PROLOGUE:

How much time had gone by since his departure? She didn't know for sure, at some point she had stopped counting. Days? Weeks? Months? The only thing that was clear in her mind was that it had been a long, long time. Too long.

There was a time when her hopes were high, alive... she had the firm conviction that someday she would open the door and he would be standing there, with those eyes of his and that tired smile that shone within them every time he looked at her. She had planned every detail of the encounter, every word, every action... but nothing ever happened.

The time crawled slowly behind her window, and still nothing. Not even a phone call, a letter, a message, a signal. Nothing.

And hope began to slowly die in her heart. She stopped running to the door every time someone called. Her heart didn't beat so fast anymore every time the phone rang. She quit searching the mail twice looking for a letter that never came, bringing her news about him. And her life slowly descended towards a black void.

It was then when, in her mind, the little voice woke. It came suddenly and spoke with rage one day while she had been crying alone in her room.

"You weren't good enough for him to stay. You aren't good enough for him to come back," It said. And she didn't fight it, because it was the voice of her mind and she truly believed that it spoke the truth.

"You aren't pretty enough..." and she began going to the gym a lot and eating very very little.

"You aren't smart enough..." and she would spend hours and whole days studying, not sleeping for several nights, drinking too much coffee and beginning to smoke in the process.

"You aren't strong enough..." and she found herself spending every second of her spare time in the Danger Room. Exhausted, sweating, some days her vision blurred for even minutes... and she kept on fighting the holographic enemies anyway.

"... No, never good enough..." and so, her body kept on wearing out little by little...

---

CHAPTER 1

Twenty minutes. He had been staring at the almost full jar of beer for good twenty minutes.

He wasn't paying attention to the soft music playing in the background of the pub, nor to the quiet conversations between the few people that were in it. He wasn't even thinking about the smoke-filled air and the cigarette in his hand he had apparently forgotten to light

There was nothing in his mind but a name and a feeling he couldn't quite define. A voice in his mind had screamed her name, leaving his soul ice cold and his heart beating with an intensity that left him breathless, sitting still for twenty minutes --staring, not moving, not listening, not thinking of anything else.

~Marie...~

Now --in the deep of the night, and almost three years after his departure from Xavier's school--, it was like her name was calling him, beckoning him away from the smoke-filled air, the paltry candles and neon, the small pub in the middle of nowhere. Drawing him.

He stood up and left a couple of Canadian dollars on the table along with all that was left of the beer and the unlit cigarette. He rushed up to the exit, and once on the outside, grabbed his bike. It wasn't the one he had 'borrowed' from Scott though he wished it was, that one was faster than this old junk he had won in a poker game a year ago.

Without so much as a second thought he set his course to Westchester County; his little angel needed him.

---

The air was cold and the sun hadn't come up yet. Early morning, silence and the huge mansion standing before him. At last.

He had been traveling without rest for the last four days, pausing only when he ran out of gas, sleeping eight hours in four days. Always in a hurry. Always with that bad feeling roaming his mind.

And now he had arrived. It was funny, he was afraid to knock on the door.

He didn't have to though. Ten seconds after his arrival at the front door, a woman he knew all too well opened it. She had hair like fire and her features were delicate and beautiful, like a china doll come to life.

"Jean," he recognized her.

Any other day just the fact of seeing her again would have awakened his lust, desire and everything else he once thought he felt for her.

Not today.

He looked carefully at her, noticing all too well the trace of many sleepless nights under her eyes. Her skin was whiter than usual.

"We have been waiting for you," she said, and then added on the verge of tears, "I'm so happy that you finally came."

Something must have gone very wrong.

He stood there in silence, afraid to ask, afraid to move, afraid to even breathe. ~Damn.~ He wasn't a man who let fear to affect his life. Never had. But now he couldn't even find his voice, his body didn't seem to be responding to his brain. Fear that compressed his soul. ~Damn!~

"We tried to contact you," Jean kept on telling him, "I tried to send a telepathic message to you, but you were blocking everything out, every signal... not even the Professor was able to break through. Then Cerebro determined that you were heading towards here. So we waited..."

"What happened?" He barely managed for his voice to come out.

Jean looked at him in a nervous way, as if trying to decide to tell him something or not.

"Logan," she finally said, "Please come inside. We need to talk."

---

Patience had never been a quality in him, but after two years and nearly eight months of fruitless search, he had learned to cope with frustration. So, he had just nodded and followed Jean inside the mansion. In silence. His nervousness increased by the fact that Marie was nowhere in sight.

Now he was standing in Xavier's studio. The first sunbeams had begun to enter through the windows and the room was well illuminated. Nobody seemed to notice though. Xavier sat behind his desk and something that seemed like a man covered with blue fur stood beside him. He wasn't very tall and wore glasses and a lab coat; Jean had told him his name was McCoy. Dr. Hank McCoy. Scott and Ororo weren't there.

"Logan," Xavier began, "We have been waiting for you." And then he went on saying that he wished this encounter were under happier circumstances, yada yada yada. Xavier's style. Long speeches, nice words. Logan wanted none of it, all this dilation was driving him nuts.

"What happened to her?!" he demanded in a voice that sounded a little rougher than he had intended, cutting off the Professor in the middle of a sentence.

"Rogue is sick, Mr. Logan." The blue man by the name of McCoy said sadly "*Very* sick."

His world began spinning and he heard his own words as if they were somebody else's.

"How bad is it?"

This time it was Jean who answered. "Very bad," she said, almost crying, "She could die anytime now."

---

CHAPTER 2

He didn't know how he was supposed to feel. He didn't know what to do. All of a sudden, the four days of continuous travel made themselves felt all over his body.

"Where is she?!" It wasn't a question but a demand.

"As of now her condition has become near to stable," McCoy began, "She is still --"

"I asked where the HELL IS SHE!" he couldn't help it, rage was the only way he knew to deal with pain.

"Logan *please* calm down," Xavier said with a voice soft but commanding.

He didn't calm down though. Marie --*his* Marie-- was dying and they wanted to sit down and chat? No fucking way!

"Listen, bub, I *have* to see her, got it? You don't wanna tell me where she is, fine. I'm gonna go find her myself" and with that he stormed out of the room.

---

~Whereareyouwhereareyouwhereareyou.~

He looked for traces of her scent in the air, on the walls, in the floor, everywhere. He had been so close to her, had gotten to know her so well in so little time. He had cared about her, promised to protect her. And he had left her stranded. Now she was on the edge of death and he couldn't find her, couldn't even feel her.

"Logan!" Jean's voice interrupted his frantic search.

"If they sent you to stop me--" Metal claws came out, making physical the pain of his soul.

"It's alright. It's alright." she said softly, soothingly, "We're not trying to stop you."

His eyes met hers with skepticism.

"Trust me," she added, and he needed only the look in her eyes to know he could. "I'll take you to her."

---

Oh yes, she was there, before his eyes and only a couple of meters away from him. But --as he so very well knew-- Universe was a heartless bitch. So, even though the only thing he really wanted in that moment was to be near her, he had to resign himself to just look at her through a glass window.

And, damn... she looked *really* bad..

She was surrounded by what looked to him like thousands of machines. And she was connected to nearly all of them.

He heard McCoy saying something about bacteria attacking her system, about her defenses not being strong enough to stop it and antibiotics not being of any help. He just stood there and nodded slightly when each one of McCoy's phrases ended, half-listening to them. His eyes were unable to tear themselves away from the still form beyond the window.

A voice reached him, soft and tired. It was Jean's voice and it told him about how Kitty had found Rogue in the room they shared, that she had been in great pain for at least an hour but hadn't wanted to go to the infirmary or ask for help. It told him of the odd results of the analyses, about Jean's not letting her go away, because the bad feeling she had about it ".after the last two times..." And when he heard Jean's voice saying that, he began to pay far more attention to her words.

"I. basically kept her in the infirmary against her will. I wanted to run even more tests on her. I just *knew* something was very wrong with her."

Jean paused and he could feel her staring at him, "Thirty minutes later she was in coma."

"She underwent respiratory arrest, Mr. Logan" McCoy said, his voice so collected it almost annoyed him, "It was caused by the bacteria I already told you about. The big problem we have now is that her body isn't exactly cooperating with us. and without a miracle, she will lose the battle." He stepped closer to Logan, "So, Dr. Grey suggested to telepathically contact our miracle, but since Cerebro determined you were already on your way here."

Logan tore his eyes away from the still body beyond the glass window and looked at Jean, then at McCoy. Then at Jean again. Yes: they were almost, smiling.

"Logan," Jean said stepping closer to him, and if he didn't get claustrophobic with her and McCoy so close to him was just because of the hope in Jean's eyes. And he finally got it, even before she said another word.

"You want me to touch her"

---

He went through one of the most exhaustive sterilizing process he had memories of, and he endured it almost patiently. almost.

When all finally ended, he put some sterilized clothes on and entered the bubble they kept his Marie in. The place smelt clean -- residues of a lot alcohol, recycled air, hyper sterilized cloth, hyper sterilized people. Marie's body couldn't afford to fight another enemy now, even if it was only flu.

He came closer to her --she was so pale and so thin. A tube entered her open mouth...~an artificial respirator.~

Carefully, tenderly, he reached out to her, not even pausing to think that the last time he had done this she had almost killed him. It didn't matter. Right now the only important thing was her, Marie, the girl he had subconsciously come to call 'little angel'.

"C'mon kid," he whispered, placing his hand on her forehead, "wake up."