hear. Not again. Not again.

"But I promised to protect you."

His hands tap against his leg as he talks and his words are quick. Awkward.

"So I will."

"How?"

I'm not so sure I want to know this, but I have to ask.

"If you...." He swallows. "If you have a baby....you'll be safe for almost a year."

The words rush out in a jumble like an overturned puzzle box. Fragment and obscure images of the whole.

"Where would I get a baby, Scott?"

Speaking slowly, talking rhetoric because I know exactly what he means. I just want to see if he means it. My palms are starting to sweat beneath my gloves. His gaze drops to the floor.

"From me."

The sound of his voice implodes into a black hole of soundlessness, that sucks away all notions of speech and logic. I struggle to the surface, clinging to a few words and phrases that can be used to show shock. Or is it anger....or is it fear...

"My skin--"

"I can be creative just like he can."

My hand snaps toward him, a hard slap across his jaw.

"Get out."

A hiss through my teeth. Hands twisting through my blanket, knees shaking. I press my back into the wall, blinking twice to rid my mind of past images suddenly springing to my vision.

/He doesn't know/

I repeat the words over and over again in my mind.

/He doesn't know what he's talking about. What it reminds you of. You never told them that part of the story.../

"Marie, listen....I'm not going to hurt you.--"

Exactly what they said last time.

"Don't do this."

A whisper, strained and fierce.

"If I were Logan, would you--"

"It was never like that with Logan and me!"

The look on his face tells me he had not considered that possibility.

"I've tried to think of another way out." He shakes his head.

"No choice."

"There is always a choice."

"Name it."

"I could leave."

He stares at me like I suggested running the border patrol in broad daylight ten yards from a patrol.

"How far do you think you'd get?"

"Far enough."

"No. Just no. I'm not going to have that on my hands."

"I'm not on your hands, Scott. I can't thank you enough for everything you do, but I'm not your wife or your sister or your child. You don't have to be responsible."

"I know."

He puts his hand on my shoulder, and I think it hurts him when I pull away. I know he's just trying to do what he's seen Logan do; the ruse would work better if his fingers weren't so stiff.

"But there's no one else to do it."

"I'm a free woman. I can be responsible for myself."

"If you're free, then why do you wear the veil?"

I hate it when he's right. We sit and let the silence unravel into long cords before either of us get the nerve to speak.

"Just think about it." He says, in that same apologetic tone he uses to recite the bonding formula.

"No."

"I'll be careful."

I shake my head.

"Do you hear yourself? Stop, a minute, and listen. This isn't the Scott I know. Where is the honor in this? What would the Professor think? And what would it do to Jean?"

"The Professor is dead. We left him."

It's the first time he's said it straight out. I wince, but he isn't finished.

"Jean will understand. And you talk about honor? It doesn't exist. Not here."

"You say that, and they've won. They've beaten you, and turned you into one of them. I won't believe you've given up so easily."

"Call this easy?"

His voice quivers and I wonder if there is a sheen of moisture behind the glasses. Does it condense on the lens, tears shedding tears, raining in front of his very eyes? And no one but him can see it?

"No one said it would be. But you listen to me, and you listen good. There is no use in protecting something if you forget why you're Fighting for it."

He absorbs my words, slowly. His face pale in the starlight. Translucence.

"Marie, I'm sorry."

"You don't have to apologize."

"Yes. Yes I do."

He sinks onto the bed beside me. A smattering of silence. Then a paper-thin whisper, low and ragged like a groan.

"What am I going to do if I can't get her back?"

I know that sound; Logan's voice held that same mix of terror and desperation when he came out of his nightmares. I never found what answers to give, but I learned how to put my arms around him and say nothing. So that's what I do now.

I don't mean to fall asleep; I don't. But somehow I close my eyes too long, and just like that I slip away into darkness. Into a memory, a nightmare.

/Paralysis and no defenses and pain and the inability to scream because they stuffed my gloves into my mouth....skin doesn't protect..../

No...please...let me go..

/Skull banging against the dirty cement when he slams you down, a blow to the kidneys to make you stop kicking, a curse when you catch him in the jaw.../

Logan....don't let them hurt me...

/Logan isn't there. He left you. He left you with this man and with the other two who are standing and smoking and watching. waiting in line. Logan said he didn't have a choice. That one of you had to surrender to save the others. But why couldn't it have been you? Anything would have been better than this.../

Just let me go....I won't tell anyone...I promise...please...

/He pulls your scarf away, in one brutal tug, it was the one Logan gave you for Christmas last year.... Your skull meets the cement again; this time you do it. You don't want to be awake. You just want to die. You expect them to kill you when it's over with. But they don't. Maybe that's the cruelest part. They let you live.../

"No!"

I start from bed, cold sweat plastering my shirt to my skin, arms flailing until they connect with something firm. A man's face. Hands on my shoulders. Get away from me. I won't let you this time. I'll kill myself first. I'll get it right this time.

/Marie, Marie./

The voice hides its worry, trying hard to soothe, but you can hear it quicken, mounting concern.

/It's me. Scott. Open your eyes./

I can't. I'm lost, and it's dark, and they'll find me.

/Marie, they won't find you. Not here. I won't let them, ok? Now open your eyes. Come on back to us./

Eyelids snap open; chest heaving. Scott's face hovers in front of me, tinged with worry and a bit of fear. Once he sees that I am awake, he moves back, giving me space to breathe.

"What was that?" he says.

"Nightmare."

Still gasping for breath, gotta slow it down. I'm okay now. I'm safe.

"You should tell someone. It makes it easier."

"How would you know?"

Ouch, that came out sharp. I didn't mean it that harsh.

"Because if you keep it inside, it rots. And it comes out anyway, like it did just now."

"You have no idea what I..."

"Maybe more than you think. Do you think that just because I have to hide behind these glasses that I don't see what's going on? I've listened to your other nightmares too. I've seen you try to hold it back. What are you afraid of? Me?"

"No, it's not that at all."

I stand up and tilt my face toward the window, trying to clear the blood from my head.

"It's just..."

Here goes. Might as well clean it all out at once; maybe then it won't hurt so bad. I guess he deserves this, after all he's done. He deserves the truth.

"Scott, am I a bad person?"

"You even have to ask me that?!?"

"Momma always said that whatever bad things happen to us, they are punishment for our sins. I try to think of what I've done wrong to deserve this...why else would they..."

"Nothing, Marie. Look at me. You've done nothing. You don't deserve any of this, any more than Jean does. They're the freaks. Not you."

"You wouldn't say that if you knew."

"Knew what?"

I turn my back to him, walking away.

"I'm going to check the baby."

"Marie? Knew what?"

"Never mind."

"No, I won't let you do that."

He grabs my arm. Without wearing gloves. I'm wearing long-sleeves, but the cotton is thin enough so that he can feel my skin through it. And he's not afraid?

"If you ignore it, it won't heal."

"I'm past healing, sugar."

"Look, I don't know exactly what happened, but I know that it's not your fault. No matter what they did to you, that can't change who you are-- a strong, compassionate, brave young woman who deserves a whole lot more than this place. You can trust me with it, Marie."

I believe him, yes, but I still can't look at his face when I talk. I can't even turn around.

"He left me."

"What?"

"I told you he was killed. But he wasn't. Logan left me."

Silence.

"When?"

"Six months before you found me."

Silence.

"And then what happened?"

"The same thing that's happening to Jean. More or less."

"Selfish ba-"

"Not tonight, Scott. Not anymore tonight. Please."

I'm drained; lead heavy on my feet. I don't want to say anything. I just want to lie down and close my eyes without dreams. "I just need to try to sleep again. I can't talk about it anymore now."

"Ok."

He pulls back the blankets on my bed; tugs the pillow back into place.

"I'll be right across the room. Ok?"

"Thanks."

You watch him go, then lie down, pull the blankets up to your chin despite the heat.

"Scott--"

"Yeah?"

"Don't blame him too much. He didn't think he had a choice."

"You don't have to justify him."

"But I don't have to accuse him either."

"What if he deserves it?"

"I'll decide it. Not you. Just don't hate him or anything. Okay?"

A hesitation.

"Ok. But if he ever comes here looking for you, he's going to have to come through me. I'll kill him at least once. And again if I have to. And again. You just tell me when you think it's enough."

You roll over to face the wall. Hard cement three inches from your eyes.

"Ok."

Jean's right after all, you decide. Neither you or Scott really wants to sleep. You want to ease your eyelids shut and die for a little while. Both of you.

---

The Phoenix Compound
October 31

"Io vorrei liberarti domattina,"

He speaks in velvet black, a sound somehow softer than the silence when he first carried her to bed. This is after he bandaged the cuts, kissed the bruises, held a smile on his face the whole time so she wouldn't see his hands shaking. The words are Italian; I recognize the lilt from World Lit class when he made us memorize poems in both English and their original languages. This wasn't one of the assigned pieces, though. I found it scribbled on the back of a card in his desk. He told me Jean had given it to him when they took their honeymoon in Venice.

I copied it when he was out on a mission; took it back to my room and read it over and over until I knew both the Italian and the English by heart. I scribbled the words on paper and taped them on the inside of my violin case.

/I would like to free you tomorrow./

"E vorrei verderti volare sui nevai come prima."

/And would like to see you fly over the snow-fields, like before./

William is sleeping. I fed him a little more than usual to keep him quiet while Scott was tending to Jean. Everyone is sleeping, except for me and him and her and it feels like we are the last people alive on the face of the earth. Us and maybe Logan, wherever he is.

I lean against the wall, my knees drawn up to cradle my violin across my thighs, and I watch them. They lie face to face, wrapped in the dark blue sheet he bought for her welcome home present. Her hands rest on either side of his face, across his bare eyelids; tonight the glasses and the visor have been carefully set aside. His eyes are closed and her eyes are closed and their fingers work slowly across every feature on the other's face, like two blind people trying to tell the colors of a painting.

I shouldn't watch; I know it. They should be alone tonight. I should lie down and pretend to sleep, but something in me can't help this. It's an ache, the kind I get when I remember that Logan was never there to do this for me. Not only because he left me. I left him too, because I knew he would try to find me and I ran from him. I hid. I lied and told myself it was never love at all, just need and desperation crammed together into small spaces. But maybe that's just what love really is, at least a part of it.

The two people across the room from me are desperate too, even though they are together again. Maybe even more now.

"Tu, cosi lontana, seppure orami cosi vicina."v

/You, so far away, even though by now, so near./

C'mon Scott, keep it going. You almost lost it there for a minute. Trust me, you have to be strong for her tonight. You can cry later; I'll cry with you, but tonight, you have to make her feel safe and Protected and let her know that it will never happen again. Go ahead and say it, even if it might be a lie. Especially if it might be a lie.

You know, it's funny how small life really is. Even the big things--love, honor, revenge-- can be condensed into nutshells, wrapped into extremely short sentences and then spoken as if they were mundane occurences. Example: Scott fought for Jean today. He won her back. He killed Levi.

I say "killed" not "murdered" because that is a secret between Scott and me. We knew going into the challenge that Levi wasn't going to walk away. Scott never gave him the chance to yield; he broke the man's jaw with one punch and then snapped his neck. No, we didn't plan it or discuss it ahead of time. He just knew what he had to do, and I knew that I wasn't going to try to stop him. Until this morning, I had never seen him kill a man. I almost expected pity, a momentary hesitation or prick of conscience, but what I saw was a calculated action totally devoid of emotion or thought. Like he had hardened into the same crystal as his visor.

"E l'anima se ne va verso l'eternita."

/And the soul departs to eternity./

That is the only thing that saddened me. I wanted him to regret it. I wanted to regret it myself. I wanted him to be able to spare his enemy's life in the name of some higher, loftier ideal. I think he wanted that too, it's just that he wanted Levi to die more. It was logic as well as gratification--- if he proved he was willing to kill, the next challengers would think very seriously before challenging for me or Jean, at least for a few months. To judge him would be to judge myself; I have killed men before, for similar reasons. And I didn't do it so neatly.

It might have scared me that we were both dispassionate killers but I saw Jean's face when Levi's body hit the dirt. I saw the smile. We are sisters, her and I, both survivors. We knew it was not truly murder; only an execution. A judgment. Scott carried out justice for us both.

"Perche cosi sei piu vicina...a illuminar la vita mia,"

/Because like this you are closer and can light my life/

Across the room, his fingers find her lips. They stumble when they hit the scar. I can tell when his hands start to tremble again. His voice is strained on the next sentence; thin and muffled like it is passing through walls. Walls he has built to keep himself together so he can hold her together.

"E l'anima se ne va verso l'eternita..."

/And the soul departs to eternity.../

I drop my eyes when his words fail him, when he can no longer remember what to say because she has started to cry. A sound like rain on sand or on the ocean: it is swallowed up by the immensity around it until it is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

My fingers skim over the strings of the violin, rubbing them until they are hot, until it leaves marks on the skin. I run my hands over every square inch of the wood, feeling the grain, the remnants of polish, then moving to caress the bow. I lift the instrument to my shoulder, tucking it firmly beneath my chin, and hold the bow in place. And I wait. But there is no sound. No melody in my head or in my fingers, and I hold the violin in place until my arms are sore but no sound comes.

There is no music.

---

Dancing In Rooms: Marie

It's rained for three days; the world is steam and heat, like someone has draped a wet washcloth over the world and is slowly wringing it out. But not fast enough. It is still suffocating.

Violin music and restlessness burn in the air like cheap hash.

You bend your head forward, sweat plastering your hair to the back of your neck in damp curls, your eyes are closed and you feel the music in every pore of your skin, a second kind of heat. You inhale the music, you suck it in through the nose and through the lungs. Let it get you high.

This is your graduation gift from Logan: a month of places you have never seen, riding on the back of Scooter's motorcycle with new leather gloves and a map inside your head. New Orleans. Nashville. Dallas. Phoenix. Roswell. Seattle. San Francisco. Los Angeles. And finally, the crown of it all, Santa Monica. A week of golden sun and beaches and walking outside in bare feet and bare hands. Only the sun hasn't shone since you've been there; the rain has poured and you've stayed in your room with your violin and Sarasate's "Carmen Fantasy". The audition is three days after you get back. You've had nightmares of standing up to play and finding that the music has slipped out the back door of your mind when you weren't looking.

The song ends; your fingers are ready to snap at the joints. You fall back on the bed. The skin on the back of your arms and legs sticks to the sheets. His knock at the door.

(Come in.)

The door opens and shuts; a scent of wet palm trees and damp cement floats in around him.

(Where'd you go?
Out.
Out where?
Had to get us some more money.
You fought?
Only once.
Logan, you promised. You said we had enough cash.
I wanted to make sure. And I had to get out and do something. My bones were starting to hurt from sitting still.
I don't like it. You know that.
Blame it on the rain. It's making us both crazy.)

You walk over to the dresser, and fiddle with the radio. Big band music, a disco beat, a country ballad; finally you settle on a local rock station. Acoustic guitar hums beneath the humidity. You look at him.

(So you wanna dance?)

You've never asked him before; the school prom didn't count because everyone danced and it was expected. But you need to move now, you need to move because if you don't you'll scream. This is back when something as trivial as rain and a hotel room makes you both claustrophobic. Before the two of you spent four days hiding in five square feet of space in the wall behind a washing machine.

(Yeah.)

He moves in front of you, arms sliding around your waist, thumbs coming together at the small of your back. You smile.

You dance to a song where a girl asks her man to stay with her, to come with her, wherever she's going, because she tells him it wouldn't be worth it if he didn't. Logan tells you that's how he feels. You suppose it is all right for him to say that because the song is about love and it is beautiful, but you can't get past the name. The girl called herself Ophelia. You read that story; you know where she ended up.

You don't take the time to imagine that you will one day be in the same place. Drowned and shining.

After the dance is over, he takes your hand and you walk with him through the rain to the beach and you swim in the Pacific for the last time. He picks you up at the shore; carries you into waves that surge up to his waist. You stand on his feet to keep your head above water; soaked on both sides, up and down. People stare at you both with amused disbelief. Crazy young lovers, they say, with a grin or a nod.

They are partly right. You are not lovers, but you are crazy and you are young.

The dance, in a way, never ends. It disappears for a while, but then it reappears during the days of waiting when he is trying to take you somewhere safe. You dance in all the different rooms, the clean and the filthy, the spacious and the cramped. After the first few days, no more words are need. When you feel the darkness too strongly, you hold out your hand to him and he slides his arms around your waist and you dance. Your eyes are always closed, remembering wet beaches and rain on the surf. You always see this, even when he is no longer there to dance with you, even when you are only dreaming of it.

But in the dreams it is different. Your mind can't keep hold of him, the memory of his features shifts and slides like a breeze across a lake. He dissipates, into fractured colors, into ripples, then he reforms into his familiar body, but your hands pass straight through him when you try to touch. Around his body is a shimmering.

His absence is the shimmering; loneliness gives off its own light. A dull glow that illuminates everything around her. Her hands, her clothes, the walls, the room that is hiding them.

You learn that some people, like him, like you, have to spend their whole lives dancing in those rooms because they aren't allowed to dance on the streets. You could say that the point is that they danced anyway, but you don't believe that so much anymore. You don't think they have any other choice. It's like that for people who've been locked in a small space for a long time.

You have to dance because if you don't, you go insane.

The Phoenix Compound
November 18

"You have five seconds to step away from my doorstep before I blow a hole in your chest."

"Nice to see you too, Scooter."

I can see over his shoulder: the bronze lamplight, the threadbare but neat blankets, the shadows of two women and a baby.

"One. Two. Three--"

"Scott, what is it?"

Jean appears behind him, her hand on his shoulder. Her eyes widen when she sees me.

"Logan??! God, we heard you were dead...."

"He will be if he doesn't start moving back now."

"Don't be territorial, honey."

She only calls him that when she's aggravated at him and is trying to hide it.

"Let him in."

He moves back three feet, just enough to let me stand inside the door. Marie stares at me a moment in something I can only describe as pure shock (or is it really horror?), paralyzed. Her eyes are too wide; too stark. She holds the baby her in arms like a cross over her heart, warding me off. When I see the kid, I panic. I admit it. But then I remember Jean was pregnant when we left, and I find a way to breathe again. Gotta get to her. Gotta ask her why she's afraid; why she thinks she has to keep me away from her. I try to move toward her; Scott's hand moves to push back on my chest. What exactly is he trying to pull, anyway?

"That's close enough, buddy."

"Marie?"

She'll talk some sense into him.

"Do what he says."

Oh, God, she sounds scared. Of me. I think I'm going to be sick.

"I just want to talk--"

"I'd say you gave up talking rights a long time ago."

Scott again. I ignore him, for the moment.

"Marie, just gimme-"

I try to brush by Scott as I talk, but his hand stiffens and shoots out against my chest and suddenly I find myself on the floor. Ouch. That's going to leave a bruise. I grin up at him.

"You've improved."

"I've had lots of practice here."

His hand slides to his visor.

"Move and you lose an arm."

"Scott!"

Jean grabs at his arm; he doesn't budge.

"Scott, stop it! What's going on?"

He doesn't even look at her. His gaze is fixed solely on me, and I suspect that if I could see behind the glasses, I would find something close to genuine anger. Or even hate. I've never got that from him before.

"Tell her, Logan," he says. "Tell her how you abandoned Marie in the middle of some god-forsaken wilderness. Tell her. Then she'll tell you how Marie was when we found her, what they did to her after you left her--"

"You're talking about things you don't understand, Scooter."

I cut him off with a low growl.

"Get out of my house."

"You go ahead and take that arm. I'm not moving."

"If that's how you want it--"

Then I forget all about him because Marie moves. And speaks.

"Scott, it's ok. I'll talk to him."

She hands the baby to Jean.

Scott turns his head toward her, but I get the feeling he's still watching me.

"You don't have to do this."

Way to go, Captain Obvious.

"I know."

She shifts her weight from one foot to another; rubs her arms with her hands like she's suddenly cold. Her gloves have holes in them. That isn't right.

"But we'll just be a minute. Right outside the door."

"Stay inside."

"Let them go."

Jean, intervening again.

"We're right here."

She's looking at me with this strange stare that is both pity and accusation. And haunted, but I don't think that's me. I think that's something else in her memory, although tonight I'm not going to bother with what. Tonight is just about Marie and me. Let Scott tend to his wife.

He touches Marie's shoulder; where did he get that right? Touching her like he knows something about her that I don't, like he has to protect her from me. His voice softens when he speaks to her.

"We'll be right here. If you start feeling uncomfortable at all, come back inside. He says anything, does anything that you don't like, you say the word and I'm out there."

I glare at him, but decide not to push my luck with a comment as I stand up and walk outside. She follows me, silent on her feet. I don't remember her moving that way before. She always walked like she was ready to dance. Now she walks like she is ready to run, or disappear. That makes me ache. She should have never had to run. Never had to hide. I should have been there to make sure of it.

The door shuts behind us. Silence.

The first moments are the hardest: razor wire tension and a Hundred words pouring through my mind. Things I want to say, things I can't say, apologies, reasons, justifications. Finally I settle on the one she might be willing to hear.

"I looked for you." I tell her. Just to make it clear.

She leans back against the door, hands in her pockets. The moonlight cuts her face in two; half silver, half midnight, and all I can think about is how beautiful she is, how much I missed watching her. She's the mature one of us, tonight-- her voice doesn't show an ounce of her earlier tension. It's calm. Tired.

"I know."

"Did you even want to be found?"

"By you?" She drops her gaze, watching her feet kick up small clouds of sand. "I don't know."

"Marie, what I did--"

"Don't say anything, Logan."

The eyes come back up to meet me, magnum force, black and hot and aching.

"I just brought you out here because I didn't want him doing anything I'd end up regretting."

"Like that kid would get his hands dirty."

"He's changed. We've all changed. That's what I want you to understand. You came here looking for someone you thought you knew. You even told her you loved her once. I'm not that girl. I'm not clean and I'm not beautiful and most of all I'm not innocent. Not anymore."

"You're wrong. You're still Marie. That's enough for me."

The left corner of her lip flips into a sad smile.

"But not for me."

She stands up, arms folding into a barrier at her waist.

"Look, I appreciate your coming back for me, but I think you should just go."

"No."

"This doesn't have to be harder than you make it."

"You actually want to stay in this place?"

"I spent six months on the outside after you left. I've seen all I care to see."

"It'll be different this time. I've got friends--"

"Just like before?"

There is no arsenic in the question; it is merely a question and that stings more than bitterness.

"Better than before. They got me in. They can get us out."

"Please, just go."

"I'm not leaving you, Marie."

"It's a little late for that." The smile sharpens; the voice cuts deeper into the bone. "Now go. Go or I'll call Scott."

"So that's it? I don't love you anymore, Logan, thanks for risking your life and all to find me, but I'll be seeing you later. Then again I won't. Is that all you have to say to me?!!"

I'm shouting now; it can't be helped.

"Do you have any idea what it took for me to get here? What I let them put in me?"

She doesn't shout back; she whispers, but it breaks my rage down until it disappears. Anger isn't the only thing shattering, though; an throbbing starts within my chest from the moment she starts talking.

"I never said I didn't love you."

"Then give me this chance. C'mon."

If I can just get a little closer to her, if I can just touch her face or her hand, then maybe she'll know that I'm telling the truth. That I love her, that she's beautiful, that I would never go away again.

Her hands shoot up; palms splayed open, a half-wild gleam springing to her eyes.

"Stay away from me, Logan."

"You said you loved me and you won't even let me near you?"

"I didn't say I loved you. I said that I never didn't love you."

"There's a difference?"

I could touch her now; stretch out my arm and brush her cheek with my fingertips, but I don't want her at arms length. I want her close. She backs away until her head bumps against the door.

"Logan, that's enough. Enough."

"Tell me what the difference is and I'll go."

Her voice drops to a hiss, a growl.

"Don't. Touch. Me."

Then I understand what wall is keeping us apart. What she's holding inside of her that's standing between her and me. I swallow the bile in the back of my throat at the memory and try to force the words out as gently as possible.

"I know about the farmhouse."

She screams.

Three seconds later, I'm lying on my back, spitting blood and watching a star supernova inside my head, bright and red and hot. When did Scooter learn to pack a punch like that? Or move that fast? I didn't even have time to duck, much less block. My claws itch, whine, beg to give back measure for measure, but I can't. Not when she's here. I have to show her I'm better than that.

I spit a mouthful of blood in Scott's direction and move to my feet.

"I've had just about enough of that from you tonight. I didn't come here looking for a fight."

"Then leave."

"Fine. But I'm not going anywhere."

I raise my voice so it carries over his shoulder.

"You hear that, Marie? I'm staying right here until I do whatever it takes to convince you that it's not over between us."

He turns back to her.

"Go back inside. You don't have to listen to anything from him."

She stares at me, her face whiter than her hair, dazed as if she's never seen me bleed this much before. For one second, I think she's going to say something. Anything. But she doesn't. She drops her head and walks inside.

Once the door shuts behind her, all pretense can be dropped.

"You think you own her or something?"

"If by owning her do you mean that I am responsible for her? That I'm supposed to keep her safe because you couldn't? Then yes. I do."

"Not if I can help it. They told me the rules to this place. Twelve days until the next challenge."

"You're going to have get through me first."

"Not a problem, kid."

"Has it occurred to you that this isn't what she wants?"

"It is. She just doesn't know it yet."

"Be careful, Logan."

He's calmer now; not so hostile now that she's away from me. I don't know what irritates me more-- his macho leader attitude before or his big brother attitude now.

"She's been plenty of places she doesn't want to go, and you don't want to become another one of those."

"I'd never hurt her. You know that."

"You already have."

I use my sleeve to wipe away the latest spurt of blood from my nose; I still haven't gotten used to bleeding this much from one punch. It's never easy to go from Superman to Clark Kent, even if it's for a good cause. But the blood doesn't hurt near as much as the fact that he's right. I start to walk away, but one last thought holds me in place a moment longer.

"Tell her I'm sorry, at least? Will you? Tell her I didn't mean to scare her. And that I won't give up."

I walk away alone.

---

Nativity Scene: Logan

It's Christmas, tomorrow, she tells you when you both climb out of the back of the truck.

We'll be in Canada by then, you promise. A foolish reassurance; this is the last stage of your journey and of course it is the most dangerous. Like the last day of battle, when soldiers get hit by stray sniper fire or step on hidden mines right before they get onto the boat home. Like a tree limb breaking under your feet right before you can grab another branch.

The farmhouse is cold, but it is functional and anonymous and that is all you ask for. Baked beans for dinner, eaten straight out of the can. The other three travelers-- brothers-- pass around a bottle of cheap whiskey and sing Good King Wenceslaus in a key that she tells you doesn't even exist. The key of H major, she says. She laughs. The sound is too high, too thin. She's nervous. Just like you are.

There's one mattress in the corner; dusty and moth-eaten but you stake claim to it anyway. You aren't going to let her sleep on the floor. And she'll want to sleep, eventually. Her body exhausts itself easily; she lives so much more completely than you do. A minute might pass in sixty seconds for you, but she always wants to stretch it out; make it last longer than it really is.

The transport won't be there until morning. A furniture moving van; they will hide in the back behind the boxes but it won't be necessary. The necessary bribes have been arranged; they should pass through without any more trouble than cramped legs and eight hours without a bathroom.

Dawn is five hours away; too much can happen.

You do not tell her this. You wrap your jacket around her and hold her against your chest, partly to warm her bones, partly to show the three brothers what they're going to have to go through to get to her. They pretend nonchalance, but you smell the intentions on them, like the scent of an animal that has been dead in the sun too long. You might end up fighting one of them before the night is over. Or all of them.

(You know what this feels like?
What?
The Christmas stories my momma used to tell me when I was a little girl. We're a regular Mary and Joseph. Without the kid, of course.
That's one way of looking at it.)

So is that what you are? Mary and Joseph, sleeping in the barn because there is no room in the inn. There is no room in any of the inns; the doors are shut and barred and locked when they see you coming. Only in this story, there's no baby Jesus. No redemption.

(Hey, Wolverine!)

A man shuffles across the room, his shadow looming against the wall in the light of the two kerosene lanterns, his scent heavy with of lust and alcohol. You ease her weight to your left arm, ready to push her behind you and start fighting. This one's the worst; the oldest. Loud, pushy, arrogant, dirty-mouthed. It's his power that bothers you the most....he can neutralize other mutations with his touch. This means that her skin isn't the magic charm, this time. This means she could get hurt.

But you won't let that happen. Your claws aren't some mutation. They're real as steel can be. So what if it'd hurt a little more when they came out? The effects are only temporary.

(How about sending your little girlfriend over here for a while? Me and my brothers was thinking we could share her, y'know....have a little Christmas Eve celebration...)

Her fingers dig into your arm clean through the three layers of clothing you're wearing. You squeeze her shoulder.

(Go back to your corner with the other animals.)

You snarl at him.

(Not unless I take her with me. Or unless you want to do something to try and stop me.
You're about three steps away from being stone drunk. Do you really want to get into a fight?
I don't wanna fight. I wanna take your slut and throw her up against the wall and--)

He never finishes. Adamantium claws against the neck have that effect on a man. As does the smell of their own blood.

(Listen, bub,)

Your voice is barely audible, a growl.

(You want to go on being a man, you go back to that corner and keep your mouth shut until the transport gets here. I won't kill you if you try anything with her. I won't be that kind.)

He chokes out words that sound like yes, ok, whatever you want, but you're not really listening to him. First you glance at the other two brothers. No threat there. They're still staring at the claws, jaws lolling and eyes flared. Then you widen your gaze until you find Marie.

She's not watching. Her forehead is resting on her knees; she's shaking.

Just for that, you should remove this freak's spleen and shove it in a new and interesting place. But that's too noisy. Discovery is still a viable threat. You settle for a nice, quiet, kick to the groin; he drops like a sack of wet flour, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. One more kick to the stomach adds a nice closing effect.

(You can open your eyes now.)

You crouch down beside her, stroking the back of her head, rubbing her back.

(He isn't coming over here again.
I'm sorry.
What could you be sorry for? I cause trouble for you.
That wasn't trouble, darlin'. That was me playing around with a stupid drunk freak. That was easy.
I'm not talking about just with him. With everything.
What do you mean?
This whole thing. You would have been in Canada by now if you didn't have to take me along. I'm not stupid. I know how dangerous this is. What will happen if we get caught.
You let me worry about that. You just trust me.
I'm not worth it.
Don't even--
I'm not. You're doing this because you want to protect me, want to save me, but I'm not worth that.)

You bring your finger up to hover just about her lips.

(Don't ever tell me that. Let me believe that I'm able to save something. Just let me believe it.)

She leans into you, wrapping her arms around your ribcage and squeezing like she wants to pop your heart out of the bone and metal shell.

(We're in this together, right? Right. No matter what? You won't leave me.)

You kiss her on the back of her head, the smooth ridge of her skull.

(I won't. No matter what.)

Hope is more dangerous than fear. It gets soldiers shot on the last day of war, prisoners hung for trying to escape the day before they were to be released. It worms in your blood, a tiny white parasite, and before you know it, you are saying things you would never have said if you had just taken a moment to gauge the odds.

But it is Christmas Eve, and you love her, and she is in your arms; how can you stop to think what you were promising? How can you even suspect that it would be a lie?

The Phoenix Compound
November 18

I see him standing in the open doorway, long after his wife and his child are asleep, his face intently staring at something neither of us can see. I cross the room, bare feet padding without sound on concrete, and stand beside him. A night breeze pushes hot air through the weave of my t-shirt.

"Too hot to sleep," he says.

"Is that all?"

"No, not really."

"What did you say to him?"

"Nothing important."

"What'd he say to you?"

"That he was sorry."

"I've always known that."

The wind stirs the silence; hot and dry and empty.

"Did you see his nose?"

"It was bleeding. Good."

"It didn't stop."

"Maybe it was too soon."

"It always stopped before."

"What are you saying?"

"He said he let them do things to him so he could get across the border."

"You don't owe him, Marie. He made his choice."

"I know."

"And?"

"It should have stopped bleeding."

---

Fog: Marie

You're not naked; there is a cotton t-shirt and panties between you and the water, and there's no one in the room to see you even if you were, but you don't want to take that chance. The shower room is dirty: black mold in the creases of the broken tiles, brick red rust on the showerhead, a drowned roach in the corner of the stall. You wear your socks to prevent fungus between your toes, but you can't help feeling pretentious. Who are you to judge the building when you're just as filthy? More filthy.

Black mold bruises on your arms (wrists and elbows and Random spaces in between), on your legs (ankles and kneecaps and higher), on your neck, spreading along the side of your jaw. Rust brown streaks of dried blood. More blood than you want to think about, in more places than you want to see. Some of it you can only feel, like the patch of matted hair at the back of your head. It's swollen; maybe even a concussion. Drowning roaches crawl in your mind, climbing over one another in waterlogged desperation to escape the chaos.

You are a victim; you are a killer. You are defenseless, you are deadly. Either way, you've lost something. You're just not sure what.

The water is ice cold, death on the skin in January, but it's okay. It hurts, at first, but it turns numb quicker than expected, and Soon you don't even notice it. This reminds you of losing him. Pain, then unexpected numbness, and then nothing. They say you are in greatest danger of losing limbs to frostbite if you can no longer feel anything. You wonder if this applies to him. If his memories will turn black, wither, and then fall from your mind into the snow, hard frozen nubs.

No; it won't be that easy. Because you didn't lose him after all. He left. You want to say you are abandoned; forsaken, but you don't like the sound of those words. One is too helpless, the other too dramatic for this. This is too real for drama and emotion. It just happens, one awful event at a time, and you've survived it for five days now. Days or years? Time has always been relative for you; too long when it should be short and too short when it mattered the most.

You turn off the shower, watch the last bit of blood swirl down The sink with the soapsuds. You shiver uncontrollably as you dry the beads of water from your skin, but at least it's movement. Part of you just wants to sink to the floor, in the corner, and never move again. Maybe the shiver is an involuntary protection against that.

There is no way to dry your hair; you try with paper towels and an electric hand-drier, but it is too long and too thick. Outside it is winter; pneumonia will most likely set in. You think of it as an abstract: sickness is a plant shriveling up by a windowpane, coughing is the rattling of the frame when a train passes by, fever is the hot, moist air beneath a radiator that looses all its heat into the floor.

You dress at your normal rate even though it hurts; no point in indulging in unnecessary attention to weakness. The gloves go on last; they are all you have managed to salvage. They tore the cloak down the middle, they took his scarf. Protest was futile, then, and when it came time to leave, you didn't have the chance to look for it.

The door to the truck stop swings shut behind you; an old man is waiting for you outside, holding out a doughnut and a cup of coffee.

(What's this?)

You eye the food with suspicion and craving, then direct the scrutiny to his face. He found you on the road, you agreed to get into his truck because you saw the rosary hanging from his rear view mirror and the picture of the Virgin tucked against his dashboard. He is old enough to be your grandfather; this does not mean it is safe but it does mean you will take the chance. You have to get away, and this is your only option. If worse comes to worse, you still have the knife.

(Breakfast. You look like you haven't seen food in a while.
Yeah. A while.)

It's been five days; you don't tell him that.

(Then what are you waitin' fer? Eat.
I don't have any money to pay you for it.
I wasn't askin' for cash. You're too skinny as it is...go on, take it.
Thank you.)

You remember to smile when you take the food from him, remember to resist the urge to stuff the entire doughnut into your mouth at once.

(Where did you say you were going again?
Detroit. Does that matter?
No, not really. Anywhere is good.
You sure you're not in any trouble?
I'm sure.
Family problems? Boyfriend?
Boyfriend.)

Only a partial lie. He looks at the bruises on your jaw and doesn't ask again. His truck is just across the parking lot, but you can barely see it through the early morning fog. You follow him slowly, cautiously, checking behind and before at all times. A car door slams. You jump. It is the little things that will scare you now: bumps on the wall and footsteps outside the door, darkness without a nightlight. What else is there to frighten you? The big things have come and gone.

You are half inside the door, sitting on the step and drinking your coffee as the old man checks his cargo, when you see the other car pull up. It's a truck --faded green and beat up-- but the vehicle isn't so important. It's the man you see getting out of the passenger side, nodding in curt thanks to the driver.

Maybe it's the fog; maybe you're dreaming. He can't be who he looks like, but the details are there and they are concrete. A blue flannel shirt (just like the last time you saw him, only stained, you ignore the fact that it could be blood), sideburns, a scowl across his mouth. And beneath the scowl, fear. Or hope. Or both. You can hear it in his voice when he starts to shout.

"Marie!"

The sound is picked up and echoed by the fog, stretched out, lingering. You freeze at first, terrified he has seen you, but then you realize that his voice is not a statement but a question. He doesn't see you. He is searching for you.

"Marie, are you here? Marie!"

He is alive; this is a brightness, a flicker of a match, though not enough to light any candles or start any fires.

You watch your spirit run to him, flying across the snowy parking lot, arms outstretched. He catches you and hugs you so hard he lifts your feet off the ground. He cries into your hair; you cry onto his shirt collar. There is an inadvertent brush of a bruise; you will wince; the entire story comes out in bits and pieces later that evening, in a cheap hotel room. It is hard but you get through it without crying. He touches you and heals you, puts himself inside your head to drown out the other voices.

But this is not the truth; it is another dream, and you know it is because nothing is that easy anymore. You ache for him. You ache for your silence, but you do not say a word. What would you say? I'm here, come get me. Come find out everything that they did to me, everything that broke me. Come be with me so you can leave me again.

"You ready to go, miss?" The old man is back; he climbs into his seat and holds out his hand to help you into the cab.

You drop your empty coffee cup to the ground; crush the plastic beneath your heel. You don't dare look over your shoulder; you will lose your nerve and run back to the man calling your name.

This isn't me abandoning him, you say to yourself. He left me first.v

"Yes." You climb into the cab and shut the door. "I'm ready."

As the truck's engines roar to life, you risk one last glance out the window. He is moving inside now, no doubt to check the bathrooms and question the cashier. Maybe he'll find you later on down the road. Maybe by then you will be able to let yourself be found.

Your last glimpse of the man who said he loved you is of his back as he walks away.

He is surreal in the mist, a disembodied spirit, a lost prayer.

The Phoenix Compound
November 31

I look back over what I've told myself, what I've come to believe, and I know it's wrong not because of what I've admitted but what I have conveniently forgotten. The things I have said do not exist come back to life between us, immaterial and material at the same instant. Like a cement floor, like the absence of light. It is something you can touch but not hold; glimpse but not gaze upon.

She believes she knows what happened between us. I believe I know. Somewhere in the middle lies the truth. We're not the only ones interested in finding out what that is. Scott wants it too, or thinks he wants it. He needs to put two and two together and have it equal four so he can find justification for hating me. For trying-- and almost succeeding-- to kick my guts inside-out earlier this afternoon. I've got news for the kid: two plus two doesn't always equal four. Sometimes it equals five, sometimes it equals nothing.

I don't know where I heard that; I think I remember it from a book Marie used to read a lot. It was named after a year...1974 or maybe 1984. She talked about it non-stop until I finally broke down and read it just to prove that Scooter's not the only one who can understand fancy stories. I understood it all, but I didn't agree with it, or even like it very much. A man and a woman tried to fall in love in a society where an all-powerful government controlled every thought. In the end, they gave up. Of course, there was torture and starvation and the usual brutality, but ultimately they chose to surrender each other just to spare themselves a little pain.

(Never, I mumbled under my breath, rubbing my hands over my knuckles. No way they'd make me do that to her.)

I should be less rash with my promises. Maybe then they wouldn't break so easily. Ironic, I'd forgotten about that book until today. Until now, when I watch her wash blood from the rag she's using to clean my face, and I remember. I remember what the man and the woman said to one another when they were face to face again, after the torture and the giving up.

/I betrayed you, she said./
/I betrayed you, he said./

I feel those words in my gut when Marie turns around; an expectation to say them and hear her echo them in return. But, nothing so direct. We've lost the ability to deal it out honest and take it in straight. We resort to lies of silence: lies because the truth takes words neither of us are willing to say, even if we knew what they were.

"You two could have pulled punches out there today."

A twist of the rag between gloved fingers; pink-red water drips Into the rusted sink. Some of it, inevitably, clings to the gloves. She could have taken them off. A year ago, she would have.

"Tell that to Summers."

The kid wasn't lying when he said he'd been practicing. He hits with more force, more often, with less hesitation than I remember. Back when we sparred before missions, he always had a slight reluctance to his punches, a bit of strength held in check as if he had to justify each swing he took. Not anymore. He fights hard. Dirty. He fights like me. I wonder what finally convinced him to let it out.

"He was just trying to do his job."

"And what's that?"

"Protecting Jean. And me."

/No, darling,/I want to tell her, /You're not his job. You're mine./

Has he ever slipped up too? Or does she reserve that sort of memory for me alone?

"Why'd he drag it out for so long?"v

Even after I started winning-- it took longer than expected; my arms were starting to grow tired of finding new places to hit him-- he refused to give me so much as an inch. That made it harder. I used to watch hockey with the guy; I was in his wedding. We might not be on speaking terms at the moment, but that still didn't change the fact that I thoroughly disliked having to beat him unconscious in front of his wife. He wouldn't let me do it quickly, either. Had to hold on until a lucky right to the temple knocked him cold. She unfolds the rag, dips it into a bowl of boiled water (clean at least in theory).

"It's hard for him to lose this kind of thing."

"It's happened before?"

My stomach starts to knot up from something deeper than bruised muscles. Please don't let her say he lost her in a match. I'm not stupid; I know what that means here. What it'd bring back for her. A moment of anger....why'd he bring her here...why didn't he find somewhere else, safer....

/At least he didn't abandon her./

Leave it to my demons to bring up the obvious.

"It didn't happen to me."

She didn't have to tell me that, she didn't have to but she did. But another thought follows, almost as cold.

"Jean?"

A nod.

"Last month. It was...bad."

No, not Jean, too. That's not fair. Now I understand why Summers hits so hard. Once you lose someone like that, once you realize how small and helpless you really are, you spend the rest of your life trying to make up for it. Every day, every fight. You could win it all and it would still never be enough.

"Has he ever lost you?"

"No."

She smiles, but no relief or cynicism comes to sight. Only an upward curve of her lips, cold and sharp like it was cut into glass with a stone.

"No one wants a death warrant. At least no one here."

"You're not a death warrant. Not in my book."

"Of course I am."

She sits down on the edge of the bed, one hand tilting my head back while the other dabs the cloth across a fat cut above my eyebrow.

"For the first time in your life, I could kill you if I wanted."

"So why not?"

Our eyes collide; silent dares. I wait for love or hate but there is Only distance. A remote gleam, winter sunlight falling across coal.

"The last time I killed a man was back in January. I try not to exceed a quota of two murders in a year's time."

"That wasn't murder--"

"Don't tell me what it was."

She pulls her hand back abruptly. A patch of dried blood sticks to the cloth as she moves; a wound opens into fresh blood. Neither of us flinch.

I catch her hand in mine before she can get too far.

"Marie...,"

Her fingers stiffen into concrete, rigid, unmoving. The lines of her face mold into a similar mask. I try not to wince.

"Marie, look, you don't have to do this for me."

I flick my gaze toward the bowl then back to her.

"I've been beat up before, and I can take care of myself."

I want to know why she bothers, why she extends the motions when her hands and face turn stone underneath my touch. It's like the kiss when I claimed her; I never know if it is merely a form, an endured ritual, or if it is a promise of absolution. I need to know this. I want to put two and two together and have it equal four, just this once.

"Who ever said I was doing this for you?"

She twists her hand free of mine.

"It might be that I'm just selfish. That this is all for me."

"Why?"

"Because."

The rag brushes a smear of blood at the corner of my lips, and I almost imagine that her fingers push through the cloth a second longer than absolutely necessary.

"I never could stand to see your pain."

Her eyes crack when she says it, light spills from the edges, the kind of glow you can't look at for long because it damages your eyes. But even though I know that, I want to keep on staring. It's beautiful; it's gone before I even can believe its existence, but it is enough. It is enough to hope.

There are words waiting to pass between us: reasons why I left, reasons why I came back, reasons I took her from Scott. I'm not sure if either of us are ready for the first two, but I'm willing to gamble on the third. Pick a card. Roll the dice. I take a deep breath.

"Do you want to know why I challenged--"

"Tell me how they hid your mutation."

She glides around my question as if she never heard it. As if it does not exist, not even in the past because she never allowed it to reach the present. Now she's moving away from me, walking back to the sink and the boiled water. The sides of my jaw tighten in frustration; I force them to relax. Have to keep it open between us, have to keep the words coming.

"It's pretty simple. Drugs, first, about two weeks worth of heavy stuff, and then an implant regulates the effects long term."

"What about side effects? Didn't it make you sick?"

"Like a dog."

Her head flicks up from the bowl, almost looking at me, but her eyes don't quite make it to mine before they dive back to the rag twisting between her fingers. Her hair falls so I can't see her face, but when she talks, her voice is softer. Subdued.

"That bad, huh."

"Yeah, at first. Now it only hits every few days."

"What happens?"

"Nothing big....headache, dizziness, a little nausea here and there. Lovely stuff, really."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. You didn't ask me to do any of it."

"So why don't you take the implant out now that you're here?"

"I'll need to hide my mutation until we can cross the border back into Mexico. They'll let us through if they think I'm a human and you're my property."

"Guess that's what I am now, huh? Property."

"C'mon, darling. You know better than that."

"Maybe. Who says I'm going anywhere with you?"

I let my breath leak out in a slow, deep sigh, taking a moment to sort through the commotion in my mind, searching for just the right words. For once, let me find the right words.

"No one is saying anything, Marie. I didn't take the therapy and cross the border and let Scooter pound me so you would feel like you owe me something and decide to come back with me. I'm here because I had to find you, just one more time, to see if we still love each other the way we said we did."

She's looking straight at me now, eyes all big and dark and asking me if I mean it. I can't tell if she's hoping or fearing that I did. But I'm not finished yet. I'll show her I do mean it, but that she doesn't have to be afraid.

"If you want to go back to Scooter and Jean, I'm not going to stop you. You can leave right now, and I'll know that it's over and that I can stop looking for you. Or you can stay, and give me one month to prove that nothing between us has changed like you think it has. Just one month. That's all I ask."

Two full minutes of silence.

"One month. And after that you'll go."

"You'll never see me again, if that's what you want."

"And you'll give me space. You won't try to ask any questions or anything else like that."

"Nothing you don't want asked."

Outside I am doing an admirable job of pretending calm, but Inside my bones are shaking until they're about to peel out of the adamantium. Desperation does tend to have that effect on one. She tilts her head to the side, watching the water droplets slide From the edges of the rag. The surface refracts the light, she captures it with her finger, soaking it into the glove.

"We have a month."

When she drops her gaze back to the bowl, I think she's smiling. Maybe not on the outside, but in tiny, hidden ways beside her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. For the first time since I walked into the compound, I think we might stand a chance.

---

Pheonix Compound
December 18

"Close your eyes."

"Why?"

"Just do it. I have a surprise for you."

"But it isn't even Christmas yet."

"It's close enough. C'mon."

"Fine."

"No peeking."

"Put your hands over your eyes to make sure."

"And I used to wonder why they called you paranoid."

That earns a grin. She is gonna love this. Really. Just let me set it down at the right angle so I can watch her face once she opens her eyes....

"Can I look now?"

"Not yet."

"All that noise you're making certainly isn't helping the suspense."

"Gimme one more second."

Where's the plug again...ah, right here. This piece of junk better live up to the two hundred dollars I spent on it. If not, I'm going to beat a refund out of someone's hide.

"It's been a second."

"Count out three more and then you can look"

"Three.."

Straighten the antenna....practice my smile to make sure it looks real. Don't want to take any chances, here...

"Two."

Adjust the dial, thump it twice when it sticks. Fiddle with the volume to make sure I don't blow her eardrums.

"One."

Flip the switch. Watch her eyes fly open, lit up like the Christmas tree we don't have; follow the movements of her hands as they fly to her mouth, covering the dropped jaw.

Starting to smile now; waiting for her voice, the final approval.

"Logan..."

/C'mon, baby, say you like it. Say I made you smile./

"How did you find it? A radio? Here?"

She shakes her head.

"Not even the Elders have radios. It must have cost a fortune."

I shrug it off.

"I have cash."

"You shouldn't spend it on me."

"You don't like it?"

"I love it."

"Then it was worth it. End of discussion."

"Thank you...I mean, really. Thank you. I can't remember the last time I heard music like this."

"Didn't I see your violin case under your bed?"

"Um, I don't exactly play much anymore."

"Why not?"

"How did you find this?"

Only a momentary tension between jaw and teeth at her evasion: by now they have become commonplace. Her excuses are prefabricated. Convenient. Plausible denials block every attempt I make to talk about any part of life after we left the mansion. Every day, every night, every moment between us passes in a struggle for things not to say. It even carries over into the night. I lie on the floor and listen to her uneven breath against her pillow, her relentless tossing between the sheets. That hurts, to know that she doesn't even want to close her eyes or let down her guard until sheer exhaustion demands it. We're supposed to be something better than this.

The radio is meant to remind her of that something. It was our secret; a peculiarity we share exclusively with one another. Every couple has one. Summers quotes his wife poetry; I dance with Marie behind closed doors. We draw the curtains, prop a chair under the doorknob to keep out anyone and everyone, and we turn up the music until she feels it in her bones and I feel it in mine, and it talks between us. Saying things neither of us could ever put into words. It's a private show. No one else will see the desire, the wanting; no one else hears the secrets and the prayers. It's a ritual; by now it is also a last resort.

"This place has some pretty efficient ways of getting people things they aren't supposed to have."

"I see."

She already knew this; she doesn't even try to hide it.

"So..."

I attempt to inject nonchalance into my voice even though my bones are twisting into loops.

"Want to try it out?"

This is the real test. The critical moment.

/Maybe she isn't ready...maybe you should wait...No, no time. All or nothing. Just don't let her freeze when I touch her. Don't know how much I could handle it./

"How?"

"Dance with me."

A shadow across her eyes, a slight recoil in the direction of the door. For a minute I stand convinced that she is going to run, but no, she's still. More than still; she is wax. We wait amid dead sound and the whisper of blood slowing to a completely stop, stagnating within our veins. Her eyes shift to pitch black, the color of oil, the kind that stains your fingers and lodges in every crease of your skin, and refuses to wash away. That is how her gaze sticks to me, coating me to suffocation point.

"Yes." She bends her head slightly sideways. "Let's dance."

"Do you like this station?"

"Just turn it up and let it play."

I edge the volume control higher until a slow, deep throbbing layers the air like a heartbeat. Ambient guitar. Disconnected emotion: a voice that sounds like rainy streets and turns everything you look at grayish-blue, a smudge on a photo.

/You in the dark, you in the pain, you on the run.../

She takes my hands between hers, one at a time, runs her fingers over the knuckles, soft enough to set the skin on fire, each bone burnt to ash. Just before combustion, she moves her hands to her elbows, peeling off the material shielding her arms.

"Let's make this honest," she says. "Nothing covered up. Nothing easy and nothing safe."

"You want it, you got it."

/Living your hell, living your ghost, living your end./

The black oil eyes thicken, oozing down into the type of grin I have never seen before. It congeals across the surface of my skin, my bare hands inches from hers, daring me to flinch away. Instead I push closer. Only fingertips away from touch. "So what are you waiting for?" she says. "Dance."

/Never seem to get in the place that I belong. Don't want to lose the time, lose the time to come./

I slide my hands over her arms, a thin sheath of air the only thing holding skin from skin. She never gave off this kind of electricity before, when I healed. She never drew this kind of heat. My hands come to rest around her waist, loose, a circle she could break if she wished. She could break many things about me, now, if she wished. I would let her.

/Whatever you say it's all right. Whatever you do it's all good. Whatever you say it's all right./

Her face and body move with mine like she is close to me and far away at the same time. Like I am dancing with a shadow, something my hands will pass through if I try to pull too near.

/Silence is not the way. We need to talk about it. If heaven is on the way.../

Her hands rest on my shoulders, sometimes moving to brush my face with split-second touches. The temple. The cheekbone. The bridge of the nose. Not enough to drain but enough to test resolve. But whose-- mine to keep dancing with her or hers to keep from holding on until it hurts.

/You in the sea, on a decline, breaking the waves. Watching the lights go down, letting the cables sleep./

"Logan...,"

There it is, again, that glass-stone whisper, hard and vulnerable at the same time, capable of shattering and being shattered in equal portion. Her lips are close enough to my ear that if she were to so much as slant her head sideways, our faces would touch.

"Why are you letting me keep my gloves off?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

"I told you. I could hurt you."

"And I could hurt you."

"So what's stopping us? Both of us?"

"Trust. Love."

"I don't have either of those things. And I think you know why."

"What?"

/Whatever you say, it's all right. Whatever you do it's all good. Whatever you say it's all right./

"About the farmhouse...were you telling the truth or just bluffing?"

"I wouldn't bluff about that."

"Then tell me what you know."

She pulls her face back from mine; I feel her spine stiffen into Iron and cement. The oil in her eyes has caught fire and is burning, or maybe all I'm seeing is the clouds of smoke from a deeper fire.

"Marie...we don't need to do it this way"

"No."

She breaks away, shoulders back, chin razor taut.

"I want to hear you say it. I want you to look me in the face and say it all out loud."

"Why?"

The gloves reappear in her hands with magical speed, she yanks Them over her fingers and up to her elbows in short, angry jerks as she talks. "You can't, can you." A shake of the head. "How can you say that nothing between us is different when you can't even say the word?"

"I can say it."

"C'mon then. I'm waiting."

I begin to form the word; I push it to the edge of my tongue, up against the back of my teeth, and then I fall back. Paralyzed.

"You're afraid of it, aren't you."

Her voice is more glass than stone, now, the edges broken and sharp and cutting into me with surgical precision. My chest is neatly sliced open: my innermost organs viewed in contempt.

"You're afraid to say it because that means you have to accept it. Accept me, like this, not like the sweet little girl you remember. And you're not willing to do that, are you?"

Silence. And beneath the silence, heat. And beneath the heat, rage, starting to creep inch by inch over my mind, a wall of red dust like a desert sandstorm. Anger at the futility, at the walls between us she will not let me climb, at the tears in her eyes--even now, even as her words sharpen-- and at the fact that I have no control over those tears. I could not stop them if I tried.

"I think you should take the radio back." She says.

Twist, twist, twist, the blade corkscrews through my soft places, in between the metal bones and hardened cynicism. Into the fleshy places only she knows how to hurt.

"We won't be using it."

I find my voice again, not in words but in an explosion.

"Ok, Marie, you want to hear it? Fine."

I take a step toward her, shouting loud enough to make her flinch, despite her external ice.

"You want me to say it? I'll say it. You were raped. You were raped and I couldn't stop it because I wasn't there. Are you happy now?"

She's shaking, the blackness gone from her eyes, washed out by the sheen of moisture spilling down her face. I see these things with my eyes, but they do not reach my brain. I stand in a red haze and listen to myself scream.

"Are you, Marie? Does hearing it straight make it easier to blame me?"

She fixes her gaze straight on me, and I can see her visibly pulling together the pieces for one final blow. I do not attempt to block. I stand and let her finish doing to my insides what I've just done to hers.

"I don't blame you." No quiver; her stone voice. "Blame would require some part of me to care about some part of you. And that's not going to happen again. Ever."

Three seconds later, the door slams behind her.

I hear myself call after her, a roar, not her name, then watch the claws smash in the face of the radio, skewering the metal and wire. It sails, seemingly of its own accord, into the wall across the room, graceful and melancholy until the moment of impact. I am helpless as it shatters into pieces.

I am helpless.

The words come back to me again.

/I betrayed you, he said./
/I betrayed you, she said./

Sometimes, there is nothing else to say.

The Return: Logan

You lift yourself out of your grave with the dim suspicion that you will taste roots and earth and decay for weeks. There is still blood, a muddy red stream trickling half-heartedly from the corner of your gut wound. A surprise, but not a total one. You expected something like this from the syringes they shoved under your skin. You expected death-- cold, black, temporary, like a restless sleep-- but you had not prepared for the long moments before death.

The injections were not the worst: hasty, unprofessional, carried out by trembling gloved hands while five-point restraints bound you to the gurney. A functional brutality-- you killed five of them before the gunfire brought you down long enough for the capture; the needles provided reassurance that you would not be strong enough to kill again. The beatings were not the worst: clumsy, frenzied, revenge-lust, hitting in places you knew you'd never break. Metal bones, you told them, and you laughed.

It was the dying, this time, that added new chapters to your nightmares.

You tried to escape, of course. You had no choice-- she was alone and unprotected and you knew what that would mean. Perhaps you also knew that you would be too late, only you played ignorance. It's easier to die for something if you believe it will exist when you resurrect again. So you broke the straps, killed two more of them, made it a good five miles before the hunter-killer squad caught you. This time they were more e fficient. Double-barrel shotgun blasts, aimed at both kneecaps, instant paralysis. A third bullet exploding into your stomach. Cold air rushing in around soft organs.

Blood. Vomit. Cursing. Then they surrounded you.

You landed on your back and stared at the winter sky and thought of how that color of gray would bring out Marie's eyes, you thought of the curve of her elbows in your palms when you danced with her. You thought this while they packed the gaping hole in your gut with snow, with dirt, packed it tight with their fists and laughed. You did not scream but once, and that was only when they started to bury you alive. And that was only because you knew, right then, that you would never reach her in time.

You ignored the thought that neither of you would have the luxury of time, anymore.

But you are awake, and you are alive, and you are healing, slowly but faster with each step. You will need this strength when you reach the farmhouse. Every scenario has passed through your mind ten times, every horror and every possibility. You have watched yourself step through the door and find her body, a discarded rag doll that will not respond to your bare skin. You've found her in the corner, silent and shaking with fingerprint bruises and eyes that will never be the same again. You've tried to picture her alive and safe, but this image does not readily come. You saw the faces of the men you left her with; you smelled their intent.

You watch yourself kill them until you are bored of it.

When the real moment comes, the murders will be little more than a formality. Over almost before they start. It's not worth wasting the time you'll need to heal her, if she can be healed. And, if not, then you'll spend the time finding a way to follow her back into the darkness you left not so far behind, in the shallow grave. And this time you'll find a way not to come back. Even if it means doubling back to the border and taking on every last one of Uncle Sam's boys with nothing more than your claws and a grin.

Twenty-eight miles and fifty-seven mental homicides later, you see the farmhouse. It is standing and outwardly as idyllic as you left it-- one fear disappears. Your death was successful; no soldiers found her. A wind blows across your face: scent of beer and vomit and something hot and metallic like rust or dirt. The smell of blood. Her blood. Now the fear. Now the insanity. Now the instinct to kill.

The claws beg to do away with the skin holding them back; you consent, the sunlight shining off the metal as it cuts open your hands. You drop low to the ground and begin to run. Impatient. Terrified. But the neurosis is debilitating-- your vision clouds with images of her face that last night, your ears ring with the sound of the last words. Hissed, taut, razor-wire stretched across teeth; she was panicking but trying not to show it.

(It doesn't have to be you.
Marie--
I know you're going to say it. You're going to tell me it has to be you, but it doesn't. Let one of them go get themselves killed. You stay with me. You gave me your word.
It has to be me. I'm the only one who can survive it.
Then let me go with you.
No. Absolutely not.
I'm not afraid. As long as we're together it doesn't matter...it doesn't...
It matters to me. You go with them and wait for me at the house. I'll be back by dawn.
I don't think so. I don't think you're coming back.
Of course am I. Don't you trust me?
I do, but you don't understand. You can't leave me with them.
I'll only be gone long enough to do the job. Promise me you'll go back and wait for me.
I can't. Promise. I've never asked you to do anything for me, but I need this. I need your word and I need it now because we're losing time. I have to find them before they find this place. You have to promise me so I can know you'll be safe.
I do.
Say it out loud.
I promise. But I won't be safe. You know that.
Baby, I have to go.
Logan...)

A kiss planted across her lips, harder than you intended because it comes and goes so fast, and then you ran before her eyes could break you. You promised yourself that the monsters you were leading away from her were worse than the strangers you left her with. You measured one pain against the other and tipped the scales away from her. You knew she would live, if she stayed. The mutants wanted her alive; the soldiers would want her dead, just like they killed you. Or at least that is how you justified leaving her alone, breaking every promise you had made to never forsake or abandon.

Now you smell her blood and you know that it wasn't justification at all. It was denial. And it won't be enough anymore.

Stone wall pressed against your back, underneath a window, listening to the voices inside, heroin high on the scent of her blood, but it's not a pure dose. There's something else mixed in with it, someone else. A stranger. The voices lend answers.

"How could you let her get away like that?"

"She had a knife, man, how could I stop her? I couldn't grab her...her skin. y'know?..."

"She killed Tomas! I don't care how you stopped her. Why didn't you just grab her when she made for the door? Didn't see her hands? Shaking so bad she could barely hold it. Forget using it."

"Tomas was stupid, man. I told him not to try it on her again. I told him, ya heard me."

"The little slut deserved it. Bout near broke my ribs last night. In two places."

"Maybe it's better she's gone, y'know? Tomas could only control her skin for so long. Like sleeping next to a time bomb."

"Time bombs don't have legs like that. Up to there, know what I mean?"

"Right on, man."

A dual laugh. Your claws sing in the silence, a metallic call for release. One more moment, you promise them. Just one more.

"What do you think happened to that animal dude she was with? The one with the claws?"

"Uncle Sammy's boys got him locked up somewhere, in a little cage, or maybe he's just dead. I dunno. But he ain't coming back. We don't got anything to worry about."

"Maybe one of us should keep a look out anyway."

"For what? His ghost? C'mon."

"I don't know...I thought I heard something, man..."

"You're drunk."

"He's coming back for us, I can feel it. He's gonna find out what you and Tomas did and he's gonna come back for us."

"Dead. I promise. Gimme that bottle, anyway."

The next sixty seconds blur, distort, curl at the edges like burnt paper, wrapping you inside a glowing hot blur of motion and energy. Kicking the door down, feeding off their screams, grabbing the mutant with the bottle and unceremoniously--exactly as planned-- slashing his throat through the middle. Smell of new blood, rotten and sweet like decayed fruit, rushing to the brain. Scent of her old blood jolts up another magnitude. Catalyst.

The other man tries to run, tries to fumble for the gun in his lap, but you pin him to the wall. Claws through the shoulder muscles. He screams: it is high-pitched and thin, like a dog yelping when kicked. You would think more of the dog. Your lips form the outlines of words but it is difficult to push them out through the red haze.

"Where is she?"

"....don't.....know...."

Twist the claws, just enough for another scream.

"What did you do to her?"

"....n-noth-ing..."

Another twist. His eyes bulge, wet balloons ready to pop.

"wasn't....me...man....didn't....touch....didn't cut..her....please"

Cut her. Oh, God. Oh, God. You kill him, but it is an afterthought. A twitch of a wrist, a spray of wetness across your face that you don't bother to wipe away. Your brain disconnects from your hands, from your legs; you stumble, stagger back against the wall searching for a measure of control. Fighting to breathe, fighting not to breathe.

And that is when you see it.

The mattress you held her on three nights ago, pushed back against the wall, which is splattered with dark red paint. The same paint covers the mattress, and the floor beside the mattress, and the cloak lying spread open on top of the cement. Beside the cloak, a scarf, also splattered with the red. Only it is not paint. You realize this.

A third dead man lies in the center of the floor, a gash carved down the center of his chest. She did that, your brain tells you, only part of you refuses to believe it. She, who is so fragile, capable of something so harsh and so ugly. But there is something uglier. When you pick up the cloak, it is ripped down the center. Torn completely from end to end.

Then it hits you, the pain, the nausea. It hits you straight in the gut, a pounding filth worse than when they packed dirt into you. Worse than the freeze of the snow against your soft organs, yes, worse than the suffocation that filled your lungs.

You move fast; you make it to the door before the bile hits your throat, before you drop to your knees and vomit in the snow until there is nothing left in your stomach. Until you taste blood but it is not enough.

From that moment on, it will never be enough.

---

The Phoenix Compound
December 10

It's winter, and the rain is cold even in the desert, and it provides a convenient excuse for shaking. I've been sitting on the doorstep for an hour, and I'm soaked through to the skin. At least it hides the tears, rain within rain, dangerously unpredictable after so long a drought-- I only cried once, after it happened, and that wasn't until the night Scott found me. I never cry when I'm alone. It's a survival instinct; you bottle up the tears until something in you feels safe enough to pour them out. Now Logan's back, and here it comes again, the pouring out. Does that make him safe?

He was always the danger, he was never the danger. I assigned blame, anger, because they were walls against the fear, but I always knew that I was the danger, the psychosis. He can't break me, I'm already broken. I can break him, though. I found that out tonight when I saw his eyes collapse inward when I said I didn't care. I lied. Didn't I? Or am I just empty, impotent, unable to care at all? Not even for him. Wait, I know that can't be true yet. It still hurts.

While we're on the truth thing, I'll admit panic. He got too close, and I wanted it so much that I let him, but as seconds passed, I lost sight of him. I saw the others. Their faces, not his. Their hands. It was not fair, this invasion, but I could not stop it. So I threw it in his face. I hit him where I knew it would hurt. To be fair, he did exactly the same, but for once, I think I hit a little harder.

Why? I never wanted it to go down this way. I wanted to love him just as much as he wanted to love me. It's just too late, that's all. Too many bad memories, too many scars.

I close my eyes, the liquid between the lids hot and stinging despite the chill on the rain around them.

"Marie?"

Scott's voice; he's back, an explanation will be in order. Pull yourself together, Rogue.

"What are you doing out here?"

I try to smile at him, nonchalance we both know he could see through blind. The important thing is that I tried.

"Nowhere else to go."

The smile collapses in the rain like wet tissue paper.

"You're soaked."

He unlocks the door, nudges it open with his foot while he helps me to my feet, hands full of my arms and elbows and my shivering.

"You're coming inside."

I don't know what I am to him now that I am Logan's responsibility and not his. It feels like outside, like returning to a country from which one has been accidentally banished. The official mistake has been admitted, apologized for, revoked, but you're still a stranger. You've forgotten the customs, grown rusty with the languages. Paperwork can't change that. Only now he's looking at me and I'm not sure which one of us is the exile. Maybe we both are.

"Am I allowed? Won't it get you in trouble?"

"Doesn't matter."

He's still holding my arms and steers me through the door before I can protest. I drip water onto the cement, listen to my teeth knock together, as he strips the blanket off his bed.

"Wrap up in this."

"Jean will kill us both if you've caught pneumonia on my doorstep."

I obey, slower than I should, the cold has made my bones ache.

"Where is she?"

"Will's been running a fever...today it got kinda high....she's staying with him at the infirmary."

"Is he going to be okay?"

"Just a cold, she says. She's the doctor, she's usually right."

He says it more like a prayer than a fact.

"Sit down, I'll make some coffee. Can't guarantee it'll taste like coffee, but at least it'll take the edge off the chill."

This is what I owe him for the most....the way he knows how to simply exist when I need him to exist, without prying or demanding reasons or asking questions. He just waits for me to open up on my own, lets me know in his own way that's it's safe.

"Tell me what I have to beat him up for this time."

His voice hovers over the whistle of the coffeepot, not serious at all, but casual to the point of revelation. I've got him worried, this time. Then again, I'm betting I'd be a little scared myself if I got a good glimpse of a mirror; I must be a mess. Didn't even stop to get my coat.

"It's not him. It's me."

"How so?"

He drags two chairs out from the table, offering one to me then sitting down beside the stove, within easy reach of the coffeepot. The flame from the gas refracts itself across his glass.

"I can't do it. I can't be with him anymore."

"Two days ago you said things were improving. What went wrong?"

"Everything. All at once. Bang."

"So let's start at the beginning and work toward the bang. Tell me what you did this afternoon."

"He bought me a radio. It was a piece of junk, but he spent a lot of money on it just because he thought I'd like it. Because we used to dance."

"Did you dance?"

"Yes."

"He didn't pressure you--"

"No, I wanted to. Or at least I thought I did. But then he was so close and I didn't see him anymore. I saw the others. It was too much...I panicked. Said things I never should have."

"Like what?"

"I made him admit what happened to me. I made him say it all out loud, even when I knew....what it would do. And then he yelled that I blamed him. And..."

I blink to chase away the moisture still leaking from my eyes; can't blame the rain in here. "I told him I couldn't blame him because I didn't care enough for it."

He reaches for the coffeepot and pours the steaming black liquid into two blue plastic cups. White curls of smoke rise into the air, bony fingers pointing accusation in my direction.

"Is that true?"

"God, no, it's the opposite. I don't know why I said it...awful... but it just hurt and I wanted him to hurt the same way. And it worked. That was the worst part. It worked."

I watch my fingers occupy themselves with loose threads on the blanket, unraveling as I am unraveled.

"You can go ahead and say I'm horrible and selfish and cold and I'll believe you. Just go on and say it flat out."

But he doesn't say it, not in the first few seconds, not even in the next minute. He presses a cup of coffee between my hands, a diffuse warmth that seeps through the plastic and through my gloves to defrost the first few layers of my skin. It's too hot to drink, but I consider swallowing a mouthful anyway. Just to feel the burn.

"I'm not going to lie to you just to tell you what you want to hear. You're not those things, Marie. You've survived things that would have killed most people, because you've refused to let those things beat you."

He takes a sip of the coffee, grimaces a little as the bitterness hits his mouth. Cream and sugar are luxuries that require money that could go to things like extra blankets and medicines for sick baby boys.

"So you've changed a little, just like Jean's changed and I've changed. That shouldn't matter because you're still holding on to what's really important-- who you are-- and they can never change that."

"You believe that? About any of us?"

"I have to believe it. If I didn't, I'd have quite a long time ago."

"Believing something doesn't make it truth."

I test the contents of the cup in my hands: metallic, black, mouthful of heat that scalds the taste buds on the tip of my tongue. This urges another sip. Penance bought on the edge of a plastic cup.

"Today just proves it. Proves we aren't going to get through this one."

"What makes you so sure?"

"He can't accept that it happened, and I can't pretend that it didn't."

He takes another slow drink. "I don't think he wants to pretend."

"He wants to treat me the same way he always has. It's all he knows."

Another sip; disappointment that it has already begun to cool.

"But I don't know how he even looks at me, if he really knows what they did..."

"Logan looks at you the same way I look at Jean."

"How?"

Now he sets his cup down, and slides back into his chair, staring into the bright blue flame of the stove. His jaw tightens, then relaxes, then tightens again as he searches for words.

"He wishes that it never happened, or even that it happened to him, that's how much he wants it because he knows nothing will change. But that doesn't mean he sees you as anything less than beautiful."

His voice has dropped until it is low, a soft hissing of breath like the sound of the gas flame. "It's not you that he can't accept, it's himself. His failure..."

I listen to him drift into silence, watch his knuckles grow white around the cup. My hand twists free of the blanket to rest on his knee; I want him to feel I'm telling the truth. "You didn't fail us, Scott."

A pause, too long.

"I lost her. I couldn't even protect my wife. Or you."

"Ever stop to think where we'd be if you hadn't brought us here? Where I'd be if you hadn't found me?"

"I always believed we'd win. Xavier tried to warn me about the other possibilities, but I wouldn't hear it. I was so sure we'd be able to save them. But look at us." A snort, disgust. "Real heroes."

"No one can save everything....no one. But you have saved the important things, and that is what you need to focus on. Your wife, your son. You've held on to what you love."

"Isn't that what you think Logan's trying to do?"

I set my half-empty cup beside the stove, toying with the edges of the blanket. I've stopped shivering-- on the outside-- but I still want the chrysalis around me. An enclosure, a barrier, a place to hide. With some effort of the will, I stand, dropping the blanket back into the chair.

"You think I should go back."

"Doesn't matter what I think about it, or about him. You do what you think. If you want to stay here, you're welcome."

"You'd get in trouble."

"I already told you, doesn't matter. It's your decision."

My decision. Mine, not his, not Jean's, not Logan's. Mine. But what if I don't know what to do? If I am the one holding my life in my hands, why am I so afraid I'll drop it? I know I'm supposed to say something hopeful and uplifting here, something to give him a signal that it will be okay. I don't; there is no need to compound lies. Neither of us knows if it will ever be okay, not even Scott for all his philosophy of chin up and stiff upper lip. I'm not doing this because I'm sure. I'm doing it because I believe what I said to him. You can save the important things. It's too late to save myself, or Logan, but maybe we can save us. What we have together that makes up for everything going wrong individually.

He walks me to the door; I expect a last word, an attempt to change my mind, but he doesn't. A smile for him, plastic like the coffee cup but it will have to do for thanks until I locate the real thing. Then it's back into the rain.

---

I walk through the door and into a distinct feeling that I have just entered my past. It is dim, transient, moving toward me like starlight, like something that happened millennia ago and is just now passing before my eyes. Something I can observe, but not alter.

The room is dark; I expected that. He's visual when he's in pain, he wants it Technicolor vivid, splashed across everyone else like red paint on poster board. Graffiti rage, spray painted and vulgar but overlooked as the understandable violence of tragic youth. We all thought of ourselves as tragic, once. Now it has deprecated to just plain pathetic. Before my eyes adjust to the darkness-- which is only a shock because I am too tired to resist it-- a spasmodic fear clenches my throat, like the nights in kindergarten when I used to see monsters in my closet, which turned out later to be crumpled socks and misplaced stuffed animals. The monster, here, is the fleeting belief that he is gone, but it deflates into an overstuffed giraffe when I hear his breathing. Heavy. Sharp. Muffled, like he's smothering something inside him that he doesn't want me to hear. He smelled me coming, probably before I even reached the door, he has had time for preparation. For battening down of hatches. I consider it an unfair advantage, but decide I owe him one.

He will make me turn on the lights myself if I want to see him; he is waiting for it and for this reason I hesitate, letting my eyes blend to black. I want to see him the same way he sees me. It is not easy, but I am trying to understand. At first there is nothing, a wall of unvaried darkness, like a quilt pressed too close against the face. Gradually it becomes two-dimensional, then three, until I can recognize shapes and outlines and more individual degrees of black. He is midway between charcoal and ebony, masked, unreadable. We could stare at each other this way for hours and never see beyond the outline of our shapes.

I suspect we have been guilty of that all along. Squinting to read emotions in the dark, growing frustrated then furious when we could not see.

A fumble along the wall, gracelessly, until I find the light switch. Sub-ambient rust orange glow dirties the room: the light bulb is corroding even as it burns. Ugly light, made uglier still by the numerous bare patches on the cinderblock walls and cement floors that magnify the dinginess. I had never noticed how bad the room is until now, because I am used to cracked walls and cold floors. But now I look and think how barren, how desolate. How far from the places we thought we'd be.

The realization absorbs at least two milliseconds of concentration; subsequently I am slow to realize that he is sitting beside a fully loaded black duffel bag. He's wearing his good boots, his better jean jacket. The jacket, the boots, and the half-smoked cigar serve as indicators of his restlessness-- they only appear in conjunction with one another when he's ready to hit the road. Of course he doesn't look at me. That would be requiring too much. Though he doesn't ignore me either, rather directs his concentration very carefully somewhere I am not. Recognition by avoidance, as one would avoid a wound.

He expects me to speak. Mine was the last word; reason dictates it must be the first. I am not sure what it should be, but the decision needs to be made quickly. Silence is a killer. Like the sound of dust gathering on violin strings, of cigar ash flaking to the floor, it denotes a paralysis. An impotency of communication both regrettable and shameful.

In the end, I improvise, straight off the top of my head, a shot in the dark because his face still seems covered in the charcoal mask.

"I didn't mean it."

The words bounce off the empty spaces in the room, their echoes thinner, more tremulous than I intended. Uniform calm must prevail at all costs; I cannot afford another shattering.

"I know, baby." He shifts his cigar to the other side of his mouth, his voice not so much angry as vacant, like the room. "I know."

"But you're leaving anyway?"

"I told you. I'm not going anywhere until you give me permission to go." A flick of sardonic smile. "Shouldn't be too hard to dismiss someone you don't care about."

I flinch, he sees it because his eyes flick toward me for seconds. Instinct. He is afraid I am going to lapse into some act of melodrama, such as tears or fainting. The fainting, at least, would be an advantage. A momentary, willful bypass of time. I would not have to live the next few moments, I could black them out then wake up when everything was right again. There is no doubt in my mind I could muddle through this if I was unconscious. I am so much more eloquent when I am in oblivion.

"You don't live by my permission." I tell him. "I don't blame you for walking. Go right ahead. But do you want to at least give it a talk, first? Last words?"

"I think we've pretty much covered everything that needs to be said."

He still hasn't looked at me. A growing concern; he's never been able to hold out this long before. I try again.

"Would it help if I said please? And that I'm sorry? That I want you to stay..."

"C'mon, kid." Another sign of trouble. He hasn't called me that for two years. "We've both done each other enough harm. Let's just cut damages and move on."

"Thought you promised not to leave me alone."

"You won't be. Scott's here....he's a good man. He'll take care of you."

"I don't want to be with Scott." A fight to keep my voice level, free of any hint of frustration. "I want to be with you."

"That why you can't stand to let me near you? Or talk? Or touch? Like I'm one of them...."

He throws his cigar to the floor, reduces it to ashes with one calculated stomp. This proves to be the most unsettling development yet: Logan never wastes cigars, not unless he is seriously disturbed with the kind of anger that goes past graffiti language and fireworks, the kind that shuts him down one section at a time until it's like talking to stone. His hand moves toward the duffel bag. Our conversation has reached crisis, broken off into a cliff twenty yards in front of my feet. I can try to play it safe and slide off the edge anyway or I can jump and hope for a bungee cord. An intervention.

This time I don't think about it. I close my eyes, I jump.

"I came back hoping to explain that. All of it."

This draws his full stare, a measured gaze that can't quite hide the red swollen circles around his eyes, or the flickers of hope in his pupils.

"Marie, you don't have to do this unless you're ready. If it hurts this much, then we'll just give it time. I'll come back in six months, a year--"

"If it hurts," I cut him off, gently, trying to smile, trying to be the brave one, "then it will heal."

His hand moves away from the duffel bag.

A deep breath, footsteps across the tile, settling myself carefully at the foot of the bed, a good three feet away from him. Room to think, room to breathe, for both of us. I'd use a chair, but there aren't any and the floor's too cold to sit on this time of year.

"So, how do you want to do this?" he says.

He says it like we're going to fight hand to hand, or kiss, or execute some other such complicated maneuver. Too casual. Not casual enough. We can't even get our deceptions right, tonight, the little lies usually involved in normal conversation. Only this isn't going to be a normal conversation and we both know it.

The Phoenix Compound
December 10

"No apologies. Apologies are cliched." I say. "We both have enough of them to last all night without really getting anywhere."

"What do you have in mind?"

"I want to remember it all. Not just the bad things, the good things too. We'll trade them off. One bad memory, and then one good memory. Until we know everything we want to know."

"Fine. Which one do you want to start with?"

"You pick."

A gesture of trust, of apology, exchanged with a shift of eyes, a twist of voice. I offer, he accepts.

"The best day was when I came back from Vancouver last fall, found you playing your violin by the lake."

He's looking at my hands, his eyes twisting through my fingers like he wants to hold them. He does not try, though we both wish he would. We wish but we are too scared to ask. He continues, slowly, unfolding the memory in pieces as a man brings a treasure from a box.

"You wore this little orange sweater; you smelled like oranges too, but maybe I was just imagining that part. It's hard, now, to remember what I really saw and what I imagined. Did you really laugh, did you really tease me and smile? Maybe the details are going, but I get the important things right. I still remember that we said we loved each other. I don't think we ever said it again, but that was enough. I still remember it. The best day."

Why didn't we say it again? Was it because we never felt the need or were we just too scared? After all, they were coming for us, cameras and guns and barbed wire cages. He could die, I could die, everyone could die. For the first time we knew that. Youth reserves the right to be invincible, it goes around dodging bullets, jumping off cliffs, running through traffic, but sooner or later the charms wear off. We became aware, gradually, that invincibility only applied to one of us. And that one wasn't me. He never lived with that very well.

So is that why we never said it again? Because we realized in those days that if we said it, that would mean we had something that could be taken away? Something they could use to hurt us?

I want to ask him these things, but that is not in the rules of the game. The rules are a memory for a memory. Light for light, darkness for darkness. An eye for an eye, but not for vengeance. To enable the other one to see something they could not before.

"The best day was the day we burned candles in the church. Jean's wedding." A muted grin. "You held up admirably even though faced with the loss of your dream girl and the confines of a tuxedo... although I did catch you trying to worm your way out of the tie when they were reciting their vows. But it wasn't the wedding I remember. I remember the painting, St. Francis in prayer, looking human, like a brother I could have, like a father. And you took off my gloves."

I can't help glancing at my hands, at the thick woolen gloves hiding my skin from the cold and from other, less tangible things.

"You weren't afraid. You should have been. But you weren't, not in the way you should have been. It was the first time I had my gloves off since Magneto. The first time you kissed me. I don't know which one of those makes the best day. Both of them, I guess."

He almost smiles. His mouth moves, shakes at the corners of the lips, creases along the sides, then freezes before the expression can complete itself. He has remembered what is coming next.

"Worst days?"

"Yes." I swallow, twice. "Worst days."

"Every day was the worst." His eyes don't follow mine, this time; he stares at his knuckles, rubbing the skin over the blades as if he feels the metal underneath. "But one stands out. The only one that I almost didn't make it through."

He stands to his feet, paces. Hands rubbing harder against his knuckles. Faster. Eyes darting from corner to corner as if he expects the walls to attack him at any given moment. "The day I got back to the farmhouse."

He coughs, clears his throat. I swallow the cotton dryness in my throat, swallow whole the fear.

"It was too late. You know that. You had killed one of them-- I was so proud of you for that-- and the other two didn't last long. I should have made it longer, made them pay for what they did, but I didn't think. I was pretty close to crazy right then. I found everything...the scarf, the mattress, the cloak...everything but you. It was like you had disappeared from existence, that there was nothing left of you but the things I was looking at. I remember thinking that this was going to be the last memory I have of you, the last piece of you I was going to get to touch. And that it was my fault." The pacing stops, abruptly. "That was the worst."

Conflicting spasms in my gut: nausea (slimy and cold like a dead jellyfish floating in my stomach) and the intense desire to walk up behind him and lock my arms around his waist. To give him another good memory.

In the end, the opposites neutralize each other. I do not throw up, but neither do I embrace him. Instead I pull the blanket up over my legs, over my hands, and I prepare to give him the truth. A pretense of courage, synthetic to the extreme. But then, the worst pretense of all is the pretense of not having any. The trick is, I have learned, to choose the truest imitations. The most honest deceptions. Example: I will tell him my worst memory but I will not tell him all of it. He only thinks that he really wants to know.

"Two days before the worst day, I killed a man. That could have been the worst, or the things before could have been the worst. But they weren't as bad as the third day."

I take pride in the fact that I can look at him when I say it. I have no qualms; this is the honest part of the lie. He perches on the edge of the bed, listening intently. The way a doctor listens to a pulse, the way a woman listens to make sure her child is still breathing. He regulates his breath and his pulse by mine, by the words I offer him one at a time, like heartbeats. Slow and steady.

"It was the day I made it to a gas station, some filthy truck stop that flaunted its dirt because it was the only place around for a hundred and twenty miles. Or at least that's what the old man told me, when we pulled into the parking lot. He was a truck driver, I didn't want to trust him but I didn't have a choice. It was either get into the truck or bleed and freeze in the snow on the side of the road. At least in the truck I could bleed next to a heater."

He winces. It is not meant to be something I notice, it is not a jerk or a twitch, but the skin around his eyes tightens just so and I know how much this is hurting him. I know because it's hurting me the same way. This is why I have to lie about the rest of it, because he deserves better. He deserves not to hurt.

"I guess was a bit crazy too, then. Maybe more than a bit. I don't remember getting in the truck, or even getting out, it's just that all of sudden I realized that I was standing under a shower and the water was ice cold and that whenever it ran off my body, it turned red."

My hands are shaking, he does not see this. The blanket keeps the secret.

"I didn't throw up. I'd already done that, too many times, and there was nothing left. But I wished there was. I wanted to push something out of my body so I would feel empty inside and clean again. The water didn't work. I stood under the shower until I couldn't feel my arms and legs, until the bruises hardened and turned purple, but it didn't work."

I can't see him anymore; momentary panic ensues, followed by realization that my eyes are closed. Squeezed tightly shut, like Scott's the day his visor broke. Voluntary blindness, meant to keep back destructive forces such as tears and fear. These things can kill as certainly as red lasers. But I am afraid that these efforts are betrayed be the shaking. It is not just my hands anymore. It is not a secret. I do not open my eyes, this is the lie (not by the addition of words, only the omission.) and I don't want to see him when I say it.

"And then I left, with the old man. He didn't ask and I didn't tell. The heater in the truck broke five miles down the road, and my hair froze because it had been wet, and my fingers turned blue, and three days later I was coughing blood. But that wasn't the worst. The shower was the worst. The inability to be clean."

There, I said it. He knows but does not know, he has the facts but not the last, cruel detail. I have not told him that in between the shower and the broken heater, I saw him in the parking lot and walked away.

Only there is one thing I have not counted on. He does not accept the story; he is not satisfied to hear the ugliness, but suspects the truth and acts on it too swiftly. I need time for a denial, time for a plausible excuse. No such allowances are made. His voice, too calm, too thin.

"The third day."

"Yes."

Choke the word out, Marie. He's onto you and you know it.

"I was at a gas station that day. The cashier said he had never heard of you."

I open my eyes. I want to see it coming. Whatever it will be, anger, rage, hate. It won't take him long to fit the final pieces together. "Why would he lie?"

"I paid him...in case the others followed me..."

"Why didn't you leave a message for me?"

"I didn't think. Shock, I told you."

I say, too quickly. That sounded like a planned response. He'll pick up on that, ask me one final question and I won't be able to lie to him again. I don't have it in me.

"The man who gave me a ride said that he saw an old trucker pull out of the parking lot after I went inside. Said he had a passenger, but I told him it couldn't have been you. Because I called your name and if it was you, then you would have answered."

His eyes, black like the metal of a gun, lock into place against mine. "You would have answered, wouldn't you, Marie? You didn't because you weren't there. You weren't."

He waits for the reassurance, begs for it. "Tell me."

I don't tell him; I can't say it out loud. I can't form the words, not at first. I can only shake my head. Sometimes that is all it takes. Sometimes it is too much. "I can't."

A whisper, drowning in itself, in the rain that is again falling on my face even though we are inside and I know perfectly well that there are no clouds in sight. "I can't."

There is no explosion, rather the aftermath of an explosion. broken buildings and shattered windows and ruins. It is all in his face. "Why?"

Not a word, a growl. Hoarse, charred. Another aftermath. He's unseen again, but this time it's because the top of the world is running down into the bottom of the world and it's all smeared together. The rain again, the rain that is not rain. I turn my face from him, turn it to the wall because there is no place else to hide in this barren little room.

I make my confession to the cement, not to him. At this point it's easier to talk to stone. I've broken the rules of the game; I have lied, but I'm about to do something worse than that.

I'm telling him everything.

"Afraid."

Individual words are all I can manage now; I'm working up to groups and possibly sentences. Give me a moment.

"Of me?"

I can't answer him as fast as he would like. My teeth are banging against one another, it's hard to talk around the edges. "Of what you'd see when you looked at me."

"I'd have seen you. What else is there to see?"

His voice is moving closer, why? It should be drawing back from me, heading for the door. I should be listening to silence, but he's talking and not at all in the way I was prepared for. Screaming I can handle. Profanities, accusations, righteous indignation. All this I am ready to accept. But not this. Not the sadness and the disbelief, the empathy.

A touch on my shoulder; I am undone. He does not know it yet, but I am. I am unraveling, spinning out and out and out, but it's only now beginning to show in my voice. Threads of words fraying, snapping, curling into knots and snarls.

"Blood. Bruises. Filth. That's all there was left to me, all there is now. I was afraid you would see that, see their mark on me, you would find out that I was no better than any other whore on the street. Not your woman, anymore, but their slut."

"No, Marie. No." His fingers dig into my shoulder bones, his arm slides around me to stop the shaking, only he can't. He can't stop this, it's too late. "Nothing of you belongs to them."

"It would have been better if I had died that night. At least then you would have thought of me as innocent."

His hands slide down my arms to cover my fingers. "Baby, you were never anything but that to me. Nothing can change it. No one can take it away."

God, I want to believe him. I want to believe him but I know he's just trying to do the right thing. He's just trying to get me to stop trembling, trying to stop the rain from falling from my eyes before I flood us both. I love him for it, but it's not enough to make me accept what he's saying as true. It can't be true. I know what I am, and it's not what he's saying.

This is not what I tell him.

"Of course you will tell me this." I touch his wrists, slide my fingers over his knuckles. I turn my face to his, until we are close enough to feel the other's breath across the cheekbones.

"That's how it is with you. You'll say anything you have to. You'll do anything."

A brush of fingertips across his face. "If I were to put my life in your hands, you'd drop it." I tell him. "You know that, don't you? You'd drop it because you'd try to hold on too tight."

"Would I?"

A minimal whisper, barely enough to push the words into my ears. There is something dangerous in his eyes but I do not realize this until it is too late. "Let's find out."

This is the explosion that did not come before: he pulls my mouth to his, his bare hands on either side of my face, the spasm takes us both, blindness. Blind with my eyes, but seeing straight through his. The things I see are burning, everything exploding at the same moment-- faces, images, memories-- like fireworks out of control, like Hiroshima from ground zero. Only there is no sound. His mind burns silently, as in a photograph. Yellow, orange, red, white. No one screams, or maybe they do because I think I hear the sound on the very edges of consciousness. I think it is my voice, but it vanishes beneath a second voice, his voice.

(I said I would do whatever it took.
What's happening to you? What's wrong?
Don't you know?
I'm afraid.
So am I, baby. So am I.
Stop it. Save something for yourself. You don't heal anymore.
Do you believe me now?
Yes, but stop. Enough.)

Dual oblivion. He is unconscious because he is empty and I am unconscious because I am full and bursting at the seams. This time I do not see fire behind my eyes.

I see snow.

---

Burning Snow: Marie and Logan

You do not remember the past as clearly as you once did; it is impossible when his colors dominate the memory. His vision of the universe, his revelation-- adamantium silver sky, burnished, glowing to melting point and this is what you call snow. It is not the color of snow, the expected angelic white. It is sienna, washed out tan glowing faintly golden at the edges. Faded, neutral, bland. The dead soldier's blood is the color of teak, thick and dark. It stagnates in pools on the ground, melting the snow; it covers his claws, turning to steam with the heat.

He does nothing to wipe away the stain. He sniffs the body, the air, the ground, growling absent-mindedly. If there is one, he mutters, there is ten. A trap. Someone has betrayed you and now you all will be hunted down and they will burn numbers into your shoulders or necks or wrists.

You tremble; you could never stand burnt flesh. He gave you this weakness when he first poured his mind around yours, and this is how you know he is afraid as well. Even if he does not shake, there are other signs. He keeps his body in front of you, a human shield, tight and close as if something will try to crawl through the space of inches. He doesn't allow the claws to retract. He tells you it will be fine, he says it too many times.

(Are there more?
Yeah, baby, but you don't have to worry. They won't find us. It'll be fine.
How can you say that? How can you know?
Just trust me. And keep your head down, behind me. )

You don't want to stay behind, you want to stand beside him. To meet whatever else is coming at the same moment he does, even if it is fire. Even if it means you will burn.

The brothers argue with him, static phrases of fear and panic. Sometimes he answers them, and sometimes he tells them to shut up. You don't listen to specifics. You lean your head against his backbone and listen to the distant echo of his heartbeat.

It is now you remember that this is Christmas morning.

Perhaps this is his gift to you, the heartbeat. A reminder of constancy, of security, of the forward motion of time and life. In a number of these beats, this will all be over one way or another. You envision two scenarios: escape and capture. Good and bad.

You do not realize that they will be turn out to be the same, different only in form and technicality.

(Marie, we have a plan.)

His voice opens your eyes, you are no longer resting on his back but held before him, his hands framing your face. His woolen gloves scratch your skin: a mark of desperate times; he always buys the softest materials he can afford. At first it was leather, then cotton, then polyester, and now wool, with patches over the knuckles and a hole in one wrist.

(We can't outrun them or outfight them. So what's the plan?)

His hesitation takes too long because the oldest brother interrupts the silence.

(Just tell her, Wolverine.)

Your hands tighten on his jacket.

(Tell me what?
Our only chance is if one of us goes to draw their attention and lead them away. The others will wait here for two hours then head back to the farmhouse. It'll be safe to use the main road....they'll expect you to be hiding in the forest...
It doesn't have to be you.
Marie--
I know you're going to say it. You're going to tell me it has to be you, but it doesn't. Let one of them go get themselves killed. You stay with me. You gave me your word.
It has to be me. I'm the only one who can survive it.
Then let me go with you.
No. Absolutely not.
I'm not afraid. As long as we're together it doesn't matter...it doesn't...
It matters to me. You go with them and wait for me at the house. I'll be back by dawn.
I don't think so. I don't think you're coming back.
Of course am I. Don't you trust me?
I do, but you don't understand. You can't leave me with them.
I'll only be gone long enough to do the job. Promise me you'll go back and wait for me.
I can't.
Promise. I've never asked you to do anything for me, but I need this. I need your word and I need it now because we're losing time. I have to find them before they find this place. You have to promise me so I can know you'll be safe.
I do.
Say it out loud.
I promise. But I won't be safe. You know that.)

He will not believe it. He needs a reason, and this is the only one he can find.

You look at him through your eyes and see the weariness at the temples, the sadness and resignation in the corners of the eyes and mouth. You don't know what it means, then; only an instinctive fear and the urge to pull him closer before he slips away. The picture flips; inverts until you are looking at him through his eyes. He views himself in the same color as the background of snow. Unremarkable. Invisible. But you are white, burning like the sky, like metal under heat. You know you are all he sees.


(Baby, I have to go. Logan--)

He kisses you, too hard, too fast, but you understand there is no time. Like the wool gloves on your face, it is a desperation. You watch him run from you, you watch it through your mind and his and this is the first time you don't hate him for it. This time you know he is going to die, as you are, only he dies harder. Death can be many things, not all of them final. He will drag his out, without mercy because he wants you both to survive. You more than him.

This is unfair; he doesn't consider the fact that you feel the same way, reversed. You'd rather see him survive any day. You'd rather be the one taking the pain because he's had more of it than you. You want to even the score. He doesn't realize that, or he does and that's why he moves so fast. He doesn't let you change your mind.

In a better world, you would measure your relationship in flowers, in chocolate kisses, in I Love Yous. You would fight over which one got to make dinner for the other.

In this world, you fight over which one of you gets to die. You measure love in colors: sienna, white, red. Not rose red or Valentine's red, but in the color of blood. This is also unfair, but you have made a promise and there is nothing you can do. You can't even say I love you, or goodbye. That constitutes public admission that you will never see each other again.

You watch him disappear into the burning snow until his figure is melted down, disfigured, swallowed up. It does not swallow you, it buries you. You will become as sand, as snow. Written on, rewritten, then smoothed over. Only he will not be the author. It will be a stranger's penmanship, bold and ugly and profane.

But this has not happened, not at this moment. For now both of you decide, inside your minds, at the same second, that this is the worst it can get. When you are in love you earn the right to be naive; it is your only defense.

This is the last day either of you experience such a luxury.

The Phoenix Compound
December 12

I always dream when I'm dead, and this time I watch a young woman set fire to herself: a young, slender woman dressed in layers upon layers of the gauzy kind of robe that takes well to kerosene and matches. I never saw her face, there was a veil of thin lace just transparent enough to blur her features into a puddle of anonymity. I should have recognized some facet of her-- the long white gloves, the streaks of hair bleached to the same shade-- but I could not match these familiarities to a name. Looking at her was like the memory of an old love affair, the brief and passionate kind that leaves you with vivid impressions of individual sunrises and specific shadows of firelight on hands although you can't remember the concrete things: dates, names, addresses. For this reason I can never go back.

Was this why she wanted to immolate, I asked myself. Because she knew I had forgotten or was it so that I would never forget? I was being selfish of course. I naturally assumed the bonfire she was making of herself was because of me. Or that it was only because of me.

(Don't do it,)

I begged her.

(Don't burn your life up.)

(Someone has to do it,) A casual shrug of her shoulders.

(Might as well be me.
Do what?
Give them a witness.
Of what?
Us.)

She held out the match booklet to me, as a duty I was expected to take.

(Go ahead, do it. Strike the match. We have to show them we mean it.
I'm not going to burn you.)

She shook her head and when she spoke it was with the kind of sad disappointment that a mother uses with a child who has said something thoughtless that she knows he didn't mean. She knows he didn't mean it because he didn't understand what he was saying.

(See, that's why you're going to lose me someday.
Did I ever have you?
If you're afraid to burn me up then you're going to make me do it myself.
What's the point? What will it prove?
If you can feel that staying human is worthwhile, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
But you don't have to set fire to yourself to be human.
Sometimes you do.)

A match flared, white and orange and blue. Why did I think she was smiling underneath the veil?

(Think of it like a wedding, love. Think of it as 'til death do us part.)

And she burst into flames.

I did not wake screaming but this was only because I did not know how to open my eyes. Something holds them shut, dark black staples pressed into my eyelids and along the creases of my brain, preventing me from regaining consciousness. I try to push away the darkness; a sound of something ripping at the seams, a jagged-edged pain pushes me back in turn. For now, it pushes harder.

Yet something from the outside penetrates the staples and the walls. At first it is only static, white noise. Three notes played on a rusty violin. Garbled words, inside my head, a voice that doesn't belong to the person I kissed. But I can't remember who else it could be...who else...not the bonfire girl, she is gone.

/.....God help me, Logan...wake up...heal.../

Hands on my body, shaking me: the violence is out of place with the inherent softness of the fingertips. There are no gloves. Another proof that this is not the right person. I am certain of it now. And since it isn't, why bother to answer? Why push the staples, tear the skin?

/Can you...hear...me.../

The violin again. Flash memories of fall and orange coffee sweaters and a different pair of hands, also without gloves. A momentary wonder at the similarities between hands and gloves-- for example, could you exchange one pair for another if you grow tired of them? Is this what Marie has done? Folded up her regular hands, tucked them under her pillow, and tugged on a new pair for the occasion? One that will let me touch her?

I would entertain the concept but the strange hands and the strange voice refuse to leave me in peace. It is clearer, this time, desperate, close to panic.

/Logan, I have to do something now. It's not right because you're still unconscious and you can't give me permission, but I have no choice. You'll understand when it's over./

A remembrance of a name-- I know who's talking to me. Jeannie. What's she going to do to me? I don't like the way she's promising me I'll understand, she's saying it the way they tell you things you don't really want to know at all.

/You have to know what happened to her. If you know, then you'll have a reason to wake up. And you have to wake up, you have to, they need you...you'll understand./

The hands move to either side of my forehead.

A jolt of unrestrained psychic energy shoves my brain from neutral into overdrive, every synapse and fiber standing on end all at once, twisting my body into a spasm. The soft violent fingers hold me in place; no small feat for something as small as they pretend to be. There is a sudden picture in my mind, like I am looking at a woman from her reflection in the mirror--only the mirror's cracked. I see reddish brown hair, falling over a face streaked with more red, only it's sticking to the skin, like glue. I recognize the hair.

/Now I'm going to show you all of it./

The next jolt is not a stabbing but a pouring out, like a vat of hot lead overturned and dumped into every fissure of my brain, every crease. Molten images, words, feelings; fear blends with fascination and I wonder if this is what Marie felt last night, after I kissed her? Drowned, engulfed, yet breathing.

The liquid cools quickly, solidifying into hard metal pictures, shiny and glistening and terrifying.

/Marie standing at a door, begging Scott for help. Logan's done something beautiful, she says, but very stupid and I've killed him. I've killed him./

/Jeannie working on my body, the one that isn't moving and isn't even breathing, while Scott sits between Marie and the bathroom door to make sure she stays clear of the razor blades. Metal won't kill her, and he knows it, but he also knows how creative she gets when she's desperate. She caught him by surprise the first time, and when the cuts healed that's how they knew what I'd done./

This surprises me. She told me she didn't care, and even though I never believed it, I had no idea she would go to that length trying to follow me into the places she couldn't go. I made sure she couldn't.

/The door breaks down and there are six of them, big men, men that hate Scott and Jeannie and Marie: I don't have to smell the hate, it's plastered all over their faces like black paint. We're here to take Bondmaid Marie into custody on charges of infidelity and attempt to murder her mate. Scott mumbles something along the lines of over dead bodies (I'm not sure whose) and shoves her back against the walls so they can't take her from behind. I owe him for this one, I do./

/Jeannie steps in front of them, she tries to tell them what happened and they knock her down. Fist to the left side of her face, and she's falling, and her forehead smacks against the concrete when she hits the floor. The baby is screaming. I think that's the only kind of scream that's worse than Marie's because it sounds like the little guy is dying or in pain and maybe he is. Maybe he's like his mother, maybe he feels it inside him and doesn't know what it is. What would that feel like, that sort of pain without a name?/

I can't close my eyes when they're already shut. I have to watch; and I realize that this is why Jeannie was apologizing. Not because she had to invade my mind but because of the things I had to see once she got inside.

/Scott grabs the closest thing-- a lamp beside the bed-- and smashes it against the skull of the one who hit his wife. He uses the jagged end to fight like a street kid, like the street kid he must have been once because it all comes out as instinct. Talks ugly and dirty but they deserve it. He's doing a good job but there are six of them, big men, and he can't handle all of them at one time. After he goes down the second time, Marie animates. Explodes. I taught her those moves. Brave, stupid kid./

/He's down now, and he's not moving because there's a boot pinning his head to the pavement and handcuffs on his wrist. They've got her too, arms yanked behind the back. Head jerked to the side by the hair, held in place so she can see what they're doing to him. They think it's funny, because she's supposed to be his lover. They think she'll beg them to stop. Shows how much they know about my girl. She doesn't beg./

/Boot to the stomach, to the groin, twice, to the small of the back. They aren't satisfied; he isn't responding. Two of them are down and all of them are bleeding and they feel he owes them some kind of concession of defeat. Jeannie's unconscious, small mercy, so they can't take it out on her. But Marie's still alive and kicking...they throw her down in front of him and he's snarling that they aren't men, that if they were they'd take it out on him and not on a mere girl.../

I have to open my eyes; I don't care if the staples rip out and if I go blind because of it, I can't see this anymore. I try to push my way to the outside but Jeannie blocks me. Delicate brutality, the kind that hurts the worst.

Let me out, Jeannie. I've seen enough. I'll wake up for you. Just let me go...

/Almost over, Logan. If I can see it again, so can you./

No, please...

Another surge of energy, stronger than before, overrides my protest.

/She spits at them when the kick catches her in the gut, flashes them a mocking smile around the gasp for breath; because of this they kick her again, this time in the back. Flat along the spine./

/They throw her down on the bed to tie her hands behind her back. Whore, they say, into her ear. Slut. Infidel. She presses her lips together, two thin white slits. /

Why aren't I moving? Why aren't I sliding metal up their spines, pulling out the nerves? I remember. Because I'm dead again. I couldn't even protect myself, much less stop them as she is hauled off the bed, out the door. Scott is dragged after her, then the two unconscious freaks; then there is nothing left in the room. Nothing but Jeannie and the baby and me--she is the one bleeding and the baby is the one screaming and I am the one sprawled out on the floor dreaming of girls who become bonfires.

The last image fades; the staples sealing me in oblivion dissolve. Consciousness descends as a load of gravel dumped directly on my head, left to rattle inside my skull, raising dust and confusion. I am thrust through the cracks of reality one piece at a time: mismatched, dismembered. A hand, a foot, a jawbone, an elbow, a fragment of skull. Whoever's putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again obviously neglected to look at the diagram.

Progress is slow, an effort akin to tuning an old radio. At first I see nothing but a white glare; hear nothing but the overwhelming roar of my blood inside my veins and my lungs inflating and collapsing in counter-rhythm. Stench of blood and fear so strong it's nauseating. Jeannie's brought me back at high frequency, have to tone it down before I can see or hear or find answers for this.

I close my eyes then open them again, blinking to test the connections. Images sharpen, colors appear, seeping through the white like watercolor stains. Left eye, check. Right eye, check. So much for preliminaries. I turn my head-- gritting my teeth when the three-ton gravel headache slides to the forefront of my skull-- to find out reasons for the blood-smell.

Even after what she showed me, I'm not ready to see the cut down the middle of her forehead, slanting from her hairline to her left eyebrow, fat, ugly, mocking. Bruises down her left jawbone. Not fresh; the wound is stitched shut and the bruises have begun to turn yellow. This disturbs. Disturbance leads to fear: if Jeannie's this bad, what will Marie look like?

/Like she always has./

My own voice, this time, working through the emotion to the logic.

/I'm inside her, right? Pushing out the hurt./

Momentary reassurance, then a reverse.

/But what happens when I fade?/

Can't think that. Can't panic just yet. It wouldn't do to go running out to harvest major organs until I know who I'm gonna hunt down after and why they're gonna to be slated for a donation.

My mind forms the questions, but my voice is stubborn, thick and raspy from the gravel in my head, like I haven't used it for several days. Maybe I haven't. Could I have been out that long?

"Two days."

She answers for me; she'd be able to do that. How much of her is left inside me?

"You've been out two days. If Marie hadn't told me about your implant, it'd have been longer."

"You...took it....out?"

I intend to growl but my lungs hitch and it turns into a cough.

"Yes. I know, she told me it wasn't what you wanted. But you had to wake up, now...I didn't have a week to wait for you to come out of the coma at your leisure."

She leans back on the bed, her face pale and drained from the effort of sharing memory; hands pull the bundle of blankets in her lap closer to her chest. The bundle smells of formula and talcum powder: her child.

"It isn't your fault," Jeannie says, but it's not true because she can't look at me. Her eyes lock steadfastly on the cracks in the plaster.

"You're new here, you couldn't have possibly known the rules. We've been here for seven months and we don't even know them all. So it's not your...fault..."

She's rocking back and forth, little, sharp movements, but I don't even think she knows she's moving. The veins in her hands bulge midnight blue under the pale skin.

"Let me get this straight-- she went to you to save my life so they freakin' beat her and arrested her for it. What freakin' logic does that follow?"

"She was charged with infidelity and for willful attempt to harm her bondmate. Scott was charged with infidelity and attempting to interfere with her arrest."

"How did they even know I was down?"

Talking too fast but I can't slow down. Don't have time. These people are fanatics, I knew it right when I walked through the gates. I also know what fanatics do when their delusions of sanctity are interrupted.

"Someone must have seen her come to us for help. They called in possible violation of her bond. No logic...just an excuse for revenge. Scott killed a man not long ago, the High Elder's son. Should have seen this coming....should have..."

She stops, the words fractured at their joints like broken fingers. Something in me aches like the broken fingers are mine.

I reach for her hand, it is feverish, trembling. The gravel inside my mind has been replaced by Hiroshima: mushroom cloud hate, white fire anger, charcoal shadows of fear burned into place, but I do not show this to her. There is control in my voice because it is all I can control at this point. Everything else has spun away.

"Then what did they do with them?"

Of course I ask, even though it I am not sure if I want to know. She did not show me this part inside my head. Did she think it unnecessary or was she trying to spare me the visuals?

"There was a trial, but it wasn't a trial...witch hunt. With all the trimmings...the things they did...the questions they asked..."

An even greater restraint is required; my words turn metallic, spun very carefully out of cold, unemotional wire.

"Things." I echo.

"Questions." "About their...relationship...and their lust...and their plan to kill you....All lies, all of it. They took his visor to humiliate him. He had to face them blind and she had to wear the veil and when they didn't say the right thing..."

Again her voice fades, in and out like a distant satellite signal, and the secondary fear that she's unraveling on me begins to grow in urgency. She pulls her hand from mine and begins to finger the hem of her dress.

"They sentenced them to a community purge that's what they call the beating, like it's meant to cleanse all of us. Like it's something just. That happens tomorrow. But that isn't the worst part."

"It gets worse?"

"When they wouldn't confess, the council decided to get evidence of the infidelity. To force a confession. They thought they could find it on Marie."

No. Absolutely not, she's not going to tell me that they--

"There was a medical exam," she says, baldly. "For proof."

This is the part where the room turns white again. Even when color and shape return, my vision is blurred once more, all the wires knocked loose, crossed in the wrong places. Metal slices through skin, though I don't even notice that the claws are out until I see Jeannie flinch.

Marie, baby, they're going to hurt for this. Just you hold on.

The Phoenix Compound
December 12

I stand, ignoring the protest of various muscles, pacing the floor in front of the bed, trying to think of words. A naive stab at hope.

"You examined her?"

She shakes her head, speaking very low.

"No. They wouldn't let me. They threatened to take the baby...I had to let them do what they wanted. They made me leave and that was when I came back and cut out your implant. So you could stop them. But it was too late."

"I'm taking it real nice and slow when I kill them."

"You can't."

"What?"

"If we interfere, we'll be banished. Scott, me, the baby. We won't have anywhere to live..."

"This ain't living, Jeannie. This is as bad as anything they could do on the outside. Worse, because they're our own kind."

"If we just let it ride out...they won't kill them. They need her womb..."

"Need her what?"

Choke on the words, on the implications, on the resignation I see in her face that isn't fair, isn't fair at all. Not to Marie, not to her, not even to Scooter.

"Are you listening to yourself? These freaks aren't our brothers any more than Magneto and his crew. In fact, I'd prefer Magneto. And have you looked at this place?"

My hand sweeps the room, the cracked walls, the windows that look out onto the barbed wire.

"What makes it any different from the camps?"

She glares at me, half-wounded, half-angry, her chin jutting out as she holds the bundle in her arms toward me.

"My son. They aren't hurting my son."

"Not yet."

She flinches again but does not crumble; Jeannie has always been stubborn when it comes to these things. Justifiable sacrifices, she called them. She and Scooter threw that term around a lot, in the early days of the war. It always meant our sacrifices, our attempts at justification, not those of the other side. They thought they were being noble, now I realize they were just scared. Like we all were.

"Please, Logan. Promise me you won't interfere. It looks worse than it really is. I've survived the worst part of it, Scott's survived it, we can beat the system. At least we're not hunted here. At least we have small moments of peace."

"Small moments of peace. For that you're willing to stand and watch while they beat your husband? To do nothing?"

"Take a glance at my forehead...does it look like I stood and watched anything?"

Her voice sharpens, and it is the most alive I have seen her tonight. I may have pushed too far; she would let me call her a cheap whore before she let me doubt her loyalty to her husband.

"There are ways of doing this without a fight. You are Rogue's bondmate. If you talk to them, they have to listen."

"If they want to get back at Scott so much, they aren't exactly going to be open to reason, are they?"

Not that these are the most logical people to begin with.

"They can't hurt her, if that's what you're afraid of. And I know it is. I feel it."

Afraid? Haha. Not me, the Wolverine, the Man of Steel. I'm not even mildly concerned. I bypassed concern and went straight for the gut-wrenching terror part. Never was much on middle ground.

"You gave her healing," she says. "She'll walk away without even a bruise."

"Two days, Jeannie. She ain't going to be protected from anything. And neither is Scott."

Her eyes glaze over in that defiance again. She's on her feet, face to face with me, squaring off.

"Scott knows that we all have to make sacrifices." The words rapid fire, mechanical like she's trying to convince herself as well as me. "He did when I was taken. He allowed it so that we could stay safe. Now I'll do the same for him."

"So that's what this is about." I growl. "You want him to have scars to match yours? He let you down so now you think you'll even the score no matter who else gets hurt--"

"Stop--"

"No, Jeannie, you stop. Stop calling it noble things and come out with what it really is-- revenge? Payback? Or are you just afraid to do anything because it might actually cost you something--"

"You don't know--"

"Yes, I do. You had it bad, but so did Marie and if it was you and me in a cell she wouldn't cower behind justifiable sacrifice--"

"I said stop!"

A chair hurtles across the room to smash into the far wall, caving in the plaster.

I've never seen her lose control like this before. Never seen it this strong. The cabinet doors open, shut, open, shut, the glass in the windows rattles. Every bone in her body is rigid, sharp, waiting to snap. I begin to wonder what the procedure is for calming down a telekinetic on the rampage; maybe I should just duck and hope she doesn't aim...

But then the baby begins to wail. Thin, pale cries of discomfort and fear, as if he can sense his mother's anger. This deflates her; she sinks back onto the bed, but misses the edge and ends up on the floor. A hard bump, her teeth rattle together when she hits the pavement. She ignores it, hugging the bundle to her chest, rocking him, whispering things that mothers whisper to crying children.

(Hush little baby, don't say a word...Momma's gonna buy you a mockingbird....a mockingbird....Momma's gonna buy you the whole flock....don't say a word...)

I am not a father; crying babies create definite flight instincts in me, but I resist them. I should do the heroic thing and kneel beside her, hold the baby with one arm and wrap the other around her and tell her that I didn't mean it. That I am angry, like she is, and scared, like she is, only worse because she has the excuse of trying everything she could. I, on the other hand, have been flat on my back and unable to defend so much as a flea.

But as Scooter's is so fond of pointing out, I'm not a hero. Whatever I say will come out wrong, whatever I do will be misunderstood. I'm better at breaking things than fixing them; look at the bang up job I've done with Marie. So I stand and watch, hands in my pockets, boots wearing a path into the cement, conscience building the justification that at least I didn't run.

Three minutes, five minutes later-- though it feels more like twenty years-- the bundle stops squirming and squalling and begins to suck intently on his pacifier. Thank heavens for modern science. She looks at him a moment longer, her fingers smoothing his eyelids and the tuft of brown hair in the middle of his head. Then her eyes lift to me, holding none of the expected things. They are softer, tired, asking me to understand.

"I love Scott. If I could save him, I would. But I love my son too, Logan, and he loves his son. He is all we have for a future. No more Xavier, no more fighting for the Cause. Just a little boy. We can't risk losing him on the outside."

She pulls the blanket tighter around the tiny body.

"Do you have any idea what the humans would do with a mutant baby? I've heard the stories. They make me sick."

"And Marie is all I have. All I've ever had. What do you want me to do...stand by and watch?"

"There's no other choice. I know it's hard, but if you want to save her life, you have to let this happen."

"No." One firm shake of my head. "I tried to save her life that way once before and it nearly killed both of us. Don't ask me to do it again."

"If we leave the compound, the Registration Bureau will find us. This place is monitored that way. At the most it'll only be a matter of days."

"I have connections. I did some fighting for a man who can smuggle us out; he owes me."

"And you trust him? You have proof?"

"And you trust these freaks here? You have proof that they won't take your son, or kill your husband?"

"They won't. We have a use. We're safe. It costs us something, but don't all sanctuaries?"

Our eyes meet, lock. I unfold my mind to her in a gesture of trust, she needs to know how much I mean this. I could do this without her-- take Marie my own way, have my fun with the freaks while I'm doing it, and then leave her and her husband behind to face the fallout-- but I won't go to that extreme until I can justify it by the knowledge that I've done everything possible to get them to come with us. I can't just leave them behind. Not her, not her child. Not even Scott.

This is why I don't answer her right away; inspiration was never my forte. Charles was the one who gave the speeches before the missions, who painted it all in red and white and blue and made us believe it. I always saw the Cause in two colors-- gray and grayer-- but when he talked, I saw it through his eyes. And I fought from that viewpoint.

"It's not worth it. Even though you're right, even though your son is beautiful and deserves to be protected and loved and given a chance."

"That's what we've given him. Here."

"Be honest, Jeannie. You think he's going to get it?" I say. "Life on the outside is hard, yes. The risk is always there, it's real, but look at what he'll be missing here. He'll never know what it's like to decide who he wants to be or what he wants to do with his life. He'll never be able to go to sleep without wondering if his mother will be taken from him or if his father will be killed in a fight."

Her face clouds, wrinkles at the corners of the mouth, but she doesn't stop me.

"He'll never have freedom here...that's what he deserves most of all." My gaze drops back to the baby. "Because if he doesn't have it, he won't be alive. Just like we aren't alive, you, me, Scott, Marie. Don't let him become us. Let him become something better."

She holds me in a steady gaze, the expression on her face not so much as twitching. Granite, unreadable, opaque. She kisses her fingertips then slides them across her son's forehead, down the bridge of his nose. Something in her twists, snaps, breaks and reforms into new thoughts before she speaks.

"Let me go home, Logan. Back to my apartment, where it's quiet and where I can drink a cup of coffee and think."

She rubs her temples with her hands; I wonder how much of Scott is up inside her and how much she's hurting with him. Maybe I pushed too hard, too soon.

"Give me two hours." She says. "Two hours and if I'm not back then you can do whatever you need to do. Then I won't try to stop you. But promise me you'll wait."

I nod.

"Say it out loud."

"I promise."

She walks away, the door shuts behind her and I start waiting. Why do we call it killing time? Is it because we all realize that we are helpless against it, impotent and paralyzed, and so we hope that it is a way of revenge? An ant shaking a fist at the sun. I kill time; I hunt down individual seconds and pound them out into minutes, hoping to link them all together to form hours. 3600 seconds flattens out to 120 minutes, which can be squashed together to form two hours.

At the same moment, time seeks to kill me. It slows, it bends, it lasts forever. But I'm used to this. Every day was forever when I wasn't with Marie. In that sense, I've already survived eternity.

I refuse to die by minutes.

---

The door opens; Jeannie walks through smelling of gasoline, of dried sweat, drug store lipstick, and a man who isn't Scott. She's carrying a cheap handbag-- cracked orange vinyl with one strap missing-- but wearing her best dress, or what passes for best in this place: thin blue cotton splattered with pink and white flowers, held in place by two straps tied in a functional knot at the back of her neck. White trash clothes; straight out of a West Virginia trailer park, only she carries herself like it's the tailored Gucci wardrobe her husband used to buy her on a regular basis.

The baby is still on her hip, an accessory to the outfit that is laid on the table beside the purse as if she is tired of wearing him.

"Didn't think they were big on dresses like that around here." I say.

"The rules only apply if you turn them down while you're wearing it."

"Right."

"Whiskey," she says, "and don't pretend you're a boy scout because I know you have it here somewhere."

"No whiskey, but I got Scotch. That do?"

"Get it."

I open the cabinet underneath the sink and grope around in the cobwebs until I find the bottle and one shot glass. As I pour it for her, I notice secondary details of her appearance that my initial surprise kept from notice: the smears of red lipstick at either corner of her mouth, the smudges of oil and engine grease on her left elbow and on the side of her neck.

She picks up on the stare, doesn't look me in the face when she takes the whiskey. Instead she tosses the whole glass down her throat in one curt motion...a defiance though of what I'm not sure. Her face wrinkles.

"Disgusting."

"Sorry if it ain't as classy as you--"

"Not the Scotch, the other taste. Doesn't matter how strong the liquor is I can't get that taste out of my mouth."

"Taste of what?"

"Anyone who isn't Scott."

She slams the glass down on the table, but not so hard that it will crack; she's been taught the graceful ways of expressing rage, and even now they remain in the background like instincts half-forgotten.

"Don't tell him about this. He's still a boy about these things, he'll overreact."

She wipes the corners of her mouth with a restrained frenzy, the lipstick comes off on her fingertips like colored lard. Oily and thin.

"I got us a vehicle," she says. "A way out. And five extra tins of gas for the road. It'll be waiting for us at ten o'clock at the west gate; we have a five-minute window when they change the sentries. We should be able to make it a couple hundred miles or so before we have to stop."

"How?"

"Does it matter?" She rubs the lipstick from her fingers onto the tabletop, ridding herself of the stain.

"You don't owe me any explanations."

This isn't entirely true, I'm itching in my bones to know what turned her around so fast and what she's been doing these past two hours, but I have enough common sense to know that if she wants to tell me, she will. And if she doesn't then it isn't my business to ask.

"Money. I knew he'd do it if I promised him enough money, only I had to be sure. You understand that, right, I had to let him--"

"Jeannie."

I raise a finger to my lips to stop her because she's flirting with incoherence as it is. Don't want to push her this time.

"I told you, you don't have to say it. You did what you had to do."

"I made him think I liked it."

"You saved your husband."

"He wouldn't look at it that way."

"Doesn't matter. He won't know."

"A beat up Jeep and five tins of gasoline." Her smile twists down, the way Marie's does when she remembers the bad times. Broken ice, cracked glass. "I guess I've been sold for less."

Don't know what to tell her on that one.

I take a step closer to her and rub the smudge of grease from her arm with the end of my shirt. She flinches out of my reach: walls of surprise but also of defense. Her skin is tight with gooseflesh and I don't know if it's due to the wind outside or something else. Answers arise to my question in the form of echoes of Marie telling me the story behind all this. (Last month. It was...bad.)

When it's finally over, we will reckon this as our greatest loss. Not the burned-out mansion or the forgotten quest or the men we've killed. We won't regret those things because we have too have been burned down, forgotten, killed. No, the greatest loss for men like me, men like Scott, won't come until we reach out to touch the women we love and respect, only to watch them pull away. Unintentionally, a gut-reaction. The lingering regret will be the shadow in their eyes; the one thing we will never be able to erase totally.

Of course we'll never believe that, we'll never stop trying. Maybe that's the penance.

"Go home, Jeannie."

I want to squeeze her shoulder, to put my arms around her and tell her that she makes the dress beautiful and that Scott would still love her if she ripped out his heart and threw it against the wall. I want to tell her that it's not fair, that it will never be fair, that she's worth more. She and Marie are worth so much more than this.

But it's not allowed. That's something else we've lost-- the ability to comfort through hands and arms and touch. We are contained to the long-distance solace of words, and we know it will never be enough.

"Take a shower." I tell her. "Drink your coffee. Don't worry about this place; don't even think about it anymore. By tomorrow morning it won't exist, for any of us. And don't worry about Scott. I'll bring him to you; in one piece even."

We attempt, and nearly succeed, to share grins.

"Thank you."

She nods, graciously, then picks up the handbag and the baby and walks toward the door. She pauses, at the last moment, turns around and presents me with the gift of a smile.

"It wasn't just for him. For her too. If it matters to you."

She doesn't give me time to thank her, she's gone and the door shuts behind her. It leaves me with the question of whether or not I would have tried to stop her, if I'd known. Protested, argued her out of it, popped the claws for emphasis? No. I would have let her do it because I'd have known she'd win. That's Jeannie for you-- she may be a slow starter but once she's with you, she'll play it to the bone, no holds barred. That's what you have to do in this kind of mission. It's always easier to think of it in that way: another mission to be completed, another justifiable sacrifice.

Of which I have just about had my fill.

---

Double Violin Concerto, Reprise: Logan

You'll never be able to remember it exactly as it happened because it is not a memory. It has never happened to you and it has never happened to her, but you are aware that this is not the point. The point is that you are here and so she must be here, somewhere, and when you find her, both of you will be able to understand what you are seeing. There is nothing so simple as dreams and reality, but rather endless variations on the stages between. Something is being shown to you; you don't know what. The only key is the vague premonition that surrounds you with a sense of ominous invisibility, like the summer air before a thunderstorm hits. You are looking over your shoulder, waiting for the lightning.

The earth moves under you: no, it's reverse. You move, too fast, and it makes it look like the earth is sliding out from under you like liquid. You watch it drain away outside the window: stubble fields where a black rain falls in sharp hard pellets, brown trees that stand alone and naked apart from the gray soot that covers the branches. Somewhere in the world, the sky has burnt through and now it's snowing ashes. You watch the child stand at the edge of the tracks and wave at you as you pass-- a little girl in the dark blue polka dot dress. Soot clings to her hair and some of the polka dots are scorched brown instead of white. She smiles; do all children smile because they are oblivious, or sometimes is it because they realize everything and know that it is all they can do? What would you have done, when you were her age? Of course, that would require remembering childhood. For you it is impossible, so you determine to remember hers instead. You determine to smile back, but she's already gone. Liquid, streaming out from behind you in waves.

All you see is your face in the night window, smeared with beard stubble and the greenish-black glow of the ceiling lights. Two holes have been punched into your forehead and in these holes a dim black light is glowing: you realize they are your eyes but cannot remember how they came to be so empty. The pupils reflect dark shapes of the liquid earth that rush past at breakneck speed.

You realize you are on a train. Alone. No, you are not alone. You know because you hear her violin.

A melody that is clean, sharp on the edges, a song you have only heard twice before. Once by a lake, once in a concert hall. At first, surprise-- she has convinced everyone that she no longer plays but this song is meant to be a secret. No one else will hear it but you. This is not selfishness on her part; she knows that you are the only person who needs to hear the song. Everyone else in the world has moved on to louder, brassier music: machine gun rattles in city streets, grinding machinations of tanks, screams in the night. But she needs something softer, something spun from glass instead of wire, something that will not cut the fingers when played. She needs it just like you do.

(Marie is in the next car.)

Charles anticipates your question, again, even though he is dead. The dead have that sort of habit; insinuating themselves into your subconscious until their voices well up all at once in your dreams. At times the roar can be quite deafening. Charles, at least, has the courtesy to whisper.

You want to close your eyes and find her just by the sound of her magic, but you could not do this. The train is unfamiliar, alien to eyes and ten times more to touch. You have to peel back the eyelids, catalog every door and seat and window frame, keep on alert for the monsters. This is a dream, after all, and they are inevitable. You follow the melody towards the door that connects the cars. The aisle smells of coal, of stained upholstery, of cigarette smoke and stale bread.

A step, another step, and you open the door. She is standing in the middle of the car, feet firmly planted on either side of the aisle to brace against the rocking of the train; face crumpled inward as if she is fighting to remember the notes. She never had to fight before.

The song snaps in two the moment she sees you; her face smoothes out into a flat white sheet creased at the bottom with an odd grin. Like she has been here for some time already and has expected you.

(I knew you'd find me here. If I played my violin long enough, I'd knew you'd come.
What's going on here, kid?
Maybe we're dreaming.
At the same time?
Hey, you were the one who jumped inside my head, don't complain if weirdness ensues.)

Her eyes sparkle; she's teasing you again.

(Wonder what made us choose a train. Not exactly a pleasant memory. If we're going by memories.
Guess this is the only way to get where we're going.
Didn't think travel was safe these days.
It isn't.
Well at least I know we're not getting boring in our old age.)

She walks toward you; takes your hand between hers and leads you to a nearby seat. Your ears ring with the beat of the wheels along the iron track; an oppressive rhythm frantic like an out of control metronome. The seats are stiff and uncomfortable: horsehair bristles irritating the back of the neck, hard plastic armrests that grate against the elbows in all the wrong places. You are too hot and too cold at once, sweating and shivering, burning and freezing.

You turn her hand over, trace finger circles on her bare palm. This time you wore the gloves, because you knew even in a dream that she frees her hands when she plays violin.

(Last time I dreamed, I watched a girl set herself on fire.
Anyone I know?
I think it was you.
I must have had a good reason for it.
You said you had to give them a witness of us.
Then there you have it. Justifiable sacrifice.
I never believed in that.)

Never when it came down to her. Your fingers wander from her hand up to her face, the curls of hair framing the skin, falling down over the eyes.

(Neither did I.) She admits. (Some things you can never justify; you're not even supposed to try. Like what happened to us.
You mean what happened after I left you?
No, I mean what happened after I stopped wanting you to come back. And after you stopped wanting to live.)

You are no longer satisfied with the communication of fingers; you lean forward and plant a kiss on the side of her forehead, through her hair. Then another, then another. Morse code-- does it spell out I Love You or SOS?

(In the dream you told me sometimes you had to set fire to yourself to stay human.
I was right. Something has to be given up, something has to be consumed.
What if they're waiting for us at the station? What if they catch us again the minute we arrive?
Then we'll be caught.
Do you want to jump the train?
Not particularly.
I'd hold onto you; you wouldn't break bones.
That's not the point. It's our stop; if we don't show up then they'll just find someone else. And no one else deserves it.
Doesn't mean that you do.
No, it doesn't. But neither do you and we might as well find out together.
Maybe they won't be there. Maybe we'll be somewhere that they can never go.
I don't care where we end up as long as we end up in the same place.
Good, because I don't plan on leaving again.
They could make you leave.
They could try. Maybe they'd succeed, for a while, but no one can keep me locked up forever. Not when I know you're out there.
Why me?
Because you're the only thing in me that's alive.)

She leans against your, her head on your shoulder, your hands on her face, covering her eyes. She doesn't have to see whatever's coming; you'll see it for the both of you.

(Does any of this count if this is a dream?
Why should it matter?
Because I want to remember it when I wake up, and I want to know it was real.
You'll remember it.
How do you know?
I'm inside your head and I won't let you forget. I'll take care of you.
Promise?
I promise.)

And you hold her by the window and the earth pours itself out around you and you are both rushing toward the end of your journey, only you don't know what it is. It is vapor, the future is, a shimmering iridescent vision that changes shape every time you think you've got it figured out. Only you're not so concerned with prediction and prophecy. Or even with the more absolute things, like life and death and escape and capture.

You are with her.

She's right; you don't have to justify your sacrifices. You have her and she is more than justification or hope. When you are close enough to touch her and she is close enough to smile back, you both transcend hope. You are all that is left when it is gone; you are the light that glimmers from the void.

The Phoenix Compound
December 12

This is what he sees when he comes for me--

Puddles of dirty light in the corners of the room, thick orange like stale vomit: one light bulb, just enough to reveal the darkness without challenging it.

A man in a torn shirt that used to be white but now is not: dead, unconscious, asleep, is there a difference? The red crystal over his eyes matches the wetness on his skin and face. He smells of broken bones-- a thin sharp burn, like gunpowder, or hot metal shavings.

A girl crouched in front of the man's body, her hands spread out before her: two loaded guns, no, an entire arsenal of naked palms and wrists and fingers. A last line of defense. The hands are shaking but this is partly a deception; she has been taught it is best to kill while trembling-- no one sees it coming until it's done.

This is what he hears--

Fragmented words, smashed, broken, too rushed to constitute a proper threat. A growl, low and dark like the rumble of ice about to crack or a bridge about to break, either way a warning of impending destruction. It is not her sound; it was given her through someone else's instincts. His, he would like to think, but there could have been others he doesn't know about yet. Only she can't carry the sound right. There is a vulnerability, a desperation: she speaks this way because she won't scream even though he smells the urge on her. Or has he confused that with her blood? In the confusion it's hard to tell.

"You try to hurt him again, I'll kill you."

"Marie."

"Oh, God, they got you too?"

"No, baby. I'm here to take you home."

"Where's that?"

"Somewhere that ain't here."

"How will we know when we find it?"

"Easy. It'll be any place we're together."

"I didn't believe them."

"About what?"

"When they said you told them to do those things to us. I didn't listen."

"Shh, baby, I know. I know. Just hold onto my hand and let's get out of this place."

This is the final scene-- >

My body pulled to my feet despite my concern that I am frozen to the floor and will break if moved. This is not meant to be inconsiderate; there is simply no time to wait for a proper thaw. Scott thrown over his shoulder: a dull heavy thump like a sack of wet flour or old potatoes. My hand (bare) in his hand (gloved) as we walk out of the room.

Now we fade into the darkness, now we exit stage right to prepare for the interlude or is it really the finale? I can never be sure, the script has not come in yet and we are working impromptu. It's the best way, really. This way, when he says he loves me, that he'll take me home, I'll believe it.

It is the sheer impossibility of such things that make them true.

Fifty miles later or two hundred fifty miles later, one hour or three hours or possibly even days, one of us remembers the English language and makes a request. Jean, naturally. After Scott, she's the one who best remembers things like talking and voices. If it were left to Logan and me, the silence could last indefinitely; we don't use words as much as they do, we never acquired their comfort with it. Why bother, when hands or eyes are so much more simple, so direct?

She chooses words, however, although her hand might have followed, resting on Logan's shoulder. A command, although she's being careful to hide it.

"We need to stop. If they were going to follow us, they'd have done it by now, and I need a few minutes to examine Scott. If there are serious injuries, we could be making it worse..."

Logan nods, but I bite my lip to hold back the shudder. Examine. No thank you, I want to tell her, I've had quite enough for one day, but of course she wasn't talking to me, or even about me. Paranoia makes you self-centered that way, although you can say it's unintentional. It's instinct, like pulling your hand away after it has been burned. For days after you will be on the look out for fires, even if there aren't any in the near vicinity.

Ten minutes later the engine dies; strangled quickly by Logan before it can draw any unwanted attention. This is an unlikely danger, however. The gas station itself looks to be unwanted: some rusted skeleton of metal and dirty glass left to die quietly by the side of a desert road. We're prepared anyway. In the event of curiosity there is money, and if that fails, there is a gun. I can't say which I'd rather use. I never had a taste for killing but tonight there is a desire for hot metal in my hands, for the smell of bullets, the reaffirmation that I am not helpless; that they did not break me on the examination table or in the dark hallway outside the cell. I need to feel capable of resistance, or at the very least of a good scream.

This is not allowed; I just realized there is a baby in my lap and they are not made for loud noises or gunshots. I must have held him the whole time, only I can't remember Jean ever giving him to me, or even putting my gloves on again, for that matter. I would say I am in danger of losing my mind, but I'm not. On the contrary, I am too much aware of it for my own good. The memories are too real, too vibrant, pressing too hard against the back of my eyes to let me see anything else.

Now that we have stopped, night descends. It is dust in my teeth, sweat between the creases of my knees and the vinyl upholstery even though it is cold enough to make fingers sore. It is sandpaper wrapped around my throat, from the wind in my face. It is the unwrapping of a dull ache, one layer at a time, the revelation of bruises and cuts and joints that are stiff from being crammed into a space between boxes too long. It is also a smell: decay, rotten fish; if I were to lift my shirt there would be fresh blood.

Logan smells it too; this is why he watches me out of the corner of his eye. He can't decide if he should wait for me to say it hurts or if he should pick me up, no questions asked, and hold me until he's found every mark. But let's be honest, what good would it do? Satisfaction of curiosity, perhaps, nothing more. What evidence would it provide? Proof of a failure, whether it is his or mine or both of ours. He can't blame himself for what he doesn't know. Or rather, he can, but it will be harder because he won't have the specifics and he has trouble imagining these things.

To the left, a neon green bug light hums like a giant beetle. Beneath, a door with a faded stencil of a woman in a skirt spray-painted on the wood. There is also a word: OMEN. I assume it was originally WOMEN but sand and wind have erased the first letter. The door is cracked open-- an invitation? Inside there will be a mirror (damage assessment), soap (damage control), and most importantly water. Filthy water, maybe, but it will be wet and it will get their stench off me.

A glance in the rearview mirror: white hands are moving across three small lumps in a man's side; Jean's hands and whatever's left of Scott's ribs underneath the bruises. The reflections of her eyes meet the reflections of mine.

/What did they do to my husband?/
/It's hard to say, really,/ I want to tell her. /I was strapped to an examination table at the time, a different sort of pain but not so different. All in all, I'd prefer the cracked ribs. Those will heal in a week or two weeks but I will wake up cold for a month. However, this is not the point. To answer your question, I do not know. They took me outside when it happened./

But I don't say that.

"Take it."

Half-shove the baby into Logan's lap, fumble with the seatbelt I don't remember fastening. Don't look at him or Jean and whatever else don't look at Scott.

"Where are you--"

"Bathroom."

I slam the door, half-wincing at the sound of my own violence.

"I've been holding it since forever."

"Marie--"

"I'll be back."

My first thought panics: there isn't a lock. Then: who would I be locking out? I don't know; it's just the principle of the thing.

I flip the switch, and tube lighting sparks to life with a faint crackle of electricity. Something scaly and unidentifiable crawls into the shadows underneath the sink, which is layered in beige tile, most of it broken or covered in graffiti. The human equivalent of dog pee, a territorial marking. Jonni wuz here.

In the spotted glass above the sink, a girl's face flickers in the sputtering light. She's nothing the mirror hasn't seen before-- a little bit of blood, a few bruises, lots of pale skin and big, dark eyes. She is not me. She is not me. I close my eyes and press my fingers against the glass to scrape away the imposter, but my aim is off. My hands hit the metal frame of the mirror instead. Then it all roars at me in a flash, a bloom of color and light.

/Lensherr would have a field day with the cabinets and the table and the buckles on the restraints. Although it is not all metal. There is latex, for the gloves, and white cotton, for the spotless scrubs and the sheet they drape over your body. Your clothes, for the most part, have disappeared; this is not so much a punishment as it is practical thinking. Supposedly you are not as great a threat in your underwear. Stench of antiseptic, of utter sterility. Oh, yes, and of frayed leather, around the wrists and ankles. For your own protection, of course. They are protecting you from breaking their fingers, which is what happened the first time one of them tried to lift you onto the table./

My hands fumble with the knobs of the sink until I feel cold water across my fingers. By now my eyes are open, but it does no good; it's too late, it's all beginning to sink in. I've learned the importance of holding onto all pieces of yourself as long as possible, in times like these, because if you allow even one shard to slip away, the entire structure caves in. That's when the breakdown comes, when you actually stop to think about what has been done to you. If you keep yourself at a distance, the sheer weight of shock carries you through. You live in the blur.

Water covers my face: voluntary drowning for a space of seconds. I relish the lack of air, the coldness in the lungs, before reaching for a paper towel.

/A woman's face visible through the wire mess glass window. Eyes of a Medusa, she'd turn them all to stone if she could. It's Jean. You can hear her through the door, begging and demanding to be let in on every medical credential she has. More a show of support than an actual hope. They won't let her in, but she'll want it to go on record that she tried. Before she leaves she gives you something even better than a hand to hold. She sends you the message that he is alive, that she will wake him up and send him for you. She tucks it in the back of your mind, along with the images of the things he will do to them. It is her parting gift. You replay the pictures in slow motion, again and again and again and you feel no shame for enjoying every second./

When I look back in the mirror there are two faces. I expected as much.

"If you're looking for the men's room, it's next door."

He picks up a paper towel and folds it in half.

"Turn around. Let me see your face."

"What, can't get a good enough view from the mirror?"

"Let me see your face, Marie."

His hand slides along my jawbone, around the swelling on the cheekbone, down the bridge of my nose. I let him turn me around. His other hand follows with the paper towel, mopping up leftover drops of water or blood or both.

"Is Scott going to be all right?"

"Should be. Ribs are the worst of it, though there might be head damage. Jeannie doesn't know any other reason he'd be out so long."

"I do."

His hand pauses mid-stroke.

"How?"

I stare down at the floor-- mustard yellow tiles-- and wish I Could follow my little scaly friend into the shadows.

"I touched him."

"Why?"

He doesn't sound surprised, or even angry. Merely curious.

"They kept on....they wouldn't leave him alone. I couldn't take it anymore after they broke his ribs. He was shaking...you had to see him, Logan. I had to do something."

My fingers capture the remains of a paper towel and begin to systematically tear it into pieces.

"I would have tried to share the healing but by then there wasn't any left. So I...touched him. Not long at all. Just a few seconds, like an anesthetic. I figured they'd leave him alone if he was out of it."

"Did they?"

"Yes."

"Did they leave you alone too?"

"...Yes."

"I've smelled blood on you for three hours, baby. Look me in the face and tell me the truth."

I bring my eyes level with his. He is dark, stormy, I can almost feel the lightning gather at the ends of his knuckles. Have to find words, or at the very least motion, and I do try. It'd be selfish if I didn't. My teeth sink into my lips, pain instead of tears; at length I am able to shake my head.

"No. They didn't."

He moves, without sound. A hand on my shoulder, another on the top of my head. Tentative: afraid to leave a mark or remembering what it felt like to be sucked dry, left for dead? I do us both the favor of flinching away, but of course it is interpreted as something else-- fear, maybe, or shock. He could be right in his translation. I have lost touch with the language of my face while he still speaks it fluently.

"I'm going to ask you something and I need you to promise honesty."

He drops his eyes into mine; they sink like stones.

"I promise."

"Are you still afraid of me?"

I try to smile but it almost turns into a sob before I can control it. Better to reveal nothing than everything. "No. Not you."

"Then sit down and let me see what they did."

I shake my head, pulling my cloak tighter to me.

"Not necessary. It's nothing bad...just some bruises, a few shallow cuts...I'll take care of them myself."

The new marks are irrelevant; it's the old scars that tell stories neither of us want to hear.

"You trust me, baby?"

"Yes, but--"

"Then sit down and let me help you. Ain't no way you can reach everything back there on your own."

"How do you know it's my back?"

A tight smile. "I pay attention. You haven't leaned all the way into the seat but twice, and each time you winced." >

He counted? A surprise: I am unaccustomed to being the focus of that kind of attention. Scott watched my back, sure, but he had a wife and a newborn son to protect. I had forgotten that Logan doesn't have anyone else. And neither do I, really.

"One condition." I sit down on the loose toilet lid, wobbling a little as it slides under me. "Don't try to pull any hero stunts and heal me. We need...I...need to have you conscious. Just in case."

"Fair enough."

He drops to his knees behind me, peels off my cloak. I don't move, face turned into the wall. Much the same view as the sink: dirty tile, orange graffiti. (Eva luvs Bobby 4 evr.) A faded blue poster for a crisis pregnancy hotline-- it offers a free test. I shudder.

"Relax, darlin'." His whisper, behind my ear. "It's just me. No one else here, no one else gonna get in here."

Unless you count the dozen or so ghosts in my mind...

But I nod. Consider it a gesture of faith.

He starts to unbutton the back of the dress. Clumsy on the buttons: he's used to snaps and zippers and things that pull off easily and now he's afraid he'll break something. I'm shaking, just a little, but the room is cold so we'll say that's the only reason. He works his way down until the dress is loose enough to slide down around my shoulders.

A profanity: his, accompanied by the sound of metal claws slamming into tile. I turn to find him up to his wrist in wall.

"Logan?"

"Sorry, baby. It's just hard."

"I know it's ugly...I'm...ugly. I'm sorry."

"Not you, Marie. Never you." He pulls his hand out of the wall and retracts the claws. "Hard because I had a chance to kill those freaks and I let 'em live. If I had known this, I would've killed 'em. Every last one, no matter what Jeannie said."

"Does it look that bad?"

"Bruises mostly. Does this hurt?"

He places his hand next to my spine. I suck in my breath. "A little."

Ok, so maybe a lot but I'm trying to maintain objectivity.

"Looks like they bruised the bone there. That'll be the worst of it."

"Am I still bleeding?"

"Yeah, some...hold on a second." Running water and a paper towel; he returns and squeezes the water carefully over the broken skin. "When did they do this?"

"After the examination, in the hall. They kept me outside while they finished up with Scott, and one of them wanted to see if I still healed."

That was the worse part, to be honest. I can take my punches as well as the next girl-- actually, a little better-- but don't use a knife on me. That's how all of it got started, after Logan left me. With a blade. Of course these morons didn't know that. I was just cheap entertainment. It would have made it easier if they'd given me the courtesy of hatred, like they did Scott. It was vengeance when they hit him; for me it was simply boredom.

"How'd you get these?"

He brushes the thin ridges of puckered flesh running parallel across the middle of my back. Three of them, I think, or maybe four. It was a little hard to keep count in between the fading in and out of consciousness.

"Those are...old."

I can practically hear his body freeze. Instant crystallization. "How old?"

I swallow. "From the beginning."

Biting the lip now, hard, a natural defense. If I let myself go I don't know if I could control it this time. That kind of thing happens now; one minute I'm fine, the next I can't stop crying. His fingers run over the dead flesh; it feels like cotton dragged over brushwood. Pieces of me have been cut down, dried out, and wait impatiently for the rest of me to follow suit.

"Can I touch them? Without gloves?"

Low voice, I'd have reason to pretend I didn't hear him if I wanted it to go down that way. But I don't.

"Dead skin doesn't absorb but everything around it does."

"I'll be careful."

Yes, but he will also be reckless, in his own way. He's made up his mind; he's already pulling off the gloves.

"Okay."

Touch is the last thing we remember and the first thing we forget.

It is insubstantial; it leaves no trace. It is a wind: you feel it when it passes over your face or your hand but it leaves no proof of existence unless it breaks something. Sometimes you don't even feel it at all, or you feel it too much and it becomes as nothing. That is how his hands feel against my skin: an overwhelming rush of numbness. Scars add to that, as do calluses. They can't pick up on the subtle differences between forefinger and thumb, the individual smoothness and roughness in each of his fingertips. This is another factor against memory.

Two fingers trace the jagged white lines from top to bottom, bottom to top. I am touched the way a blind man touches a statue: the details are sought out, memorized, established in the mind as pictures. Does he have his eyes closed? Probably, the skin of a blind man remembers so much more than skin that comes with eyes. Touch me again, Logan. I am blind too, now; I will remember it too.

"Can you feel that, baby?"

His voice a scratch on the wall; soft and hoarse.

I shake my head, no, I can't feel it. There is water behind my eyes; if I cracked the lids it would be called tears. I can't feel him, I feel him too much, either way it equals deafness. How can his hands speak when I can't hear the words? Then his fingers are gone. Wait, I want to say, I will listen harder. Don't leave me to the silence. It's not my fault....

My shoulders hitch in the middle of the breath; that happens when you're crying without sound. You spasm, you short-circuit, eventually. You self-destruct, only the chain reaction doesn't make it this far again. It is cut off, paralyzed by a touch made without hands. He has not given up; he has merely resorted to another language.

His mouth brushes against the first scar, leaving behind the imprint of a kiss. The phrase is repeated, twice over, three times, until the message has been delivered to each scar, each deadness in the skin.

/For it is in dying that we are born to life eternal./

St. Francis had it right after all.

Then, a more audible question.

"Did you feel that?"

His hands tighten on my shoulders, near imperceptible betrayal of hope. Did you hear, his fingers ask me, did you hear me?

From me there is a sound like a gasp, only wetter. Similar moisture on the face: somewhere the eyelids sprang a leak. Batten down the hatches, girls, there could be a flood. But there isn't. To pour oneself out takes energy, a certain flare that I don't have. I can only trickle. Black water seeping out from under a stone.

"Marie...what's wrong...did I hurt--"

My fingers close around his.

"No, sugar."

I turn around, trying to smile through the blur across my eyes.

"I'm just remembering."

"Remembering?"

"How it feels to be touched by someone who doesn't want to leave a mark."

This is the part when he wraps his arms around me and holds on like I am time, like I am slipping away through his hands even as he's watching. Suffocation but then again who needs to breathe at times like this? Breathing is noisy, cumbersome; it slows you down. Heartbeats too, even more distracting, which is why they've stopped now.

"I can't tell you I understand this because I don't." he says. "I never will be able to know how it felt, how much it hurt. I won't even try. But listen to me..."

He pulls back, holds me at arm's length so I can see the entirety of his face. There is an anomaly-- stray glimmers of wet light at the corners of his eyes. A roughness in the throat, like worn down sandpaper. "Whatever you need to do to let it out, you do it. You need someone to hold on to, you need someone to hit; I'm here. Right here, baby."

This is the part when I reverse the suffocation. I detach from my body and watch the girl in Logan's arms hold on for dear life. She cries aloud, she beats fists against his back, she rages. He rocks her back and forth, saying words that neither of them will remember, but somehow that's not the point. The point is not the future but the moment, this exact spot in time.

This is the part when, between everything else, she-- who is myself-- falls in love with him again. No, wait, that's incorrect. To fall again would indicate that I had climbed out of it, and that's not true. I've always been in it, up to the hips. Up to the neck, the eyes. Total suspension.

We'd just forgotten. But not anymore.

---

Sleep-Rite Motel
Boulder City, Nevada
December 13

Ozone in the air, or is it cigar smoke?

Not that I can claim an unbiased perspective when the entire room smells of a delicate blend of soured whiskey and stale sweat. Perhaps I could better describe it through the ears-- easy enough; this dump might as well be made of styrofoam. Everything passes through, only slightly muddled, like listening to myself drum my fingers under a desk. The complete sound is there, though smudged, and if I am quiet enough I can even pick up on the subtle colors of tone.

You must know there are two sounds to fury. Rage and calm, machine-guns and razor-wire. Scott is dangerous because he has perfected the latter. No words wasted, no pointless screaming and cheap profanity, merely a cut-glass tone that convinces you he is one step from removing the glasses and razing a city to the ground.

Or in this case, a man.

"You. Had. No. Right."

"No right to what, Summers? Keep them from turning you and Marie into ground beef or keep them from taking your wife down hard after they beat you to death?"

"That's not what would have happened."

"You always did hold your illusions better than you did your whiskey."

"I never acquired your taste for it."

"You never acquired the need."

Logan is frayed, ragged on the edges, too tired or impatient or both to trouble himself with anything beyond frustration. At least not yet.

Jean and I are not participants in this duel, not even bystanders or sideline reporters. She vanished into the bathroom as soon as they stepped into the hall, claiming the baby needed a bath and she needed clean hair.

(Not entirely an excuse; she will want to wash off the last traces of the man who doesn't smell like Scott. Logan told me not to ask how we got the Jeep. Fair enough.)

I am a spy, an ear pressed to the door or to a keyhole, part of the wall or the doorpost or the furniture. Invisible unless they get out of hand, in which case I will play the part of divine intervention or something equally as moral. At least that is the official justification. Morbid curiosity could be an ulterior motive here, given the right amount of thought.

"I knew their system, Logan. Marie and I would have been punished and then all of us would have been left alone. Safe."

"That the story you sell yourself to justify keeping them in that place?"

"As opposed to the story you've bought to justify exposing them to the labs and the death camps?"

"I don't see any police bustin' up the stairs."

"Maybe not today or tomorrow, but it will happen. This isn't the same government we dodged in the beginning. They've honed their skills. Perfected."

"So have we."

"Did I mention they're already looking for us? That's another one of the compound's little policies that you failed to ask me about. You leave, they notify the authorities. It's the catch that lets them stay in business."

I shut my eyes and imagine Logan's reaction to this: blank, granite. He'll be leaning against the wall, chewing on the butt end of a cigarette. Real dark circles under his eyes, smudged like black paint. Forty-eight hours ago he was dead.

Scott's standing away from the wall; it's his intention to stand straight, to present himself face to face but there will be a flaw. One arm cradles the cloth sling wrapped around the broken ribs; breathing is labored, pulling the shoulders down in a slight hunch.

There is only a slight danger that Logan will sense me; he is Distracted by his cigar, by Scott, by the thirty plus hours of not closing his eyes. Still, I will take precautions; he has the uncanny knack for picking up on my presence through minor barriers such as walls and doors. In the old days it was paranoia but now it is memory.

"I can get us identities," he says. "Fake papers."

"Time is not exactly a luxury we have."

"I can get them tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest."

"Legal identification might get us out of town but not past the border scans. Ever stop to think how you're gonna get Marie past the screening? She doesn't exactly blend in with the crowd."

"Last time I checked, neither did you, One-Eye."

Whoa, that was almost a growl. Maybe he's decided to expand the energy for anger after all.

"My point exactly. I'm not saying it was easy back there but at least we were protected. Out here, we're vulnerable. My son is vulnerable."

"I told you, I can get safe passage arranged. The guy who got me over the border is a professional. Top of his field."

"Those kind usually stay at the top by playing both sides. I'd imagine we'd bring in enough to give him an early retirement."

"He knows I'll gut him if he tries it."

"Oh, brilliant."

The wire stretched across Scott's voice tightens into a hard thin line. If you could run your fingers across it, you'd bleed.

"You'd dump Marie off again so you can go have your fun, just let them do whatever they want while you're gone, but that's okay. You like her better broken."

"I'm not dumping her anyway, bub." Logan's voice has shifted; he's off the wall, edged most likely into Scott's face. I know this sound on him; he won't even have to pop the claws, you can see the metal gleam in his eyes. "And you're right, I wasn't there to stop it."

They would be inches apart now; close enough to smell the contempt on each other's breath, close enough to whisper because I can barely hear his voice although I know he's making sure Scott gets every word.

"But at least I didn't stand by and watch for a frickin' month while some freak took my wife to bed every night."

Then it all happens at once, as these things often do. The dull thud of a fist against a jaw-- Logan's jaw, Scott's fist, although not his good one from the sound of it-- is followed by another, more substantial crash, this time against the wall. That would be Logan's contribution.

"You wanna do the honor thing," he snarls, "you meet me when you're not crippled."

"Why not now? C'mon, Wolverine, a little unfair advantage never stopped you before..."

It goes no further; I make sure of it.

My hand flies for the knob, jerks the door open hard enough to awaken every single bruise on the left side of my body. I move faster than I used to; I'm in between them before they can blink twice. Red crystal and brown eyes focus on me in tandem, part surprise, part suspicion.

"You two finished pouring salt in wounds?"

No one answers me, not that it was expected. Logan drops his cigar butt to the floor and crushes it into ash; Scott shrugs himself off the wall, jaw tightening when it pulls the ribs. Neither of them look at me. Good, that means they're listening.

"Thought so." I spin on my heels, cross the hall to lean against the doorway, arms folded across my chest. "So why don't we all go back inside and try to come up with actual solutions? Unless you'd rather stay out here and butt heads trying to prove who loves who more."

A handful of silence, or perhaps two, then we are inside where we belong: that is how quickly everything in the past five minutes is relegated to convenient amnesia.

Logan takes first watch at the window, digging a fresh cigar out of his back pocket. Jean comes out of the shower, her hair still dripping down her back, and asks Scott to take his son while she finds the diapers. Scott holds an armful of wet baby, patting him dry with the towel, and looks at every part of the room but Logan's window.

Both know the truth: no words were meant, no punches malicious. This is another of form of their common ritual, which involves poking any and all sore spots because it lets them know they're still alive enough to fight back. I would be more disturbed if they didn't fight, and perhaps it is as disconcerting that they let me dissuade them so easily. It's not hard to see that both of them are scared stiff behind the steel voices and the steel eyes. Insults and blows camouflage; that's their way.

Save it for the enemy, boys, I want to say, there will be plenty of them for it to go around.

Of course we all know that. Maybe that's the real taint of the air: not electric ozone anger or cigar smoke or even the inherent stench of the room but the words we refuse to say. The simple finality yet to be acknowledged.

We. Cannot. Get. Out.

Sleep-Rite Motel
Boulder City, Nevada
December 13

An irony: as soon as the realization hits that you will never be given the chance to be mundane, repetitive, boring, you clutch at normalcy any way possible. A spasm, really, neither willed nor controlled. You find a god, pick a favorite color, fuss over your lipstick in the bathroom mirror, open the window and try to determine the exact shade of blue in the sky.

Or in my case, you take a shower.

Hot water pounding around the ears, down the back of the neck, covers a multitude of doubts; when I emerge twenty minutes later I am tempted to be optimistic. There are some factors in our favor, after all. Certainly there have to be, somewhere. I'm not going to bother to name them specifically, perhaps because they would turn up to be more scarce than anticipated. Awareness of their existence is enough. I have learned this much in the past year: don't chase hope down, hog-tie it, and sling it over your shoulder. Just live in faith that it exists, even if it's nowhere near you. It's like silk, it's not for daily wear. The fabric burns too easily; it rips and attracts stains. But you will have to admit that it is beautiful when it first appears, or when it returns after a long absence. It has a tragic weave, you know. It likes to make guest appearances with desperation.

And it is here now. I can see it wrapped around Scott as he plays with his son; they are positively smothered in it. Of course Will does not know this and his father does not seem to care.

They are spread out on the bed, Will on a pillow and Scott stretched beside him moving his son's tiny feet up and down like little gear shifts. I'll have to give the man credit; he sounds more like an engine than the Jeep did last night. This imitation seems to merit approval; the baby's face is wrinkled with delight.

"You make a nice Porsche." I say.

"Family tradition." The corners of his mouth flip up in what might be a grin if you squinted hard enough. "Devotion to all things mechanical must be instilled from birth. If I'm lucky, his first word will be 'engine'." His eyes drop back to his son and the grin turns sheepish. "Plus it makes him laugh."

Vrroom, vrroom. The little feet totally disappear in Scott's hands as they move up and down. Will coos his enthusiasm, arms waving in a calculated grab for his father's nose. He misses but recovers his loss on the chin.

It was not always this easy. I still remember the night they found me, when the bundle of red wrinkled skin and thin screeches scared him more than anything else in his life.

(You're a father, Jean said once, and it was an accusation.
So what am I supposed to do?
Hold him.
How?
Closer to you. He's not a bomb.)

But to Scott, he was. Jean and I never understood it; I still wouldn't if I didn't have a few of his more buried memories floating in the back of my brain. He went with Logan on the rescue missions, when it was really beginning to get bad but Xavier thought we could still win. When they were in time, they brought the survivors back to the mansion. When they were too late, they dug the graves. It was the children that stayed with him, even more than the young women and the old men. They caught him off guard: the lips frozen half-open, the blind questioning eyes, the tiny fingers still clutching the hand of the mother, the torn rag doll soaked with bloody mud. Jean would have been two months pregnant at the time. Now, I believe the children were the reason he decided to run. It finally dawned on him that if he didn't, he would show up at an execution site one day and the mother would be his wife, and the child would be his son.

I remember, too well, the excuses he came up with to avoid the baby, to ignore it, or at the very least to detach himself from it.

(He's your son, Jean said again, and it would have been anger if she hadn't been too close to outright crying. He's your son and you don't even love him.)

No, we were wrong again. He loved too much.

Vrroom, vroom. I watch him drive the feet across the finish line and celebrate the victory with a kiss.

Things have improved. I told you, there is hope here today.

Jean should see him like this; it would make her smile, but she is Not here. She left over an hour ago with Logan to arrange identification cards, passports, and antibiotics for Scott--although she claimed they are for the baby, the only reason he let her walk out the door in the first place. I don't know what's harder for him; the inability to defend his wife and son or the necessity to trust that job to someone else.

"I think he's bigger than he was last week. And cuter."

"He has his mother's eyes."

This is said as a relief.

"But your jaw. And your grip....nearly pulled my finger off two days ago trying to tie it in a knot."

Casual conversation; a polite formality or a justifiable lie depending on how you look at it. It's not that what I'm saying is not the truth, it's the reason I'm saying it. What I'm using it to avoid.

My fingers slide along the vinyl blinds and push slats apart to Allow a view of the street: cinderblock gray smudges of dust stick to my gloves, loose particles of skin and hair and other used body components fly into my face and eyes. A cough or a sneeze, what will it be? As it turns out, neither. The body is absent-minded in moments of impending crisis; it forgets several of the more minor functions. Or it does not forget, but stores the energy for something more important, such as breathing or healing or running away. Or for standing and fighting, if it comes to that, although it is doubtful. This is not the old days, when heroism meant everything and martyrdom wavered before us in the air like heat. Now we have the good sense to turn tail and run.

Of course that doesn't always work. He who flees a doomed battle may live to fight again, or he simply may get himself shot in the back. Sometimes I think I would rather see it coming, but this is bravado. If given the opportunity, I know good and well I'd close my eyes.

"They should be back soon." Scott says. "Logan estimated a couple of hours, if they were lucky."

"Yeah."

Lucky. Does he mean lucky to get the job done so quickly or Lucky they weren't shot on the streets? Maybe that is why I'm looking at the window, to locate the remnants of gun smoke and the blood smeared on the asphalt and the bodies, or what is left of the bodies.

That isn't why I'm searching. Jean's too smart for that; Logan's too strong. There is something else-- a man, across the street, leaning by the wall beside a liquor store and smoking his fifth cigarette of the morning. Smoking but not drinking; this means something. The first cigarette, Logan told me, was not long after we checked into the motel. The second before the argument between him and Scott, the third after. I myself noticed the fourth before my shower.

(Watch,) Logan said, (you'll see an unhealthy interest in this room.
So what do we do?
Count cigarettes and if he moves send Scooter out to blast him. The kid can do that much even with busted ribs.
Why wait?
He doesn't check in to whoever sent him, they'll be on us in five minutes.
Oh.
Don't worry, kid. When I get back and we're ready to leave, I'll have a little chat with our friend and see who he's working for.)

I wonder where he plans to stash the body. Dumpsters are too obvious; maybe he'll leave it in the bathtub. A farewell present.

"He's still there, isn't he. Our inquisitive friend across the street."

Scott says this without so much as looking up from his son; it strikes me that the game I just witnessed might be a diversion. A display of normalcy, of deliberate carelessness. Look at us, it will say, we are blissful in our ignorance of your plans.

"Still there. On his fifth smoke."

He slides off the bed and shares the view with me, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a slight grimace. "Wonder what's holding them off?" A murmur; I'm not entirely sure this question was meant for me to hear at all. He forgets, sometimes, that he is not alone.

"Maybe he's not with them at all. Maybe he just doesn't have any place else to go. Wouldn't you stare at hotel windows if you had nothing better to do all day?"

"Marie."

He says it as a contradiction, sympathetic but firm.

(Don't you know, little girl, that no one is just looking in windows or smoking cigarettes anymore? Don't you know they're all watching for someone? The entire world is eyes and none of them are kind.)

We drift into silence; having done away with the formalities it is now legal to ask the real questions, only as usual neither of us are quite sure how. Well, at least a shot in the dark is better than no shot at all.

"So you think we should have stayed."

"Yes." He turns away from the window, rubs the dust onto his pants. "Not permanently but at least until we could have come up with a plan. Until we knew for sure what we were doing. And until I healed enough to be more than dead weight." A spitting out of words at the end; he's a bad taste in his own mouth. Chalk, I imagine, they say it's the taste of broken bones.

"You're not dead weight, Scott."

"C'mon. Logan had to carry me out of that place on his back. I'm not exactly in fighting condition."

"Maybe we won't have to fight."

"I hope you're right."

Another silence, the silence of dust particles floating through the light twisting through the bent blinds. There was some surprise when I woke up this morning to see the sun on Logan's face, on my arms. You must understand that once you live so long behind wire the sunlight no longer seems real. It is dying all the time, even in midday. Knowing this, you can imagine the shock to see it alive again.

I fold my arms over my chest, fingers drumming against the thick line of my collarbone. Scott leans against the wall; does he know that Logan stood right there an hour ago? Probably not. He has no idea how much alike they are in the midst of their differences.

"I don't know if I could have stayed there any longer." I don't say it to Scott, but to the window. Or perhaps to the man outside the window, explaining my reasons for leaving the world assigned me and invading his. "Not after--" A swallow, thick. "I just don't think I could have. They went too far."

"I'm sorry."

The visor leaves its red shadow on my face. Behind it the eyes will be offering regret or sympathy or both and I am not in the mood.

"Don't be. I don't have the energy for forgiveness today, especially when it's not needed."

"You shouldn't have touched me. Should have just let them finish what they came to do and leave, it would have been easier that way..."

"No, it would just have given them what they wanted. They wanted us helpless and I don't play that part well."

"No, you don't." He grins but it collapses on his next thought. "Tell me something and tell it to me honest."

You know, I'm getting tired of that request. It's usually followed By some deep and probing question that takes more than I want to offer. But I feel I owe them answers, if I can give them. God knows I'd want them to give me the same if they could.

"What?"

"Did we spend months in there for nothing? Was it worse than outside? You've lived both. Tell me straight."

I knew it. Deep revelation time. My teeth pull on the skin of my lower lip as I slowly process the words I will use for honesty. Lies come so much easier; they require no thought at all. You have to put some effort into the truth.

"Honestly, I don't know if you can compare the two." Hands fiddling with the hem of my shirt, twisting the edges around fingers. "Outside, I knew what they wanted....my money, my body, or my genes. If I slipped up, I lost one of the three. It was that simple. In there it was different. Like they were trying to break down who we were, like Jean and I weren't even human or mutant.We were something else, something filthy that was only good for what you could put inside."

His fist clenches reflexively; releases. We uncover sores that have not healed; Jean still wakes up screaming some nights when he touches her and she thinks it is someone else.

"So Logan's right." The muscles of his jaw lock together, rigid, taut. "I failed."

My hands move over his and I look him in what would be his eyes.

"No, Scott, you didn't fail. Neither of you did."

Thick golden light drips through the slats in the blinds and leaks onto our faces, our hands. Invisible stains. I can't look at it directly, everything is brighter when you are free. Garish, almost. It burns the retinas.

"Tell me why."

"Because I would be dead if Logan hadn't left me to get himself captured and gutted in my place. And I wouldn't be human if you hadn't found me when you did."

"You were always human, Marie. More than any of us."

"See, that's where you're wrong. I couldn't even remember how that felt. It was like falling every minute of the day, knowing you could scream but no one would hear. All I could do was hope that someone threw down a rope before I hit bottom. I wanted it to be Logan but it was you. That's all there is to it."

His fingers brush the back of my knuckles. An appreciative gesture, but also a prelude to what he will say next. "If it comes to the worst, if we are separated and you don't make it out, I'm coming back for you. Once I get my family out I'm coming back to find you."

"No, you're not."

He is taken aback.

"Marie--"

"You have to be there to teach your son his first poem. I'll be fine. We'll all be fine."

"So where are we going now? What promises do we make?"

"I don't know. But we don't give up, whatever happens."

"You don't ask much do you?"

"Only from people I know can give it."

Then the conversation is over, a mutual consensus, and we fall back to the different, pointless activities meant to keep us from jumping at the sound of every passing car. I expect sirens any minute, flashing lights and bullhorns but that is not their way now. Lights and noise give a warning, a chance to dash out the bathroom window in the last second and escape. Now they do it with finesse, with silence. The van pulls up in the back of the building or across the street, the black uniforms swarm in silence up the stairs, and then they kick your door down and shoot your baby in the head.

But then what was I expecting? Even sides? Fair play?

Scott confines his fear to metal; he cleans the gun -- our only weapon, a battered but serviceable automatic-- and divides the ammunition into gleaming piles of silver. Half will go to Logan, half he will keep. Everything must be rationed, now, even death, but when he thinks I am not looking he slips three of the bullets into his pocket. Understandable-- Scott would never let them take his wife and son alive. This raises the question, however, of the third bullet. Is it for him or me? He would have some sort of noble instinct like that-- take me down gently, spare me from the inevitable No thank you. If I want to die, I'll do it myself, I'm certainly capable.

But it may surprise you to know that I have not considered that option yet. I have too much life to catch up on to sit around the hotel room moping on ways to end it. I occupy the time by telling Will my memories of favorite encounters with the violin.

/Beethoven in Carnegie Hall, my seventeenth birthday, Logan hadn't stopped chasing memories yet but Xavier bought me my own box and accompanied me himself in a gray Armani tuxedo and silk tie that matched the burgundy Versace gown I had found waiting for me in my room./

/My first public performance since leaving home, Mozart in a drawing room with roses and white marble floors, my fingers sweating at the creases not from the music but from the audience. Diplomats, congressmen, influential businessmen. Anyone and everyone whom Xavier thought worthy to impress with the idea that his children could play the classics as well as any pure human. I was not the only performer but I was the first and I was convinced the spotlights would melt me into sugary mush.)

/Bach Double Violin Concerto by a lake in autumn, Logan appeared from nowhere to disrupt the music and told me he loves me for the first time and, at least this far, the last./

An attempt at passing down a better world; they will want him alive and if the rest of us die trying to stop that, I will at least be able to hope he remembers part of it. That a long time ago life consisted of beautiful nothings like music and expensive dresses and vows of first love. Then again it could merely be nostalgia. My fingers ache to touch the strings, more than that, to touch the notes contained within the strings. Enough of silence; I want to pour out music. I want to live it in technicolor, to obsess about nothing more than the cadenza at the end of the page. I want to be swept away.

It is the insignificant things that will keep us all alive or kill us.

Outside the window, a man lights his sixth cigarette.

Sleep-Rite Motel
Boulder City, Nevada
December 13 (Nightfall)

I will turn my head over my shoulder, a year from now, two days from now, and I will look back at this night and say this is what it meant to be in thrall. A type of drowning, really, very slow and clear but also muffled, dim; a roar in the ears. Shining, like we were looking up at the diffusion of a light moving over the top of the water. As long as we stayed under, as long as we avoided the light, we would be saved.

Our lungs would fill with liquid, eventually, but this was to be preferred to scorched and blackened bones. A natural fear, believed despite the lack of hard evidence.

(I will say to myself, how sheltered we all were, how naive. And then: how quickly we fermented. Aged, but not to perfection. Simply aged.)

I should not indulge so easily in the reflection. It is not the time to meditate; it is the time to say goodbye. Which is in and of itself a mantra, though not a very good one. It has never yet brought me luck.

Jean and Logan returned with white cardboard boxes of Something that smelled vaguely like Chinese but more of stale oil-- not that they had much of a choice, they had to go wherever was safe, to whoever wanted their wallet satisfied more than their curiosity-- and a plan that not even Scott could argue for very long. The beauty is in the simplicity.

A meeting in a train yard, deserted (traditionally), at dark (traditionally) where a freight train carrying refrigerator parts (at least on the official papers) ships us out to a suitably remote location. Waiting commences, two days or two weeks. Then, another meeting, at a formica diner or a roadside bar, to finalize matters. Money passes under the table in exchange for brown manila packets of plastic, paper, and alternate lives. The implants come later, duplicity at the genes. This requires more money, although it is not a problem. I saw the envelopes pass from Scott to Logan before he left; they were thicker than my wrist and there were two of them. Expense is not spared.

Of course there are complications. Namely the eighteen blocks between the hotel and the train.

The eyes are still on us-- a different shade, a woman instead of a man. Heavy on the mascara. She leans against the glass window in a sort of tubercular hunch, pretending to shop for men but the dress ruins the effect. It's too high class for this part of town, as are the shoes. As soon as our room is empty, she'll make the phone call, if she hasn't already. That's the double-edged sword: to leave means we will be hunted but to stay only means they will take us from our beds.

There are contingencies for this. Calculated risks. We will dismember, leave in parts instead of as a whole. Not in the Jeep; they'll have marked that by now. We'll keep our feet on the ground, because it's easier to disappear. Into an alley, out the back door of a crowded beer joint. Down the fire escape. Up against the wall, a last resort, pretending to make love or slobber drunkenly, a sort of insanity in plain sight. No one notices the man on his knees vomiting his whiskey up, at least not in the way they do the man who's on his feet.

We hope it will not come to that; we still have our dignities even if we are more aware how easily they will be compromised. We rely first on the men, for their strength, but they rely on us for our faces, the beautiful or innocent guile. The surprised parting of the lips; the arch of the left eyebrow; the cultivated smoothness, the opaque yet transparent stare that answers all questions by removing the necessity for them. Lying is archaic, clumsy. It is much easier to evade the truth by rendering it superfluous or obsolete. Our faces are water, bending to any mode or shape needed to pass through a hole. A survival requirement, much like their sharpened trigger fingers and honed fighting skills.

Trust is a factor. We believe they will not turn the violence in our direction and they believe that we will not sell them out in smiles.

Now the question, who goes first? An advantage to be sure; whoever is left behind to maintain appearances runs the risk of being caught in the room if suspicions arise and the cavalry is called in early. They will be required to draw attention, to mask the escape of the others. In other words, they get to be the heroes, and we all know what happens to that sort.

Straws were drawn. It was really the only way to decide the matter given the high concentrations of Fearless Leader lying dormant in Logan and Scott. And also, the fear. Neither cares very much who finds them where but there are women and children involved. There always are, but this time it is magnified because it is their women and their children.

Scott won and promptly looked guilty for it. Jean was merely relieved; after all, it's her baby. Logan said nothing, and neither did I; we met eyes before he chose and shared the mutual decision to lose if at all possible. Not so much heroics as logic. They have all the disadvantages--broken ribs, newborn sons. If either of them suspected, they keep their mouth shut. Or rather, Jean kept their mouth shut for both of them. Scott had the itch of a man who would question were it not for a bit of telepathic lecturing on family duty.

So this is where we have ended up, at goodbye. Or, to be precise, the prelude to goodbye, which is mostly silence because there won't be anything to say for a while. We could fill the void with the usual cliches-- be careful, watch your back, good luck, see you soon-- but this would cheapen the words we will use when the time comes for them to walk out the door. I prefer to scrutinize, to focus on specific details and tuck them away in the files I keep on the people I want to remember.

Jean: the red lipstick, thin and tending more to the effect of grease than paint. The meticulous bow at the back of her neck where she tied the straps of her halter dress together. The cracked vinyl handbag, which is important because it will hide the gun. She's trying to decrease her face value. At night, under the streetlights, they won't be able to see the fine lines of her mouth and the delicacy in her eyes. They will see the handbag first, and then the dress and from there on stereotypes take over. There are other details, less obvious but just as important. Her hands, for example, their exceeding paleness, the length of the fingers, also their persistent attraction to Scott. Every other gesture is toward him, in some form or fashion. The tucking in of a collar. The brushing back of hair. This is what I will remember of her love for him, the casual intimacies. The familiarity-- she expects to grow old with him and does not feel the need for fever pitch, for reckless passion.

Scott: the frayed black sweatshirt, too big, worn bare at the elbows and disintegrated into holes in more than one place. The hood, also over-sized, but here it becomes an intention. Certain things need to be hidden, such as sunglasses at night, which would either be excused as a sign of gutter machismo or fingered as an accusation. Also the firmness of the jaw, which contradicts the desired image of harmless street trash, as does the entire face. There is an inherent magnetism, the sort that men envy and women fall in love with. Also, it is oblivious. Surprising, but true; when he is near Jean, when she touches him, he sees nothing else. Or if he does, he filters it through. Orbits around her. This is what I will remember of his love for her, the blindness. The extreme good luck that they did not crash, into each other, into reality, or that they never had the sense to admit it. There is something to be said for illusions.

Logan: the pile of fried rice left on his plate from dinner; the leftovers that mark the extent of his distraction. The fortune cookie he pushes into my hand, crumbled and smelling of vanilla and bananas, read the message, he says. Black and white block-print, easy on the eyes, a semi-authentic Chinese proverb that was most likely Made In Cleveland. (Confucius say, the man who never loves has never lived.) This is what I will remember most about him-- the continual, almost desperate avoidance of his own words at all costs. He tells me he loves me through eyes or hands or another man's words but never his voice. He thinks it breaks too easily, it takes strange turns and come out to mean something entirely different--

Stop, Marie Stop remembering him like this, stop including him on the list of goodbyes. He is staying, this time. Not just tonight but every night after, no matter what. You are together; cut the paranoia and trust him.

No, it's not that. It's not a lack of trust. I remember him now the same way I remember myself. Preserving the details because I know how unrecognizable people can get even if they never leave your side. I know how strange I have become. For myself, I choose only one detail; it is all that is needed. A dark orange sweater, hanging loose around my shoulders, cashmere. A scarf, sheer enough to see your fingers through, chocolate brown and tinted gold. I found it in the duffel bag Logan handed me when I went to take my shower.

(A few things I picked up on the way here, things I thought ya might have missed.)

Strawberry shampoo. Shaving gel, the purple girly kind with Sparkles on the lid. Three pairs of cotton undies, yellow with white flowers, two bras, also cotton. Jeans. And, at the bottom, the orange sweater. So he remembered after all.

"Ready."

Scott's announcement breaks off my distraction, cools the small smile that had began to creep across my face.

"Street's clear." Logan peers through the blinds. "Except for our lady friend, but she's going for another cigarette. Distracted." He waves them to the door. "Go, now. Go."

It comes and goes too fast. Seconds, perhaps a minute, though something in me feels it should have taken longer. There should have been kisses on faces, embraces, last words. After all, we are family. Instead there are a few scattered whispers (Be careful. See you soon) and then nothing. The cliches turn up sooner or later; there's no way to avoid them because what else would we say? If you die, I will mourn you? If you are taken, I will come back for you? This means failure is an option. This is unthinkable. Or are we just afraid we would be lying? That we would forget, that we would not come back?

I add to their words (Watch your back. We'll be there in a minute) and watch them fade out the doorway, into the hall. Already a memory. Already beyond my grasp.

---

We are alone together, now, Logan and I. An interesting way to put it-- alone. An adjective, not a very good one, used to describe an absence of companionship, a state of isolation. A severed limb, a hand neatly clipped off at the wrist. So how can two people be alone when they are together?

Quite easily, actually. Language isn't as idealistic as we like to think. It accounts for such things as awkward silence and empty words. Or, for the necessity to have companionship in the midst of isolation, to be severed with someone else so that together the two of us can manage. They've taken his right hand; I'll have to open his ketchup bottles. I'm missing one foot; he'll have to carry me up the stairs. This is fine, neither of us minds the extra effort.

I shut the door, lock the dead bolt, shake my head at the precaution. As if a door ever stopped anyone who wanted to get in. There are always windows, or bullets to blow off the locks, or explosives for the less subtle. It's a formality, I suppose. We will be able to say we have done everything we could. That has to count for something.

Across the room from me, he's pulled up the blinds and leans into the windowsill, smoking a cigar. Staring down into the street, at the woman, his eyes lazy and insolent. A distraction. A challenge: Look at me. The lights in the room are turned off; street lamps cut hollows into his face and scoop out the shadows, leaving vacuums of light. Burnt orange, typically, but it should be silver. There should be a moon, a full one, golden yellow or else the color of blood. Stars too, thousands of them. Or if not, there should be turbulence, pitch-black darkness, rain hard as nails and shiny as tin. There should be an extreme, something, anything more than smog and a limp wind and three dead stars on top of the sky. Something to fit the mood, which is extremity. A jump, though not by accident, off a plane. We've already begun to fall.

He watches the street and I watch him. Like a picture, without the benefit of a camera. We never put much stock in that form of remembrance. I once had a single photograph of him, not even in color. A black-and-white print, taken on the excuse of using the last bit of film I bought for an art project. The photo is of him alone, lying on his back under a tree with a book lying across his stomach. Paperback, the title barely visible; 1984. I never knew whether he read it out of actual interest or just to shut me up, but he talked like he enjoyed it. It must have been a hot day; the tree was wilted, the leaves drooping like thin black fingers. On the back of the picture, in tiny sepia letters, was one word. Picnic. No names, no dates; I knew these things, why should I write them down?

He smiled, but the edges were guarded, like a man suddenly in a corner. Caught, but he doesn't know by what, friend or foe. His hand was held up, between himself and the camera, warding off memory. Warding off tomorrow. As if to prevent me from looking back and remembering him in one certain fixed light. As if to protect me from how much he might change.

I kept it too close, I admit, wanting its solidity, wanting permanence. When a mission went bad and I burned, it burned with me. I was salvaged before too much damage had been done, repaired by Logan, but the photograph was past salvation. A curl of brownish-yellow paper, the image charred beyond recognition except for one spot in the middle. A smeared black hand still extended a barrier between the smile and those watching the smile.

He was right, I realized, I could not hold onto him. He changed too fast, too readily. The proof was in the eyes. They did not smile so much, even after my burns healed, they did not lend agreement when Charles spoke of a humanitarian fight and rebuilding the future. Three weeks later, he told me he wasn't going to let me die in someone else's war, and I packed my bag and left the mansion with him to cross the border into Canada before it was too late.

Such intricate, futile attempts at protection.

And here we are, tonight. Still smiling, somehow, though not for the same reasons. Still holding up our hands between our faces and the world, warding off the change that we should just go ahead and recognize as inevitable.

"Penny for your thoughts, baby."

He speaks without looking at me; it's not required. Even in a crowded room, it is recognized in advance that there is no one else he would be talking to, at least not like this.

"Not worth that much. Just thinking about an old photograph."

"Anyone I know?"

"Someone you used to know."

"You'll have to reacquaint us someday."

A soft grin. "Someday."

I am standing behind him now, my arms around his waist, head resting between his shoulders. Comparing heartbeats.

"You should stay away from the window." He turns his head slightly toward me, his hand reaching up to rest over mine. "There's a chance they might think it's just me."

I move, but not away. "Let them see." I stand beside him, face to face. In plain view. "They'll know we're together. Aren't we?"

Hands on his face, allowed to touch because it's through cotton, smoothing out the wrinkles and the worry lines beside his eyes. Tracing the bridge of the nose. The bottom of the lip. So many things could be excused as simple inertia. Two objects set in motion on a collision course. Couldn't be helped. But at the same time I want it to be a choice. Mine, his, ours.

"Yeah, darlin. We are."

His hands move to mine, pulling them away from his face. Over his heart. I am holding it in my palms, cupping the life. Trying not to spill.

"Then why don't we show them?"

I pull the scarf from my neck, hold it out to him. He drops the cigar; his fingers close around the cloth. The golden threads turn bronze in the streetlight. He moves, or I move, or we both move, and then we stop. At the same moment, together.

The kiss is andante sostenuto. Slow, and sustained.

"Tell me if you need space." A whisper, against my cheekbone. "If you need room to breathe."

Who wants to breathe? I am not sure if I say this aloud or not, but I must have said something or nothing because he kisses me again. Con ardente moto. With fire, with motion.

Then the hands tighten on my arms, the shoulders hitch in a muffled curse. Muffled because the words entered my brain but a roaring in my ears prevented me from totally hearing it. All I hear is the squeal of brakes as two, three, four vehicles jerk to a stop in front of the liquor store.

Oh, and the blindness too, let's not forget that. A most unusual loss of sight that has the effect of sharpening everything to a hard, unforgiving clarity that makes it impossible to see as a normal person would. How else can you explain the fact that it is night but I can see every chip and scratch in the black paint of the vans? That I can count the exact number of wires in the mesh that covers the windows in the back. (1,345) Converted dog catchers, I think, they've come to take us to the pound.

It feels like no one else sees this; I am the only one in the room, The only one by the window and so I am required to sound the alarm. Scream, set off a flare, run down the hall shouting fire. But, nothing so melodramatic. I am placid. I am calm as water on glass, though I suspect I have gone white in the face because his eyes are burning before I even speak.

"Looks like we're not going anywhere after all. They're here."

The hands on my arms tighten again, but this time it is the opposite of surprise. It is premeditation, as are the words that follow. He planned for this contingency all along. "Get out."

My body moves toward the door. I haven't given that command, but he's taken control, overridden my personal orders: stay, don't move, don't let him out of your sight again. At the last moment, I remember the counter-measures. Feet dig in, hands tear free.

"No."

"You can make it if you run, out the back, find Jeannie and Scott and stick with em." The hands move up to my shoulders, to my face, this time pleading. A stream of words or at least pieces of words, broken off and thrown at me all at once. "I'll slow 'em down and you run, get out, now...."

"Logan. Stop. Listen to me."

His words dry up. Silence. I lock our fingers together; I lock our eyes. Tying us together, double-checking the knots.

"I'm not leaving."

"Yes, you are. You're getting out and you're going to be safe and--"

"No. I don't want to be safe. I want to stay with you and hold them here to make sure Jean and Scott and their baby get away from this. You won't be able to do it by yourself. Not long enough."

Have to keep it soft, keep it gentle even though it would be a relief to scream. I would if I thought an increase in decibels would merit an increase in understanding.

"I can hold 'em here myself, it'd be pointless if we both went down--"

"Yes. That's just it. If we can remember that staying human is worth it, even when it doesn't have a point, even when it has no result whatsoever, then we've beaten them. And I'm not human when I'm not with you.There are pieces missing. Gaps."

He stares at me for a long second, then a longer second. Granite eyes. Why is it I always characterize him in stone? Because it doesn't bend until it is broken. But there is a secret, too. Behind the stone is a smile. A relief, even though his voice is hoarse, uneven on the edges.

"I keep you human?"

"Yes."

A smile, a spasm across my face because it's too brilliant to be natural. The shine of ice before it cracks.

"Everyone has to have a reason, right? For me it's you."

From below, a shatter of glass. A scream.

The shadows have entered the building. One minute, perhaps ten seconds longer than that, and they will be knocking at the door.

(I'm sorry, we don't live here anymore,)

I will say, through the key hole.

(You think we do because you can see our bodies, but I assure you our true selves have been absent for some time. A sort of journey, you see, another dimension of space. You will understand why we say you cannot follow. You would not know the way.)

"Get on the other side of the dresser," he says. "Push. Over to the door."

After the dresser, the bed: old wood, rotted, growing yellow fungus in the back, but it will slow them down. This is all it's meant to do. Buy time. Make them work for it.

"Listen, kid." Chest moving up and down, breathing heavy. Ragged. "When it starts, I don't want you in it. You don't fight."

"But--"

"When they come at you, just let them--"

(Here my brain interrupts him; he said when not if, it is already a forgone conclusion that we will be taken down. I realized this but of course there is a difference between the moment you realize it and the moment it hits your gut. That moment is now. Tremors in the joints of the knuckles, at the back of the legs.)

He continues.

"--but you don't rush them, not even when they take me out. No matter what you seem them do, you stay back. You go peacefully."

"I won't." An insult; I can take the blows as well as he can. "I'm not going to go anywhere without a fight--"

"Trust. Me." His arms at my elbows, drawing my eyes up to his. "I can get us out of this, I can do it. But it won't work if you get yourself beaten down and dragged out. I'll regain consciousness before we get two miles out; you won't."

"Then you go peacefully too. Let them take you out easy."

A hardening at his jaw; a strange burn in his eye. "No freakin' way, baby. Ain't no way they're gonna get to you to begin with unless I'm put down hard. Just ain't gonna let it happen."

Voices at the end of the hall, shouting to the humans.

(Registration Enforcers, stay in your rooms. I repeat, stay in your rooms.)

Then, to us.

(All non-registered persons come out with your hands raised. Surrender and no use of force will be necessary.)

All lies, of course. Even if we followed the expected cliche and came out waving the white flag, there would be "use of force". Accidental beatings, unfortunate bruises. Mistakes happen. Fists and the door. Pounding. The wood shivers. I flinch.

"This is the Enforcers!! You are under arrest for evading registration and entering city limits without a pass!! Open up!!"

It is not until Logan slides his arms around me, pulling me back against his chest, whispering (it's okay, I got you Marie) that I realize I am shaking. No just at the fingers, anymore. Entire arms and shoulders.

We move back into the corner, the camouflage of shadows. We are digging into the trenches; climbing into the foxholes. Securing the helmets, pulling the pins out of the hand grenades. Counting to three.

Three.

/Pounding, muffled thud like a hammer striking a coffin, then a crack; the door splinters, soon it will break down the middle and they will be climbing over the fortifications and we will be at war./


Two.

/Palms sweating against the gloves, his arms unwrapping from my shoulders and moving in front of me, though his hands linger a moment longer on mine. Fingers wrapped through fingers, locked. Questions, answers.

"Are you still here, Logan?"

"Yeah, baby. Right here."

"You won't let me go?"

"I won't."

"Do you think they got Scott and Jean?"

"No. I think they got away. "

"So do I."/

One.

/The warmth of his body moving away from mine, into a standing position, taint of metal in the air as the claws are released. I'm on my feet behind him, still talking. Last words. Everyone deserves them.

"I was wrong before, when I told you what my best day was."

"How?"

"This is the best day."

"Why?"

"Because it's the day that we are most alive. Right now. This moment."

"I love you, baby."

"You finally got around to saying it again, huh?"

"It's okay if it's just me. I'd understand--"

"I love you."

"Just remember it, okay?"

"Couldn't forget it, darlin. Not even when I wanted to."/

Zero.

Explosion.

/Hands legs bodies pouring through the door too many, too dark to see but the glare is blinding flashlights in the eyes a dirty shot now someone's switched the lights on oh God there are so many they aren't firing they really do want us alive he's in the middle can barely see him through the thick and what are those metal things, cattle prods he can't fight that I have to get the gloves off have to do something leave him alone don't hurt him hurt me instead Logan let me help But. I. Promised./

When the end comes, it is like the final movement of a Beethoven concerto. Prestissimo furore: very fast, with fury. But at the same time very distant and slow as if I am sitting in the far back of the auditorium, picking out each individual note and slur of phrasing. A crescendo, a deafening forte, then silenzio. Silence.

Forgive me, I forget myself and slip into music. This is what really happens--

Logan falls, inevitably. First to one knee, then to the side, and then the cattle prods finish him off although it takes longer than it should. There is blood, too much. This I do not watch, not entirely; when I open my eyes again they are twisting his arms behind his back, wrapping them around a steel bar placed over his shoulders. Manacles at the wrists, all the better to cut off the circulation.

When they turn to me, I expect a deluge, but instead there is a pause. A fermata, I would say, if this was a concerto. But it is not and I am not to speak of it as such again. I hold my hands out, in front of me, a gesture of surrender. Of emptiness but also of defiance. If I have nothing then that is all they can take away.

"Hands behind your head!! Up against the wall."

I move my hands behind my head, slowly, but I do not turn to the wall. They will have to do some things for themselves. A smile, mine, complete with bared teeth, flashed in their faces. Desperation but also triumph.

"Watch the skin, sugar." I say. "It'll kill ya."

They move as one, with necessary use of force even though I am not resisting. Various points of impact-- butt of a gun in the stomach, fist gripping the hair, slamming the face and body against the wall. Another blow to the small of the back, keeping me in place while the hands run over me. Searching for weapons although they know I do not have them. Arms wrenched behind the back, metal bar shoved through, wrists locked into place.

They have not been able to determine why I am smiling; eventually they grow tired of asking and simply bloody my lip. Only this has no effect. They are too late; I am no longer here. I am somewhere entirely different. Another dimension of space, another universe.

I am standing in the back of an alley, beneath the flickering light of a broken street lamp, watching a man lead a woman through the darkness. For a moment, I see them not as I have known them, but in the way a stranger will see them.

The man's sweatshirt is too big for his frame; it hangs off the shoulders. The hood droops over his face and conceals most of the features. Especially the eyes, though you can still see the glint of dark red sunglasses if you stare hard enough. Street trash, most likely, a coke addict or heroin junkie, they're a dime a dozen these days. The oversized shirt will hide the puncture marks in the arms, the bruises on the ribs from the pimp or the loan shark. The sunglasses will hide the burned-out eyes. The vacant stare.

Then the woman, baby on her hip, a cracked vinyl purse slung around her elbow. Pretty enough, beautiful even. She doesn't quite match the cheap cotton halter dress, which is out of season. Doesn't she know that winter can get cold, even in the desert? Just another white trash attempt at style. Those kind would shave their legs with beer bottles just to save the cash.

Both the woman and the man are pathetic. Bland. Invisible in plain sight. Safe.

I smile. They are going to make it.

But now we are moving apart; their figures deeper and deeper into the blackness of the alley and myself deeper and deeper into a blackness of an entirely different sort. I open my mouth to call out a farewell, a last word.

(We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.)

This is what I want to say, but there is no sound. No sound at all.

One last glimpse of them, but it is strange. They are passing beneath a street lamp, a wash of quicksilver outlines their silhouettes with dim light. An eerie glow, as underwater. Wavery, indistinct, undefinable.

This is my final impression of them, which precludes memory. Three words.

Waterlogged. Drowned. Shining.

Aren't we all.

Epilogue : Marie

How did the end surprise you both? How did it form, how did it coalesce? What decided that you should live, that you should be given a second chance?

Escape was never questioned; it happened, sooner or later, though you cannot tell which. There are numbers on your wrist, which certainly would point to later, but no scars cement the theory. It is immaterial, the exact details. You have learned he will only let you remember so much anyway. If you try to cross the boundaries, there is a barrier, a wall within your mind. It takes the form of his presence (so much stronger now, another point of suspicion. You imagine this is the reason you have no scars; he stole them all.) It takes the sound of his voice.

/Let it go, Marie. It's over. We have other lives to live now./

Yes, you would say, but what about your old lives? What if you forget them? Does it mean they never existed, that you never knew the people involved? You will always have tomorrow; a whole string of them piled end to end. It's yesterday that's in constant jeopardy. Endangered.

All of your new memories are south of the border.

You remember the back room of an old stucco church that smelled of chickens and stale incense. Twenty miles outside of Mexico City, or maybe thirty. A new pink sundress is involved, as is an exchange of words followed by the kissing of the bride. The rings come later; at that point he can't afford them. It took everything he had just to get you both out of the States.

You remember the honeymoon: three hours in a dusty motel room. Afternoon heat sliding through the metal fan blades, quivering waves of light above the curve of the sheets. Outside it is one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade. A radio plays to hide the rattle of the fan and a woman sings in Spanish, which neither of you understand. Not that it matters; you aren't listening to the music anyway.

You lie on your back beside him, your skin sticks to the sheets and to the mattress as you hand him another piece of ice. Passing it between your palm (bare) and his (bare) until a second skin of moisture forms. Through this, you are allowed touch. In this manner you share an entire bucket of ice, letting the chips melt on your foreheads, down your necks, across your mouths.

The room is golden in the sun. He is golden in the sun. You smile.

The metal fan blades spin circles in the stagnant air and the light runs off the sides of the bed into shadow and for the first time you can remember, he smiles back.

There are other memories, less involved. The three months, five months, nine months as nomads, wandering from town to town, eventually from country to country. A slow but steady draw to the south that stopped, at last, in a three room flat in Panama City. The water tastes of iron and the cockroaches are the size of your hand but there is no need to look over your shoulders. No need to wonder if they will catch up with you, somehow. That was always a fear, even in Mexico; it was too close.

In the two months after you move into the flat, other signs of normalcy appear. Jobs surface, some more legal than others, but he isn't in a place to choose and you aren't in a place to complain about his methods of provision. After all, it takes money to live, and there will be additional expenses in the near future: your stomach has begun to swell, and every so often something inside it kicks.

A baby girl, or at least that's what the old woman who lives across the hall claims. She hands you packets of dried herbs to put under your pillow (to ward away the spirits) and woven charms to hang in your window (to bless the ancestors) and a crucifix to nail by your door (to garner the aid of the Holy Mother.)

You draw the line when she wants to rub corn whiskey on your womb. Your Spanish may have improved but your enthusiasm for the local customs has not.

(But it will give the nina strength,) she says, bone arms waving energetically from the folds of her shawls. (Strength and good lungs.)

(If she takes after her father, she'll be strong enough without whiskey. Ah, he is a strong one, your hombre.
If I were younger, and still had all my teeth, I would give you a run for that one. Believe it or not, I was beautiful too once. A very long time ago, before the children widened my hips. You must watch the hips, after the birth. They will want to swell. But there are charms to prevent it. You would like them?)

(I would.)

(Ah, good. Now you must drink this tea. It has a very strong herb in it and will take away the aching of the back.)

In a way she is a fairy godmother-- pesky and a nuisance and persistently underfoot but always bearing some sort of redeeming gift. The tea, after all, does make your back ache less.

And so time continues to go by, always in the present, always moving to tomorrow. The past is over, he says, let it go.

But you can't, not entirely. There are still afternoons when you wonder what happened to the others, the man and woman and child. It is easiest to believe that they made it out, just as you have, that somewhere Jean is having the same trouble making tortilla shells as you are, that Scott is as frustrated as Logan at the newspapers that are entirely en espanol. It is simple to build for them an entire life, a decidedly happy ending.

Although there are other ends to the story, not so picturesque.

There is no use wasting time between the two, because you will never know for sure. You will never see them again, even if you sometimes think you spot one of them in a crowded market. You will never be able to ask (did you make it?) because if they did then they will have disappeared. Just like you, they will have packed up their old lives and stacked them on a shelf. They will have moved on, but not completely. At times, at stray moments, they will catch themselves wondering the same things about you. They will think you are alive, or they will think you are dead. It is that simple.

In the end, you decide you do not need the truth. And you're not looking for a happy ending. Happiness will never be there, not in completion, there will always be things like pain and hard days, and nightmares. The numbers on your wrist, for instance, will not go away nor do you really want them to. You want proof, of some sort, that you have survived. You want something to tell the children.

And what will you tell them? How much, how little? Not all of it, certainly. Some things are meant to be buried, kept secret, taken out only between you and your husband and even then very quietly.

You will tell them this--

The point of this story, of any story, is not the ending but the journey. It is the people you meet, those you hate and those you fear and those you love. It's the love that will get you through, it always has before. Don't worry, you will say, if it seems to disappear because it is only in hiding. It can be found again, by looking. Or by opening your eyes to see what is already there, what you have forgotten.

Yes, you will tell them this.

Even though you do not know how your story ends, you are sure you will find out eventually. You are sure, as well, that you will never be alone, not anymore. You believe it; he has promised.

And what more do you need? You know enough to live. No more is needed, no more is asked.

The End