Visceral (adj.): 1. instinctual: proceeding from instinct rather than from reasoned thinking


As they climbed aboard the Blackbird for the flight back to Westchester, Rogue flicked her hair off her shoulders, setting a fine halo of ash into a slow orbit around her head. The white lock over her brow caught the light and gleamed. She slid into the seat next to Logan, and he might have imagined a sly smile stealing across her face.

The wiry hairs on his forearms stood up. Something about the sight, the fine ash, the pale glow of her skin, the bead of sweat that called to him with salty songs of pheromones from behind her right ear, it all caught him by the base of his brain. His nostrils flared and he could smell her. Not the ash, not the ozone of a frying photocopier burning somewhere in the wreckage they were leaving behind them, not the blood and tears and sweat that accompany any fight involving the team of X-men.

He smelled… her. She caught his eye, caught him looking at her, and he could taste the flush creeping into her cheeks and the dampness just kindling. A girl like that, so young and so fine, the slightest thought of loving attention would set her to flame like a match tossed into the blowing papers that littered the office floor below them.

Storm chatted away, something about global warming or El Niño. Every time Logan turned to look at Rogue, she was looking out the window or off into the distance, but he could feel her eyes on him. Without realizing it, he held his head up straighter, his chest puffed out slightly, his legs slightly parted on the seat. He was glad McCoy wasn’t there to pick up on Logan’s own rutting scent. It was embarrassingly subconscious.

Over a girl, he thought to himself, shaking his head suddenly. A wee slip of a girl.

Visceral (adj.): 2. emotional: showing basic emotions


Rogue watched him throwing his scarred leather uniform into the bin for repair or recycling or whatever it was that happened to them. She’d never really thought about it. When she peeled her own uniform off, she still had a thin coverlet underneath, a final protection against accidentally exposing someone to her powers. She’d also picked up a serious case of body modesty, thinking of her flesh as a weapon for so long. She looked across the locker room as she slid the damp leather down over her calves.

He’s watching me, she thought with a thrill. I know that look. He’s trying to pretend he’s not thinking about a woman. Me! I’m the woman.

Against her will she laughed, a low chuckle that none but he could have possibly heard. Sure enough, when she looked again, he was staring openly, one eyebrow arched.

It made things happen inside her, not just a sexual response, but an emotional one. Her stomach fluttered with butterflies, and she could feel her heart racing.

Visceral (adj.) 3. internal: relating to one or more internal organs of the body

He stood, wearing only his black lounge pants, in front of her door. Under his sensitive toes he could feel the worn thread of the carpet. He could feel the warmth in the air that wafted under her heavy wooden door, the breath and life of her warming the very air to a degree he could sense. There was lemon in the wood polish someone had rubbed a week ago into the door and the surrounding paneling.

To the Wolverine, to Logan, the world was a sea of sensory song, an ocean of stimulation. He could smell, taste, hear, feel his prey, or his beloved. He spent so much of his time filtering out the song calling to him; it was almost a high to stand here, drinking in the feeling of the woman on the other side of the door. She wanted him, and he wanted her, or at least wanted to be wanted by her.

He raised his hand to knock, and he felt for just an instant the familiar tickle. That certain degree of flex in his wrist, of tightness in the sinew that would send the claws, snikt-snikt-snikt! And the muscle memory, a hundred times, a thousand times old, recalled another memory.

He’d been dreaming, nightmares really, of the Project, of the tank and the experiments. In his pain and remembered fear he’d cried out, and Rogue had come, seeking to comfort even as she sought comfort from him. She’d touched him, just a finger to the sheet over his chest, not even flesh to flesh.

He’d come fully awake when the old copper tang of fresh blood had sung to him, the fluttering of a heart beating its end, the muscles clenched in fear and the gut churning in pain. His claws had reached through her, and her dying body sang to him, feeling her life slipping away on the ends of his claws, all before he was even awake.

He’d shouted impotently for help. In the end, he’d saved her. His own power, the bane and blessing of healing, had saved her. She’d even understood and forgiven, after. It was an accident. He wasn’t himself. She’d startled him. These things happen.

What he’d never told her, never told any of them, was how it had felt. Through the fear and the shame and the urgent desire to do something, to help, to save her, through it all there had been the age-old song, the doe in the jaws of the wolf, the last sighing song of the fox before the hounds. It had been death, her death, which he’d felt, and he’d drawn it close like a familiar lover. It had taken a moment of will, an act of volition to drown out the song of death and to call for help.

He’d had his claws into Rogue’s heart and lungs and life, and he’d loved it. A part of him, a small part but vital to who he was, had loved feeling death, any death, even her death. It’s what he was for.

I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds, he quoted to himself.

He’d felt her dying on his claws, and he’d liked it. He’d never let himself be that close to her again. With an ancient sigh, he turned, and stalked silently back down the hall to his room.