He wasn't like Logan: blue eyes, soft chin, satin hair.

He was just learning his own strength and had the controled voice of a leader, was destined to be someone like Scott Summers. He looked good in the X-Men uniform, moved and reacted with a deliberate swiftness.

He courted her, yes, but didn't crave her madly. She could see some romantic heart in him that liked the idea of being in love with a girl and her lethal touch.

He wasn't like Logan: no primal outbursts, no stink of cigar, no penetrating glares that snagged and lingered and exposed.

He was young, her physical age. She was older than most gave thought to. The second hand experience she found in herself was heady and at times she felt like being "reckless." He feared that in her, discouraged it with the marquee of reason scrolling across his tender gazes and frustratingly light touches.

He wasn't like Logan: stable, boyishly passionate, resigned.

He wasn't overt about the tactile side of their relationship, didn't actively pursue getting around her mutation. He accepted it as a fact and possibly preferred it that way.

He took time making his decisions, stuck with what he said. He read books and was involved in political rallies. He spoke too gently to her when they were curled up beside the bay window of the dining hall.

She loved Logan, but no longer with a simmering bite that chattered through her veins and heart. She loved Logan with a sadness that would come to be her greatest obstacle in the field and in her personal life. How much personal life could a thieving leper have anyway? She infected and robbed.

No sane person would risk themselves in the gulag made out of her self-pity.

Logan wasn't sane; he fit part of that requirement, but Logan would not stand for constant "woe is me". She knew he felt for her lot in life, had begrudgingly opened his heart to some strange, cloaked creature with a penchant for being immune to the Wolverine's aggression. He had promised her, though.

She knew he had nobility in him, some kind of integrity and honor... did it hurt him to leave or did he even realize he was breaking that promise? Dog tags or no.

Six months and some useful classes later, she found solace in a dollar package of Stanford razors. Five razors and she was ready, meditation done, mental walls constructed. The cuts started with curious abandon, started at the inside of her left arm at the side of her wrist. As time progressed, the skin she hated so much became marked with more precise, deliberate strokes.

Beads of scarlet stained sunless skin in a repetitive albeit morbidly fascinating pattern: vertical, one after the other, evenly spaced, some tilted lending an appeal she didn't think would surface in her venture to take some of her melancholic anger out on the source of her pity party.

She no longer sought Jean for more experiments to find a "cure". She'd given up hope and felt herself slide into a paranoid, base groove in which not even blue-eyes Bobby could find suitable to his romantic pallet.

Of course, no one knew. That was the point of waiting and learning to partition her mind and to control her broadcasts.

Methodic, soothing and breaching on sexual, her time with Stanford and skin became the most cathartic she'd ever experienced, leaving her eyes sharp, perceptive and challenging. She felt she could deal with what the bitch called Life dealt her.

But as she lay there in the darkness of her own room feeling the sensual stings tickling her arm, she wondered if he would come back, and sometimes -- only sometimes -- she would pillage his memories, set them in order and play out the pieces of Logan she cherished and hated at once. She hated that she had access and that she could not control herself. Somehow, though, she found a doable existence.

While she cut by night, she pondered on her future during the day, working hard in classes. Would she become a career woman or stay with the X-Men? She didn't know, but to everyone else around her, she appeared to have found a new Faith in living as Rogue.

Marie was for Logan... but what Rogue didn't realize was that Marie was dwindling; with every step forward, Marie was left just that much farther behind. No rough cheek or gruff front had been there to keep Marie feeling like she had a place; in more truthful terms, Logan hadn't been there. She didn't blame him no matter how much she wanted to, but that was among the last vestiges of the Marie he knew...

...of the Marie he wouldn't be there to love. Half a year and he hadn't found anything. No, they had found him.

At first, it seemed he'd really discovered his origins or at least where his origins had been burned away. He felt a sick hope as he was led down the water outlet; the men responsible for the senseless raping of his identity and perhaps his eventual pseudo insanity would see their due soon.