"Margery's wingspan's all feathers and coke cans, and TV dinners and letters she won't send"
—Counting Crows `Another Horsedreamers Blues'

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Her hand shakes slightly with every sweep and she can't seem to still it, so the words she writes smudge and blur under her uncertain hand. When her mind stops racing long enough to actually read what she's written, she curses silently, crumbling up the paper and picking up her lighter to burn it before dropping in it the trash can. Ink stains the side of her hand and she tucks it against herself to hide it out of sheer embarrassment. It doesn't work. She clenches it into a tight fist.

"Put out that cig girl, you know I can stand the smell." Jubilee groans from the depths of her cavern of blankets and pillows, constructed to block out the light from Rogue's dresser. "Go to sleep. God, what is time it? Oh god, four in the morning, you know some people actually get to sleep at night!"

"Sorry, today was just a little rough…I just…I just wish he hadn't…."

"Fuck him, Rogue. He's a jackass and doesn't even deserve to breathe the same air as you. God, I can't believe the nerve of that boy,he was just shoving her in your face to get you all riled up." She practically spits out the last words and then in a sad voice continues. "And didn't he do just a bang up job of it. Well sugar, you know what I say. Fuck him. Bobby can be such a….a fucking dick."

"Well I think that was the whole point of dating him, Jubilee." She says this with a small smile before Jubilee sends one of her pillows flying and Rogue is struck square in the head. Rogue tries to look angry but they only break out into fits of giggles.

"Damn girl, I did not need that image in my head before I go to sleep."

"I hope not!"

"Go to sleep! We have school tomorrow and we still have to deal with him in the morning."

"Don't remind me."

"Sleep!"

She quickly shuts off the light and rolls over on her side. Tonight had been awful, she had had lots of those with Bobby recently, but none had been as bad as this one. This one had sent her back into old habits that she thought she had killed. She thought she had grown out of her little nightly ritual. But there she was, writing to him, writing to the man who would never return. She had been such a fool when Logan was here, hanging on his arm, leaning in far too close when she talked to him.

She was a `kid' to him and she knew it, but she always thought given time he could see past the permanent image he had plastered in his mind of the needy, helpless child. And when he left the last time she had to bite her tongue to stop herself from begging him to stay. Because she would not, could not, dirty her knees by pleading for him to stay.

She wrote him every night saying everything she hoped would bring him back to her, but she never sent them. She'd even gone as far as to write on them the last address she had gotten from him, but she ended up only stuffing them into a small box under her bed.

That one box turned into many before the letters slowly stopped. She could not longer spout out silly childish poems of love and devotion or let slip all her young foolish dreams. Soon, though, she began keeping secrets and she knew it had to stop. She was ashamed for living a lie, for loving a man who was only a sanitized, idealized shadow-version of the man she thought she once knew.

Her last letter had ended them all, the words so hard to bring up that she kept on trying and trying until paper littered the floor. By the time Jubilee found her she was crying admidst the ruins of confetti, shreds clinging to her gloved fingers. She was crying so hard she thought that she would never stop. But she did. She stopped.

She stopped writing him - or at least she had until tonight.

"You damn fool, he's never coming back and you know that." She tries to tell herself these things but her heart does not stop pounding at the mention of his name. "He's never coming back, so stop caring."

She is startled out of her thoughts by a sudden weight plopping down on the bed beside her. "I thought we had decided on no more letters to add to the collection." Jubilee whispers and turns her friend to look into her face.

"We did, but it didn't work."

"All of this isn't good for you. Just send him one of those letters."

"Never, Jubes. I know he is never coming back, why would he? Jean is dead. What is left here for him? Nothing. Nothing is here that he needs."

"Oh nothing you say. Nothing doesn't sound right. There's you. He'll come back for you."

No. "He won't."

"Well then, who needs him?" Jubilee rises to stand on the bed above Rogue, dramatically lifting her hands to the ceiling as if she were flinging her troubles to the heavens.

"If only it was that easy."

"It can be." A slow smile spreads across Jubilee's face and she leans down to offer her hand to Rogue. "Come with me. I've got an idea." She climbs off the bed, pulling Rogue with her begins digging under Rogue's bed. Rogue watches her friend suspiciously.

"What are you doing?"

"Helping you let go."

"Oh?"

"Plus a little late night fun." And with that she pulls out a collection of old shoe boxes and Rogue gasps.

"Jubes, what are you going to do with the letters?"

"Finishing what you started and getting rid of some of my own demons," she mutters and drags out a single tattered box from under her own bed that Rogue has never seen before. The box is covered with pink hearts, yellow roses and old teen idols and she holds it in her hands as if it were the Holy Grail. Shoeboxes firmly tucked under an arm, she grabs a bottle of vodka hidden in the closet and quickly leaves the room. Warily, Rogue follows.

They end up outside the school at a metal trash can, a shot glass and lighter fluid in hand. Jubilee's eyes are on fire, fury and hope on her face as she looks up at Rogue before taking a quick gulp from the bottle. She lets it crash to the bottom of the trash can, dropping a burning match along with it into the pit. "Time to bury the past, girl, are you ready?"

When she gets a short nod in response, she hands over Rogue's boxes and opens her own, dropping the lid into the fire with a nod of pleasure as the fire burns away its flesh. She pulls out a notebook and drops it into the fire.

"Goodbye to all I was going to be, when life was easy." A laugh, "Easy, I see now, is boring, but for a while there I wished for nothing else." The fire roars with its new food and excitement fills the air, tickling at their skin, next into the fire was a small plastic ring, so tiny that Rogue wonders how it ever fit a finger let alone Jubilee's. "Goodbye to the first boy I kissed, who said I was forever his. Forever turned out to be far too long of a time. But god, that kiss, maybe all that was worth that one kiss."

A faded picture of laughing faces, she kisses it before dropping it in with the rest.

"Goodbye to failed expectations, of me missing that permanent safety net, and the father that would have loved me is spite of anything I did wrong except for the one thing I couldn't change."

She drops in the box.

"Goodbye and know that I don't fucking miss any of it. I will never think of you again."

Wiping a traitorous tear from her cheek, she looks up from the flames and whispers, "Your turn."

Rogue smiles, dropping the lid of the first box onto the flames before pausing to think. Then she pulls out a letter and opens it, laughing as she slowly dips its side into the fire to let the flames seek and lick, to begin to consume the edges of her dreams.

"Goodbye to quick glances and lingering touches that meant nothing to you and everything to me. You brought me so high before letting me fall. Goodbye to pet names and little secrets that were only for us because nobody could know you like I did. Goodbye to my cursing, grungy, smelly, perfect white knight that saved my life and stole my soul."

She dumps in the entire rest of first box, prying off lid of the next before starting up again.

"Goodbye Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, spent sitting by the window in hopes that you were on your way, all the while knowing that you had no idea what you were missing…"

She tosses in a few letters and laughs out loud at her next thought.

"Goodbye to writing letters at four in the morning to confess all of my betrayals to a love I thought we could have had."

Jubilee laughs with her, murmuring, "Thank god, you mean I might get to sleep at night? What will I do in Pre-Cal?"

The last box is opened and she holds the letters in her hands. She tosses in the last of them one by one.

"Goodbye innocence. Goodbye puppy love. Goodbye Logan."

She almost turns to leave then and there, but she stops.

"Fuck you, hero. Fuck you, coward. Fuck you and your nobility that fits to nothing but me. Fuck you and your heart that is blind to everything and everyone but the ghost of another man's wife. Fuck you for never knowing that with every glance at her you were breaking my heart. Fuck you, Logan. I hope you never return because if you do you are not like what you have left here."

Jubilee takes her hand and whispers, "This is all gone now, and the past is dust. Are you ready for the future?"

Rogue tightens the grip on her hand with resolve. "I am ready."

They turn to look up at the mansion, looming hugely in the night with eerie shadows, shrouded in mystery and yet somehow, also anchored with promise. This is their home now, their family. They are where they are meant to be.