'Who rules the heart,
With bands of iron to constrict each beat,
Words and rules written by anothers will,
Whom never feel the pain of their actions.'

**********************************************************

When he'd seen her stood there, he'd thought Sabertooth had given him more of a beating than he'd realised and he was seeing things. It was only when she'd moved to kill the man at her feet that he'd realised that she was real. Marie was stood there a man at her feet, her scent filled with anger and hatred.

She'd looked so fragile to him at that moment; as if he could've broken her with a breath. Thing was the Blackbird's camera's had seen her, recorded her arrival and her take down of a FOH member. It recorded his reaction to her and his telling her to run, to get away so he would take the burden of her kill. Xavier hadn't been pleased with him, neither had Scott when Kitty was still in Med Bay after four hours with a head injury she'd suffered because she'd been protecting him.

Scott had told him to get his priorities straight, he was part of a team, he was an X-Man first, a friend second, then he was allowed to think about *civillians*. The way Scott spat the word at him made Logan's blood boil, if Marie hadn't stepped in when she had Kitty might have had more than a concussion to worry about.
But he'd kept his council, been silent while they both chewed him out. Inside he'd been thinking about Marie, what she'd been doing since she'd left. She'd told him she was leaving and he'd understood why she'd gone, it wasn't her home anymore. No matter if it was still *his*; she'd had to find her own way in the world and he wasn't going to spoil it for her by checking up on her movements.

But this had changed everything, her willingness to come to his aid, to help him even when she wasn't a mutant anymore. That had to count for something didn't it?
So he took their small minded views and threw them out as fast as they gave them to him, that she was a risk, a danger to operations if she got killed. That someone would find out she'd once been a mutant and an X-Man and she'd been killed because of her decision to be human. It was bullshit and they all knew it but it was a spin that encouraged fear on both sides. And Xavier loved to use 'spin' just as much as the human press did. If they saw her again they were to take her out quietly and remove her risk.

To Logan he thought her willingness to fight alongside them would've been a PR goldmine, a human willing to fight *with* mutants instead of against them. Xavier had called him naive, he'd given him the finger in his mind and seen the smile waver for a second before he'd left to find her.

As he drove out of the mansion his mind suddenly flooded with all the rules and regulations the place put on him. Sometimes they got too tight and he ran for a while, like a dog on a long leash he'd always come home but he had a feeling finding Marie just might snap the ties that bound him here.
Turning his face to the wind he drove off into the night determined to find her.