*


“What grief displays … is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control … Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”


*


When she sees him walking down Polk Street, she thinks to herself, No, it can’t be, it’s not.

When she sees him in Golden Gate Park, playing chess with an older Chinese man, she thinks, What are the chances, there’s no way, it’s just an old man, you really are going crazy, Jesus.

When she goes into Bob’s Donuts at midnight, hungry, lonely, half-ready to lie down in traffic but distracted by the fragrance of fried dough and sugar, she sees him sitting alone at the long bar, a half-eaten pastry and a cup of coffee in front of him, watching a police drama on the old television mounted on the wall.

And when turns his head towards her as if she has called him by name, she stops, startled, wondering if she had.

They stare at each other, until he gestures to the seat next to him and she moves towards him as if pulled by an invisible wire. On the countertop, she places her own plate, her own cup of coffee, then sits down.

She thinks, idly, Were his ears always so big?

He glances at her plate, sees the apple fritter on it, then looks down at his plate. Then he picks up what is left of his own apple fritter and, before taking a bite, he says, in a voice that not so long ago apologized for her impending death, “Well, you have very good taste, my dear.”


*


She spends less than a month at the mansion after taking the cure. Enough time for eight disappointing sex acts with Bobby before they sheepishly agree to be friends; enough time for every encounter with Storm to end in a throat-clearing and a suddenly pressing obligation to get to some classroom, some training session¸ some meeting.

Enough time to watch the Italian prime minister make a tight-lipped public apology for the comments a microphone had recorded him making during the U.N. General Assembly, describing the new U.S. ambassador with a series of racial slurs, then wondering whether ‘it’ can be ‘caught through contact.’ Enough time to join the chorus of outrage the young students direct towards the common room television, as CNN replays the recording, the apology, and Hank’s official statement, over and over again.

Enough time to notice the half-beat of uneasy silence that falls over the room when she, too, chimes in with an angry protest—until Kitty finally says, too earnestly, too helpfully, “Yes, exactly, exactly, Rogue,” while everyone avoids looking at her gloveless hands.

Only Logan talks to her as if she has not changed. If they had naturally grown apart somewhat since his first return from Alkali Lake, he seems resolved to make up for that time by way of near-constant chatter. Sitting down next to her in the cafeteria for every meal, he speaks at shocking length about the new mini-refrigerator in his room, which he has obviously filled with beer; about his disdain for the World Cup fever sweeping the mansion; about what nasty injury his balls could have, might have, incurred during a judo training session with a new student, whose ability apparently consists of being able to throw skyscrapers like baseballs.

Indeed, if anyone has changed, it is him. And she is not sure if she likes this new Logan, who no longer stalks the mansion in silence but makes sarcastic quips that relax even the most fearful new children; who does not run away in the middle of the night on someone else’s motorcycle, but shows up to breakfast every morning and complains about the eggs; who is fast developing a gruff fatherly affection for some of the other female students—especially Jubilee, the only person in the mansion capable of telling a filthier joke; who never visits the garden where Jean Grey’s very specifically wounded body is buried next to two empty graves.

This Logan has thrown himself into the making of an honorable life with a determination that pains her, a determination that looks and sounds and feels more like penance.

The only thing he does not talk about is Alcatraz. At dinner they overhear someone say “Golden Ga—,” and Logan’s fists tighten around his fork and knife, and she thinks she can see three points on each hand raising, until the person finishes the sentence: “—rdens Palace, the new Chinese restaurant in town, is pretty good.”

But then, no one talks about Alcatraz. She was not there; she didn’t go through what they went through, she would not understand—no one has to say these things for her to know them.

In fact, she thinks this is the reason that Logan now spends so much time with her: because she does not know, because she was not there, because she would not understand and more importantly, would not try to. He has always trusted her to be someone who knew the importance of respecting boundaries.

But twenty-four days after she has returned to the mansion, they are in the garage surrounded by several million dollars worth of cars no one wants to drive anymore, and she asks if she can try his cigar, just to see what it’s like, and he shrugs and hands it to her.

And their fingers brush, and she feels a shiver, a buzz; less sensation than touching a hairy or callused knuckle, weaker than a static shock, and at first she thinks that is exactly what has happened, that is all that has happened.

But she knows the difference between a static shock and—something that is not a static shock.

If Logan notices, he doesn’t show it; he only looks at her hand, frozen around the cigar, and says, “Generally, people smoke it with the mouth.”


*


When it happens again two days later with Bobby, towards the end of disappointing sex act number eight, just before their final break-up, she knows for sure.

She does not know how much time she has. A month, several months, a year? Listening to her body, she would not give herself more than six months.

Six months of rapidly disappearing touch. Six months until this flat and still flesh will start to hum and buzz with hunger, and she will once again have to shroud it like a corpse. She has a bag half-packed before she realizes what she is doing or where she is going.

In Xavier’s former office, she tells Storm that she is leaving for a few months. She lies badly, shamelessly: she says that she has been in contact with her parents, that she has told them what she has done, that they want to her to visit again, and since it’s been so long, she’d like to see them.

Storm says nothing, but stares at her for a long time. It is the first time the older woman has looked at her without disdain or pity in weeks.

At first, she thinks Storm is going to apologize for her reserved behavior these past weeks, and she is not sure if she is pleased or annoyed by the possibility. But when the apology does not come, she opens her mouth to finally ask the Storm what the hell the matter is—until it hits her like a bullet, what the hell the matter is.

She says only, “You know, then.”

Storm hesitates, presses her lips together, and finally says, “I talked to Hank a couple days ago. He mentioned a couple days ago that a friend of his, who, who, who also chose to—”

And here she makes a gesture with her hands, instead of saying the words. As if they are profanities.

“This friend has experienced some weakening of the cure’s—effectiveness.”

She does not know how to respond to this. She looks past Storm, at Xavier’s old desk, where a vase of white lilies stands next to a framed crayon drawing of a thundercloud and a lightning bolt. Where an ergonomic desk chair with a small white suede jacket draped over its back sits instead of a wheelchair.

Finally, Rogue says, “I’ll be back in a few months. Maybe half a year.”

The number seems to match the one Storm already has in her head, and her face softens in joy and relief. “In a few months,” she repeats softly.

“Maybe half a year,” Rogue adds, not softly at all.

Storm clears her throat, starts making suggestions, recommendations, assurances. She tells her to feel free to use the ATM card she was given as a student a couple years ago; tells her that she will make sure there are enough funds to support her; waves a hand when Rogue protests. She tells her to take her cell phone, to keep in touch, to call if she ever needs anything or if she encounters any trouble.

Rogue says she will, though she was not planning to take the cell phone at all; now she knows that, having made this promise, her conscience—along with some twisted sense of filial piety—will force her to put the phone in her bag, even if she never brings herself to turn it on.

Then Storm steps towards her and, unexpectedly, hugs her. Rogue can feel the woman’s cheek on her ear, through her hair. She wants to hug her back, wants to slap her hard across the face. Instead, she remains still and silent in Storm’s circle of arms, breathing in her perfume of gardenia and jasmine and sandalwood, realizing for the first time that Storm is now shorter than she is.

“You come back to us when you’re ready,” Storm says, and the gentleness in her lovely voice now hurts far more than the distrust and regret in her lovely voice last week.

Rogue turns to leave, and just as she opens the door, Storm asks, “Are you taking Logan with you?”

She chokes on something that could be laughter, but isn’t. She swallows, then says, “No, of course not. Why would I?”

Then something passes over Storm’s face that is not joy, not relief, not distrust, not regret, not disdain, not pity; something Rogue cannot read, and from which she turns away before she is tempted to try.

She tells Storm, “I’m not even planning on telling him before I go.” She turns back around and opens the door to leave. “And I would appreciate it if you didn’t tell him where I’m going.”

“But I don’t know where you’re going,” Storm calls after her, but Rogue is already shutting the door.

She goes to her room, and, using a laptop bought for her four months ago by Xavier and which she then packs into her bag, she books a one-way flight, leaving early the next morning. It is terribly expensive. Last time she checked, there was at least ten thousand dollars on this checking account, much of it old cage-fight money contributed by Logan as a vague gesture towards ‘college.’

At dinner, she meets Logan, as usual. This evening the cafeteria is serving chicken teriyaki or stir-fried tofu and vegetable noodles. Logan is always in a good mood on teriyaki days. He takes two servings and by the time he has finished the first one, he has already described three defensive failures witnessed during his afternoon lessons.

She must be looking at him strangely, because he interrupts his own story to say, “Food on my face or something?” She shakes her head.

She is thinking of something she overheard Scott saying to Logan, just before he disappeared. Not everybody heals as fast as you, Logan.

When Logan is finally quiet again, or quiet enough to chew a mouthful of chicken, she comments, “You’ve been talking a lot more recently.”

He retorts, “Seemed like you forgot how. I like to teach by example.”

She snorts. Then she thinks, I’ve never thought of you as a teacher, either.

What are they to each other now? She has watched him trade affectionate insults with Jubilee and Kitty, but it has never made her feel jealous, the way she felt jealous when she saw Kitty skate into Bobby’s arms. Watching Logan not-so-reluctantly play the cool older brother to the other girls has only thrown into sharp relief the singularity of their relationship; has only made her feel ever more separate, more different, and more perplexed about what it is that bonds them, and why that should continue to be so.

Across from her, Logan is sighing, now fully wearing his annoyance in an expression she finds infinitely more comforting than the dutiful-leader one he has been wearing all month.

“All right,” he says. “What the hell. What’s going on with you? It’s like you’re in another dimension, it’s starting to piss me off. You break up with the Iceman, or something?”

“Yeah,” she says bluntly, easily, with a half-chewed chicken breast in her mouth. Logan coughs on his rice, sending a few grains flying.

“Graceful,” she says.

“Fuck yourself,” he says, wiping his mouth. Then his face darkens. “You okay? What happened? He do something?”

She laughs, says, “It just wasn’t mean to be.”

Logan looks uncomfortable. If she had been Jubilee or Kitty, he would have threatened to make a nasty kebab of Bobby’s testicles; he would have stabbed theatrically at a piece of chicken and growled, until the resulting laughter carried them to another conversation topic.

He does not do any of those things now. He shovels a slightly too large bite of chicken in his mouth. “Sorry,” he mutters after several chews. “That’s a real shame.”

She raises an eyebrow at that. “I told you,” she says. “I didn’t do it for a boy.” It is the first time she has ever referred to the cure in conversation with him since taking it.

He looks at her, and she knows this look well; the look he wears when he is trying to figure out what secret she is keeping from him, and how dangerous that secret is. The way he looked at her when she first told him about her skin; the way he looked at her before he gave her the dog tags; the way he looked at her when he released his hand from Bobby’s frozen handshake; the way he looked at her when she gave the dog tags back, fleeing their home, before John wedged himself between them to fiddle with the radio. The way he looked at her just before she left to take the cure, asking if she needed a lift, already knowing exactly where she was going.

She feels him evaluating her heart rate, her breathing, her scent. She looks back at him calmly. She does not feel shy in front of him. Has not felt shy in front of him in some time.

“Fair enough,” he says, and it is the second time he has said those words to her in that tone.

It is strange to think that this will be the last conversation she will have with him before she leaves the mansion tomorrow morning. But she is almost certain she will come back. She is almost certain she will come back.

Then his voice breaks into her thoughts, and for a moment it sounds as rough and pained as it did when she first asked him if it hurt when the claws came out. He is saying, “I’ve been wondering for a while now.”

He seems to be waiting for her to say, Yeah, so she says, “Yeah?”

He clears his throat, and he almost manages to sound like the new, collected Logan again when he says, “You still have people in your head?”

She looks at him. Something in his face right now makes him look young, nearly as young as her. She thinks, if he only remembers the last eighteen years of his life, in some way I am older than him. She is going to turn twenty-one in a few months. She already knows she is not going to spend that birthday with him.

“No,” she says, more or less honestly. “You all disappeared, mostly. I still have a few memories of what I learned from back then; but I remember them like anything else, like they’re stories someone told me. Not like it’s my own memory. Which is how it used to feel, just afterwards.”

She eats a large spoonful of rice. “Not so special, really.”

Logan is still giving her that look. With his young, perfectly human face. “Oh,” he says.

They go back to eating. She thinks again that this will be the last conversation they have before she leaves. She does not know why, but she wants to give him something, a small something, a kind of parting gift, and she almost reaches out and touches his knuckles with her bare hands before she realizes that she does not want to touch him, not at all, not even a little bit. She does not want to see what the expression on his face will be if she puts her hand on his.

He was wrong, that night before she left. He is not her father, but he is not her friend, either. Two strangers who have saved each other’s lives. Knowing each other without knowing anything about each other. Sharper than love, starker than passion. Between them they have only a sort of charged distance, quiet and tense as the time inside a prayer. She wants desperately to protect that distance, without knowing exactly what it is she is protecting, like a monk watching over a relic whose original meaning has become more and more distorted with each passing generation.

So she does not touch him, but instead, says, suddenly, “You like teriyaki because I think you lived in Japan for a while.”

He stops chewing. An expression she cannot read passes over his face and she panics, thinking it looks like the answer to the look on Storm’s face that she had to turn away from, and she doesn’t want it, she’s said too much, the quiet is broken, and she hears Scott’s angry words again, Not everyone heals as fast as you, only in her head it sounds like she is now the one saying the words, and instead of a taunt, it sounds like a lament.

“Okay,” he murmurs. “Okay.”


*


The next morning she considers leaving a pair of gloves, with a note for Logan that says simply, I’ll be back for these.

The idea makes her smile. She might have done it, even six months ago. But she does not know if it is the truth. And it is not six months ago.

So instead, she leaves a duller, less poignant note on her dresser. It says: Sorry I didn’t tell you. It’s just something I had to do. Don’t be too pissed at me. Storm already knows. Don’t worry about me. I’ll try to keep in touch, so check your email once in a while; ask Jubilee to help you figure it out. Don’t be too hard on the kids—but don’t be too easy on them, either. Take care of yourself.

She doesn’t sign her name, because he never really calls her by it naturally, and she has come to accept and even appreciate that. The name Marie seems to be slipping off, like a weathered cocoon. Before taking the cure, she had entertained the sentimental notion that she would be able to go back to that name, and the girl who once wore it. It has taken her less than a month to realize her mistake. She hasn’t been Marie since Laughlin City.

And while she likes the name Rogue, it feels too formal, too distant for this note. So she leaves the note unsigned. Upon the words “care of yourself,” she has smudged the ink a little with the sweat of her bare hand, and she thinks that will be enough of a signature.

Storm has arranged for a shuttle van to pick her up and drive her to the airport, and it arrives early in the morning, when the day still looks like night, and she feels as though it is a month ago again, and she is slipping out of the house to rewire her entire life. Only then it was onto a bus that smelled of tobacco, on the way to a dank, overcrowded public health center in Washington D.C.

When she goes down to meet the shuttle van, she half-expects Logan to be waiting for her, to have smelled her, heard her; to have sensed, inexplicably, the change in the air. But at four in the morning, she is the only one awake, and the drive from upstate New York to JFK is nearly wordless, and when she sees the sun rise, she is already wondering what the sunrise will look like on the West Coast.


*


In San Francisco she stays at a Holiday Inn for a couple of weeks while she looks for a studio to rent at a price that doesn’t make her want to kill herself. She finds one that gives her only a mild rage blackout, with a building manager whom she suspects is also either a former or current mutant, if the tattoos on his neck are anything to go by. The apartment is near a street where cable cars pass, a fact which delights her like the tourist she is.

The first thing she does after she signs the lease on her apartment is purchase an economy pack of condoms, along with a box of brown hair dye to dye the white streak out of her hair. She has come to love the look of it, but it does not belong on her head right now.

She has enough money to live on without having to find a job right away, but she doesn’t know how long she will be able to tolerate living solely on other people’s money. But then she thinks, now is a good time to use up everything given to her in childhood.

It is as she is in a vintage store shopping for sleeveless tops that she sees him for the first time, walking slowly down Polk street. She sees his profile, the tweed beret he wears even in May sunshine, and she convinces herself she is imagining things.

And later that night, she orders a pizza, and when she opens the door to her new apartment, she has a terrible impulse to live out an actual porn scenario—and it works, to her simultaneous dismay and pleasure. And the first time with a stranger is already better than all the times with Bobby combined.

A week later, she sees that tweed beret again—not a beret, more like a newsboy cap—playing chess with an older Chinese man in Golden Gate Park. She hurries out of the park so quickly she practically topples a young man with glasses, walking his dog. He, like nearly everyone else she meets, is extremely charmed by her accent. When he says he lives just across from the park, she says she’d like to see his place and his face turns red, and she likes that very much.

And in less than fifteen minutes they are fucking on his couch while his Alaskan husky watches. She touches his arm and feels the ghost of a buzz, but he does not seem to feel anything, and she wonders to herself if it really is just static.

Afterwards, he says he wants to see her again, and she says she doesn’t have a California number yet, but gives him her New York number, changing just the last 7 into a 9.


*


She has had sex with six other people before Erik Lehnsherr meets her gaze in the Bob’s Donuts on Polk Street.

She has expected many things, coming to San Francisco. If anything, she had perhaps expected to see Logan here, furious, half-mad with worry, ready to throw her over the back of his bike. She admits the thought is a guilty turn-on, albeit also a terrifying one. She had dreamt of it, often, in the early months, after he had first left the mansion. But she knows it will not happen. They are not those people. She is not that girl.

She had not, however, expected to see Erik. Wrinkles on his face, white hair growing out of his ears. She had heard that he had been hit by a dose of the cure; someone told her it was Hank and Logan, but she had never asked for the details. They all assumed he was dead, disintegrated, along with the many others Jean had destroyed. More details she doesn’t know, because she wasn’t there.

So she sits down next to him and sees that they have ordered the same fried pastry, and she thinks, a little crazily, Of course. Of course.

“So the untouchable girl took the cure after all,” Erik says, smirking, taking in her bare arms, her dyed hair. “I seem to remember Pyro mentioning that.”

She looks at him carefully. She wonders how he can be here, how he has not yet been recognized, and then she thinks that if she were anyone else, she wouldn’t have recognized him, either. His face, now like a cartoon sketch of old age, weary and beaten. Wearing a newsboy cap instead of a helmet. Only his voice sounds the same. Bored, haughty, warmed by decades of rage.

He sees her looking at him and says, “Relax, child. I have no plans to hurt you.” And someone else said something like that to her, long ago.

And then she sees herself on top of the Statue of Liberty, back from the dead, seventeen years old, staring down at Logan, bleeding and unconscious; then a level lower, Erik in black, also unconscious, and they are both inside her, they have replaced her, she has been burned away.

She says, “You know it’s supposed to be temporary.”

Erik says nothing, only looks down at his hands. “Ah, yes. I’ve felt something to that effect.” He takes another bite of his apple fritter, chews, swallows. “But if you’re concerned about your noble comrades, I assure you, my dear, one lonely old man is the least of your problems.”

“I’m not so sure,” she says, and isn’t.

Erik leans on one elbow, partially covering his smiling mouth with a hand. It is a habit of his, this gesture. She knows it because she has done it too, in the days following the Statue of Liberty incident. She had looked at Xavier that way, smiling forlornly behind her hand, and she had seen the professor’s face shift and heard his breath hitch in his throat, like someone hearing beloved but nearly-forgotten music coming from faraway room.

The effect is even more charming when Erik does it. She wonders if he is going to say something about her hair, which he is studying with great amusement.

Instead his gaze moves to dart lazily around the room and he says, “Isn’t it a bit late for you to be wandering about alone like some sort of urchin? Where’s your Wolverine?”

It takes her a few moments before she is able to say, “I’m here alone. I’m living here in San Francisco for a little while.”

She wants to add, not mine, not mine, but saying it would draw more attention to it.

“Another disenchanted convert from the Xavier school of philosophical hand-wringing and physics experiments?” Erik laughs. “If you were looking for a new team to join, dear child, you’re a touch late. I’m afraid I’m done with fraternity.”

She knows this laugh, too; it is the laugh meant to anger and distance Xavier, the laugh meant to cancel intimacy. The laugh that says, like an outstretched knife, You are not better than me, you do not know me.

She stands from her stool, leaving her own apple fritter almost entirely uneaten. “I wasn’t,” she replies. “Good night, Erik.” She leaves before she can see the disappointment settle into his features.


*


She doesn’t set up an Internet or a phone account in her apartment, but when she opens her laptop, she realizes she can leech Internet off one of her neighbors’ open wireless connection, so she does.

When she checks her email, she has several messages from Jubilee, from Kitty, from Bobby, from Storm, and from Logan. She responds to all of the messages except for Logan’s, with brief assurances of good health and comfort. She still does not say where she is.

Logan has written two emails. The first one says, Hey, kid. Definitely pissed at you. And I know how to work an email account with Jubilee’s help. You ever gonna tell anyone where you are? Storm swears she has no idea, and I’m starting to believe her. The kids are becoming slightly less useless. Did you get my phone message? Take care of yourself.

The second one says, Hey, kid. Still pissed at you. I’ve been thinking about what you said about Japan. I think you’re right. Feel free to let me know if you remember more. If you want to. At least send us a sign to let us know you’re alive. Take care of yourself.

Rogue thinks she is going to respond; she even opens a reply message to Logan’s latest email.

She wants to write, yes, she remembers more about Japan; she remembers wary happiness then hysterical grief; a poisoned fiancée; another young girl who was entrusted to his care after her mother died in a collapsed building. She wants to write, it wasn’t the first time you’ve had to kill the woman you love with your claws. It wasn’t the first time you had a young girl’s life thrust into your hands.

But after staring at the screen for over an hour, she writes nothing. She sends a blank email, and hopes that can be sign enough.

Just before she goes to sleep, she remembers that Logan mentioned a phone message. Without thinking, she slips back out of bed, towards her bag. She takes the cell phone out, turns it on. The background picture is still one of Bobby in ice form, pantomiming licking her face. In the photo she is eighteen years old, grinning with her eyes closed.

She has one voicemail message, from Logan. The sound of his voice in her ear shocks her after nearly a month without it.

“Hey, kid. It’s Friday morning. Storm said you left a few hours ago. Thought I might catch you before you got on the plane. Just wanted to say safe flight. You can call if you get this. You know my number. All right. Later.” Every word is clipped, cautious, determined to conceal his anger from her.

She lets herself play the message two more times before she turns the phone off again and tries to sleep. In her head she lets herself play the message as many times as she wants.


*


The second time she runs into him is in a grocery store near her—and therefore, she realizes with great alarm, his—apartment; he, endeavoring to read the label on a jar of black cherry jam; she, in search for crunchy peanut butter. He smiles when he sees her, says, “Hello, dear girl, you look well,” as though they are old friends.

She grabs the first peanut butter she sees, rushes out. She has sex with a young man she meets in the elevator of her building, and whose apartment is two floors above hers. She is giving him a handjob when she feels the buzz again, and he yelps in pain, saying she tugged at his foreskin a little too hard. It doesn’t seem to put him off for long.


*


Several days later, she is going down on a young woman named Maria or Marisol or Marisa when she feels the buzz in her tongue, and Maria or Marisol or Marisa starts screaming, and Rogue is about to pull away in terror, until she realizes the woman is coming.

Afterwards she pops into the convenience store with a sudden craving for cigarettes and maybe a tabloid magazine, and Erik is already there, buying a newspaper. He sees her enter, greets her, “Hello, my dear.”

She ignores him, asks for a pack of Marlboro Lights and picks up an issue of Us Weekly. Some famous pop singer is coming out as a mutant.

Erik clucks his tongue, says, “Those things will kill you, dear girl.”

“If I’m lucky,” she mumbles under her breath. The shop-owner asks to see some I.D. She shows him her New York driver’s license. He looks at her, at the I.D., then back at her.

“Nice hair,” he says, pointing at the old picture. Erik bursts into hearty laughter. She scowls, slams her money on the counter and doesn’t wait for her change.

“Good night, dear,” Erik calls after her as she leaves, still laughing.

She can hear the shop-owner asking, “That your granddaughter?”


*


Then, for the first time, on a foggy day, she sees the new bridge being built where the old Golden Gate Bridge used to be, and the strange skeleton of the old Golden Gate Bridge, still partially and haphazardly collapsed onto Alcatraz. Tourist visits to the site have been completely stopped; she can only see it from afar, her eyes following the path the broken red bridge makes towards a gray speck that the fog obscures almost completely. She is not sure it is really there at all.

Fitting that she should come to San Francisco and still not be able to see it; where they fought, what they paid, what they saw when it seemed like the world was falling apart around them. She remains outside of it. The lacuna remains a lacuna.

Without knowing why, she walks as if hypnotized to a payphone nearby and calls Logan’s cell phone, hating herself for remembering the number so easily. It rings, and she stares at the old red bridge while she waits.

He picks up on the fourth ring. “Yeah,” he says.

She can hear children in the background. It is one o’clock in San Francisco, four o’clock in New York. After-school activities must be in full-swing. “Yeah,” he says again, more loudly.

She wants to say, Hey. She wants to say, How are you. She wants to say, I didn’t know San Francisco is fucking built on like, twenty-four-hundred hills, I think my calves have doubled in size.

But she says nothing. Logan pauses. “Jesus. Is that you?” he asks, and she knows that she is that “you.”

Another pause and he says, “That last email you sent, it didn’t have nothing in it, was it supposed to be blank or was that a mistake?”

He waits, then continues, “Well, if it was a mistake, send it again, ‘cause it was blank, so I didn’t get what you wrote, if you did write something.”

Then he is quiet again, breathing steadily into the phone, and the noise fills her ear as if the breath itself has a form, as if it has crossed the country between them.

She wants to say, I did that trick with the tongue on a couple of girls last week; I remembered it, the way I told you I remember things, like it was a story you told me, but you never told me that story.

“God, is it just me or are teenagers getting stupider? There are some kids around here I wouldn’t mind reducing to a fine dice and putting into a sandwich. You weren’t anything like that, when you were their age.”

She wants to say, Magneto lives in my neighborhood, and we’re practically stalking each other.

He continues, “So I still don’t know where you are, and this phone call says it’s from Unknown. I guess if I really asked Storm, she could probably work some kind of trace on it, these phones are all so high-tech. But you don’t want that, do you?” She doesn’t respond. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

He adds, clearing his throat, “By the way, sorry I was asking about that Japan stuff, I don’t know if that was weird for you. I decided a little while ago that there was more important stuff to care about than what-fuck-all I did in my past. So just forget I asked.”

She enters another dime into the payphone. She doesn’t have much change on her; she hadn’t been planning to make this call. She only has pennies left; the phone does not accept pennies.

He continues, “Oh, by the way, I was reading some file the other day, and I found out your last name. I didn’t even know it before that. Ain’t that something?” He coughs, not a smoker’s cough. After decades of smoking, his lungs are pinker than a child’s. “It was weird. I don’t think it fits you.”

She wants to say, It’s coming back, it’s going to come back, and this might be the only chance I have to be something other than what a leap in evolution has made me.

The operator is now saying, Please enter twenty-five cents. She doesn’t have twenty-five cents.

Logan is saying, “Kid?” She places the phone back on the receiver, gently, as if she is placing it directly onto his ear, in New York.


*


She is still recovering from a spectacular orgasm in a public park, given to her by a talkative blue-haired girl, when she enters Miller’s East Coast Delicatessen and sees Erik sitting inside.

The orgasm has put her in a good mood and she is tired of avoiding him, so she orders her bagel “for here,” and crosses the restaurant to sit down in the empty chair across from him. He smiles bemusedly at her and she regrets her decision immediately, the afterglow receding from her body. “To what do I owe the—”

She interrupts him. “Are you alone here?”

He blinks. “Yes,” he replies, and there is no haughtiness or coldness in his voice, only a guarded calm.

“What about Mystique, John—the others?”

He looks at her. He seems to be surprised that she does not know. “Mystique instinctively protected me from a shot of the cure with her own body; we parted ways then. And Pyro; I lost track of him during the battle at Alcatraz. He may still be alive; I don’t know. I doubt it. Nearly everyone and everything was destroyed by Jean,” he says.

He looks older than death and young as a boy as he says, “The way she destroyed Charles.”

She swallows. She knows only that Xavier was killed by Jean, not how. She does not want to imagine, cannot imagine.

Erik continues, “I believe Mystique is still alive, and living somewhere in Southern California, at least according to recent activity on what was once our joint bank account.” He smiles. “We had several properties around the world; I live now in the one we bought here. She may live in one of the two we had in Los Angeles, or perhaps the one in San Diego. There was a particularly strong pacifist mutant community in San Diego, near the border.”

She tries not to think of Mystique’s mutation coming back, of a bare tanned leg flickering into blue scales. “And you’re not in contact with her?”

Erik looks at her. “While I was grateful for her extraordinary gesture, I was not especially sympathetic to her predicament, when she became human again before my eyes. I doubt she wants much to do with me now.”

He smiles again; he has a habit of smiling at every place in the story where she would want to drag a knife across her own neck.

She says, not knowing why she wants to know, “Weren’t you and Mystique—didn’t you—”

“My dear, are you trying to ask me if I was in love with Mystique?” His eyebrow lifted, he says, “Mystique and I shared an—arrangement.” He sounds infinitely pleased himself when he adds, “I shared a similar arrangement with your friend Pyro, when he joined us.”

Then he does that smile again, and now he mixes it with that hand gesture, hiding the smile behind his left hand, and she wishes she were Xavier, she wishes Xavier were sitting here instead of her.

He says, “As for love—I think you, dear child, ought to know better than anyone about that.”

She knows, she remembers. Whenever she masturbates, Xavier still appears in her mind more often than she can help.

She remembers the endless counseling sessions, especially just after the Statue of Liberty incident, with Logan still in the medbay, covered in scars, and the Professor in front of her in his office, wearing a silk tie that cost nearly half her rent here in San Francisco, hovering his hands at her temples, trying to separate the two men in her mind, trying to call forth the girl—

—And she would look at him and regret everything, want everything back, want another time, another world, want his legs again, broken or unbroken, again, again—

—And she would also know that all this was long over and would never be again, and hadn’t it always been more or less one-sided after all, and she must not wish for it anymore, she must put it away, she must put it away. And she would feel Erik clamping down on his own desire inside her head, Erik clamping down on every memory or wish or thought about Charles that might now be in her head, too. Erik in her head, wanting desperately to safeguard a past that he had already long-abandoned forever.

And during that first session she could only grit out, over and over, “Don’t say anything, Charles, just don’t bloody say anything in front of the girl.”

Xavier, weakly murmuring, “It’s all right, Rogue. You are here. You are here.”


*


Back in her apartment, she checks her email again. Messages from Jubilee and Kitty. In Kitty’s email, she mentions that she and Bobby have begun dating, that she tried to call, that she wanted to be the one to tell her, that her friendship means a lot to her, that she really looks up to her, that she hopes that she’ll be able to understand. It doesn’t take her long to write a short email assuring Kitty that no forgiveness is necessary, and that she thinks they will make a very good couple.

Jubilee tells her the same thing, only slightly more bitchily, and Rogue laughs, genuinely, for the first time in what feels like ages. Jubilee mentions that Logan is doing grumpily well, as always, and has fast become a beloved teacher in spite of himself, especially among the youngest kids. Jubilee says, The stick up his ass is now only maybe four inches in diameter, instead of six, so, improvements!

Then, two more messages from Logan. She wonders if he always sends messages in twos.

The first one says only, Was that supposed to be a reply? It was blank. Send it again. At least I know you’re alive.

The second one says, Hey, kid. Got your call. You really did forget how to talk. And apparently you forgot how to write, too. I don’t know how the hell you’re managing, wherever you are. Maybe you’ve joined some kind of mime troupe.

I didn’t trace the call, in case you’re wondering. So I still really don’t know where you are. By the way, I don’t know if this will bother you, but I thought I’d let you know anyway: seems like the Iceman and Kitty are an item now. You’ll probably hear it from one of the girls. Just thought you should know.

Teriyaki day today. Thought of you.

She sends another blank email, then leaves her apartment, takes the elevator two stories up, trying to remember the name of the man she fucked two weeks ago and is going to fuck again. By the time he opens the door and grins knowingly, she knows it is definitely either Byron or Brian.

Afterwards, he gives her the jar of peanut butter she left at his place the first time, and she hadn’t even realized she forgot it. She takes it back and decides to make a sandwich. She sees that the peanut butter is the natural kind; she has to stir the oil back into the dry, hardened nut paste, and as she is stirring hard with her spoon, she feels the sobbing come out of her as if from another person, and she stirs and stirs and stirs again, long after all the oil is evenly distributed and her hands are covered in grease and the sorrow that belongs to no one disappears and her swollen eyes can open and the peanut butter looks like peanut butter again.

*


She has resigned herself to the absurd twist of fate that has dropped in her in the same San Francisco neighborhood where Erik Lehnsherr now also resides. She thinks, vaguely, that it might not be fate, that there might be some kind of magnetic pull, something that drew her to this area, instead of another. Or, perhaps she has unconsciously followed some tiny, insignificant memory of this area of San Francisco, where he had long ago bought an apartment, accompanied by Mystique in the form of an older British gentleman; a memory that made this area seem more familiar, more appealing to her, more like a place she thought she would be able to live.

In any case, she now finds herself seeing him nearly every other day, in the park, or at Miller’s East Coast Deli, or Bob’s Donuts, talking, not-talking. Sometimes they end up taking the bus back together from Golden Gate Park to their neighborhood, and she thinks her life is an elaborate and painful farce as she watches a young girl who looks like Jubilee insist on giving up her seat to Erik, who sits down with a dramatic elderly-person sigh of gratitude.

One evening she asks him, “Was Xavier your first love?”

Erik looks like he wants to spit out his mouthful of apple fritter. “You have something of an obsession with this subject, it seems,” he finally manages to say.

She explains, “You were in my head; there are things I know and then there are holes. It bothers me. It’s like I forgot things that happened in my own past.”

“But they weren’t in your own past, my dear,” Erik says, a little tiredly.

Rogue glares at him. “I didn’t ask for them to be in my head, either.”

Erik raises his hands. “All right, all right. I admit defeat. I seem to be doing a great deal of this recently.”

He sighs, wipes his fingers on a napkin. “No, Charles was not my ‘first love,’ as you so mawkishly put it.”

When he says it, she blinks, knowing he is telling the truth, and then she blurts out, without realizing what she is saying, “Jean-Luc.”

Erik’s face slightly crumples at the name, and she feels as though she punched him in the stomach. She wants to take it back, she cannot take it back. She says, covering her mouth, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t—I don’t know what—”

He says, “You do know things, don’t you.”

Not a question, a statement. Without a trace of rancor or resentment. Just the starkness of that truth. She squeezes her eyes shut and says, “You don’t have to say anything more, I’m sorry.”

But when she opens her eyes, he is already smiling again, saying, “Oh, my dear girl, don’t you know better than to ask a decrepit old man to start telling stories about the past? You’ll never hear the end of it.”

He pauses, looking at her out of the corner of his eye, giving her this warning, waiting for her to tell him once again to say nothing. But she only looks at him. So he starts to speak.

“Jean-Luc was a young man I met in France, shortly after the war. The British had liberated the Auschwitz prisoners who had been transferred to Bergen-Belsen by the Red Army. I was just trying to get out of Germany; at that point everyone was trying to get to Portugal, to Jerusalem, to marry an American soldier. I don’t even remember how I got from Bergen to Strasbourg, I think I was in a car with a few other former prisoners. All I remember was someone trying to feed me a can of condensed milk, and vomiting in the car. I woke up just outside of the city; in a field by the side of the road. The people in the car must have left me for dead.

“From there, I continued on foot. I couldn’t have gone far, I could barely walk. I suppose I collapsed on the road again, and when I woke up I was in another, smaller car.

“Jean-Luc was driving, his wife Martine was tending to my wounds. When I opened my eyes I was in the backseat, just behind him. I saw him in the rear view mirror. Actually I heard him before I saw him; he was singing some old French song.

“They were driving me to their home, which, it turned out, was just outside of Paris; we must have already been driving for hours. In the car, Martine gave me three boiled eggs, already peeled, and the ugliest, toughest apple I had ever seen in my life, and I ate everything in, perhaps, four seconds: stem, seeds, everything. I would have eaten the eggshell if she hadn’t peeled it. I wasn’t even seventeen.”

She thinks, Don’t tell me that.

“They had been part of the French resistance. They seemed like gods to me. At that point Paris had already been liberated for several months, but you could have told me the planet Jupiter had been liberated; I had no idea what was going on anywhere. I didn’t speak French then, only German and Polish. Jean-Luc taught me my first words. J’ai faim, je m’appelle Max, pomme, poulet, ici, là.”

“Max?” she asks.

“The name I was born with,” he says, after a moment’s hesitation. He looks surprised at himself. He has shared that name without meaning to.

“I stayed at their home, recuperating, and then as a friend, for a little over a year. Jean-Luc never looked at me as anything but perhaps a fragile and beloved younger brother.” Erik looks down, smiles, then shrugs.

“Then I met another young Polish woman in Paris, who had also been in the camps. She was living alone with her daughter; her husband had died at Dachau. We lived together for a few years, the three of us, in Paris then in London, until my mutation manifested itself uncontrollably and I nearly killed them both. She took her daughter and ran. I was living alone in London when I met Charles. He was only seventeen. And that, as they say, was that.”

He tears a piece of apple fritter off, but does not eat it. “I sometimes think I must have seemed to Charles then the way Jean-Luc seemed to me: powerful, charismatic, passionate. Someone who had every answer to every question in the world.” He sighs. “Some of my answers disappointed him, obviously.”

She looks down at her own untouched apple fritter. “Did you keep in touch with Jean-Luc? What happened to him?” She thinks she already knows.

Erik smiles, that smile instead of a knife across his neck.

“We kept in touch. I never told him I was a mutant. He became a journalist, and was especially involved in covering the Algerian war of independence. A few weeks after the Paris massacre in October 1961, he filled his pockets with paving stones and threw himself into the Seine.”

She has never heard of the event he is talking about, but she sees it, recognizes it. Enough bodies in the Seine to dye the river red.

“So that,” Erik says, “is the story of my first love.” He bites into his apple fritter. “Though I fear it has failed to satisfy your inexplicable—though, I suppose, also endearing—thirst for romance.”

He says “romance” with an exaggerated Dracula-like accent and a flourish with his right hand.

“Thank you,” she says only.

He shrugs, and once again he looks like any old man, in a plaid wool jacket that is pilling, telling stories to his granddaughter. “What is a first love there for, anyway? To be the first, that’s all.”


*


That night she dreams of being sixteen years old and opening her eyes in a strange car and falling in love with the driver, a young man in his late-twenties or early-thirties, who is singing, along with a voice on the radio that she does not yet recognizes as Charles Trenet: “Ménilmontant, mais oui madame, c’est là que j’ai laissé mon coeur. C’est là que je viens retrouver mon âme, toute ma flamme, tout mon bonheur!”


*


She has been in San Francisco for three months now. Her white roots are showing; she dyes them again.

It is coming back faster than she expected. She was wrong when she thought she would have half a year. After sex, more and more of her partners are falling asleep, yawning, saying things like, “That really took something out of me,” while she spends a few seconds thinking in Korean before she snaps out of it and is herself again.

Over pastrami sandwiches, she tells Erik this. “It’s wearing off more and more.” In response, Erik moves his fork an inch closer to him without touching it. Then he picks the fork up, spears his pickle with it and takes a bite, eyebrow raised.


*


After fucking a young man whom she orders to remain clothed, and who yells for his mother when he comes, she goes back to a bank near her apartment and obtains ten dollars worth of quarters for her laundry. But instead of going home to do her laundry, she stops at the payphone and calls Logan’s cell phone again.

He picks up only after several rings, saying, “Yeah.” A pause, and then another, “Yeah.”

She doesn’t hear anyone behind him. It is nine o’clock in San Francisco, midnight o’clock in New York. He is probably in his room. She curses herself; she might have woken him up.

“Ah, kid,” he says. He sounds tired. He must have had a particularly trying day. He breathes out heavily into the phone, and once again she can feel it against her ear. She wonders if that is why he does it.

“Kids are still little terrors. They keep coming in here with new powers, different mutations. I couldn’t just have another who can just phase in and out of walls, or turn into metal? At least then I’d have some reference. What do you do when a kid’s body goes totally viscous, like a blob, whenever she’s upset, which is all the fuckin’ time since she got here? We all know the fuckin’ story, parents kicked me out, blah, blah, it’s the same fuckin’ story for everyone. And to top it off, the blob is fuckin’ poisonous, and sticky as hell. And the thing is, sometimes she can’t reverse it, she gets so deep into it. Then you just gotta wait it out, or worse, try to coax her out of it. If you told me a year ago I’d be trying to talk a deadly blob down from the ledge, I would’ve—I don’t know. I don’t know.”

He is rambling. Even the new, more talkative Logan, doesn’t talk like this. He sounds half-drunk, and she doesn’t want to know the quantities of alcohol that he would have had to consume to bring him to that state. She puts another quarter in the payphone.

There is a sound; she thinks it is him rubbing his beard with his hand. “Shit,” he says. “I haven’t really slept for something like a week now. Just workin’ nonstop. Seems there’s always something else to do.”

She says nothing, and he seems to be listening for her breath as much as she is listening for his. Waiting for her to speak. When he realizes she is not going to, he exhales heavily again.

“Ah, kid,” he says, and all the life has gone out of his voice. She can barely hear him; he speaks so quietly, as if every word is wounding him. “I am so fuckin’ angry at you.”

And she can expect that, already expects that, only he doesn’t sound angry at all.

“But not as angry with you as,” and here he stops talking entirely, but she can hear his trembling breath, can feel it as if it has a body, as if it is his body, against her ear. And with each breath, the sound thickens a little more, so she can hear the breaths sticking in his throat, so it sounds like he is gagging on them.

Then he says, “I killed her,” so weakly that she only knows he has said it because it is exactly what she has been hearing him say, whenever he been saying everything else. And then those thick, ragged breaths crash over her ear again.

She does not know how much time she spends listening to Logan’s breathing, which is sometimes so dense and jagged and loud that it hurts her ears, and then sometimes so faint she is not sure if he is still on the line.

Gradually, she nearly empties the entire roll of quarters in the payphone, shifting her weight from one leg to the other every now and then. Shops close around her, more and more lights in more and more windows are turned off. The world darkens and falls asleep around her.

Finally, she can hear the breaths becoming more even. She puts in two more quarters just to listen to him sleep.


*


She gets an email from Logan the next day. Sorry, kid. I was a little out of it. Rough day. I’m working too hard over here. I’m not angry with you. Well, I’m fucking pissed at you, but I’m not angry with you. You get what I mean. Anyway, Danger Room simulation in ten minutes. Take care of yourself.

Diligently, she sends another blank email as reply.

She thinks about how horrified she would have been if Logan had been shot with a cure needle during the battle at Alcatraz. Robbed of his healing mutation. He would not have, like her, simply become human, or close to it, again. He would have been maimed from the inside out; he would have died around his skeleton.

She meets a young man in a chain bookstore and he fingers her in the restroom because she tells him she is wearing a tampon. Afterwards, he says he wants to see her again, and she says she doesn’t have a California number yet, but gives him her New York number, changing just the last 7 into a 5.

Only afterwards does she realize he looked a little bit like Scott. She tells herself, There are too many ghosts, she can’t possibly avoid them all.


*


And more and more she can feel it start to hum, for longer and longer intervals, and she pulls an old pair of opera gloves out of her duffel bag and looks at them. Not yet, she says, but doesn’t quite believe herself.


*


“And you,” Erik says to her over a chessboard in Golden Gate Park. “Who was your first love?”

She gives him a pointed glare and he makes a show of looking extremely wounded. “What, my dear, are you the only one permitted to ask inappropriate personal questions?”

She looks down at the chessboard. They are not playing, just sitting here, because she does not know how to play very well, and she refuses to, as Erik requests, “access the me in your mind who is an excellent chess player.”

“I’m not sure I’ve ever had one yet,” she replies. “And I’m not sure I want one.”

Erik looks extremely disappointed. “And here I thought I was answering questions to soothe your broken heart, not providing data for an objective case study on first loves.” He hovers his right hand over the chess pieces, and they sway to and fro beneath his fingers, like blades of grass. “I was under the impression you were in love with the Wolverine.”

“Stop that, people will notice.”

He laughs, “My dear, for me, it’s like being able to breathe again after being underwater. Don’t you agree?”

She looks down at her still ungloved hands. “Mine is different. I’ve never been able to control it.”

He tilts his head. “What do you mean? You just—control it.” He gestures vaguely with his unoccupied hand.

“Helpful,” she remarks. “Thank you.”

He laughs then, and it is a real laugh. “Yes, my apologies. I imagine it’s like not being able to whistle: people who can whistle are always giving you incredibly imprecise directions, like—‘You just blow.’”

“Well, I can whistle,” she says, and does so.

Erik purses his lips, but no sound comes out. “I’ve never been able to.”

She says, cheerfully, “You just blow.”

He smirks at her, then turns suddenly serious. “You ought to observe yourself carefully right now. If you are able to tell what your body feels like when your mutation is inactive, and then what it feels like when your mutation is just beginning to awaken, you might be able to better understand that distinction—and, thereby, how to consciously control what has otherwise been an involuntary reflex.”

She does not want to tell him she thinks it is a good idea, but the deep crinkles around his eyes tell her that he already knows.

Then he stops playing with the chess pieces, leans on his left elbow, and she knows he is going to do that thing; and then he does it, and now he is smiling like Casanova, behind his liver-spotted hand. “So there is no story, then, between you and the Wolverine.”

She does not say anything, but moves a pawn forward, beginning a game. Erik chuckles. “Very clever,” he says, and she is not sure if she is referring to her chess move, or her avoidance of the topic.

Then, after a few minutes of wordless play, she tells him: “When you were in my head, you only spoke English, never German or Polish. I always wondered why.”

“Ah,” he says, leaning back in his chair. Then, “Have you ever heard of the poet Paul Celan?” She shakes her head, no. “He was a German poet, born to a Jewish family in Romania. While he survived, he lost his parents during the war, when they were deported to internment camps; his mother died particularly violently, I believe.

“Well, in his poetry there was always a strong ambivalence about what it meant, for him as a Shoah survivor, to use German, to speak in German, which was, at once, his mother tongue, the language of his poetry—but also the official language of his parents’ destruction, the language of those that sought to erase him, and people like him. ‘Death is a master from Germany,’ went one of his poems. Still, he never stopped writing in German, though the German of his poetry was something of an invention, a way of subverting German from within, of staring deep into its horror, its abyss.”

Erik moves another piece. “Now, unlike him, and perhaps to Charles’ great disappointment, I am not and never was a poet—I did not have the imaginative resources to remake German for myself. It was absolutely intolerable for me to speak it, so as soon as I could speak something else, I spoke something else. I can barely speak German now, and Polish even less. My current accent is almost entirely stolen from Charles, a fact which he never ceased to tease me about.”

She notices that he is right; that it is Xavier’s voice in his mouth, Xavier’s vowels, Xavier’s breathing rhythm. Realizing she is not the only one who knows how to absorb others.

He adds with an ironic grin, “Come to think of it, Celan also threw ended up throwing himself into the Seine.”

“Jesus Christ,” she says.

“Not exactly,” he cracks, with the same grin.

Erik plays with a chess piece. Then he looks up at her, and she is not sure he sees her anymore when he recites, from memory, “Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen.”

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“The world is gone,” he murmurs. “I must carry you.”

Then he shakes his head. “That’s the first time I’ve spoken German in a long time.”

Still gazing at her, he says, “It’s not easy, is it. To be the one that survives.”

She lets out a breath she did not know she was holding. “No,” she says, looking down at her hands again. “It isn’t.”

Then Erik remarks, out of nowhere: “You weren’t there, that night. At Alcatraz.”

Her head snaps up so abruptly her neck hurts. “No,” she says. “I wasn’t.” She moves another piece.

He is considering something; his next move, she assumes. Instead, he asks, “And do you regret that?”

She stares down at the pieces before her. “Not really,” she says. “It wasn’t my place.”

“And yet here you are,” he says pointedly.

He takes one of her pieces. When she does not say anything else, he continues, “You must know, then, that it was your Wolverine who was the one to finally—stop—Jean.”

Another move, and she wants to say again, not mine, not mine. She takes one of his pieces. “Yes.”

Erik covers his mouth with his hand again, but he is not smiling. “He came after us in the forest. He was so desperate. I remember thinking, What an incredibly stupid man.”

And now he starts smiling again. “He told me I let Charles die.” He moves a piece, holding onto the miniature horse head a little longer, a little more tightly. “I wanted to pull his skeleton out through his eye sockets. I still wonder why I didn’t.” And when he releases the piece, the head is dented.

She moves a piece, takes a piece. “That sounds like something he would say. He was trying to hit at your weak spot. He came for Jean.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Erik says, sounding bored again. “He was so terribly resolute. He knew I could play him like a puppeteer and still he came after her alone. I genuinely could not believe the extent of his stupidity.” He snorts. “But in the end, I was stupider, I suppose.”

She thinks of Logan, paralyzed as a doll inside Erik’s grasp.

“He loved her very much,” she says, and though it is something she knows, has always known, the way she knows her own flesh, she has never said it aloud to anyone before.

Erik looks at her a long time. Then he seems to decide against patronizing her. “Yes,” he says. “That much a tree could tell.”

Then he looks down at the chessboard and chuckles. “Ah. You see what I mean about needing to learn conscious control, my dear?”

“What?” she asks.

He gestures down at the pieces. “You say you can’t control your mutation—you say you can’t access all the things you’ve taken into your head. And yet, and yet.” He smiles, and she looks down at the chessboard. She has checkmated him.

She looks down at her still bare hand as though it is a stranger.

“Rather than learning how to control your mutation,” Erik says dryly, “it seems to me that most of the time, you control it a bit too well.”

She pushes her chair back. “We’re done here,” she barks, sweeping the pieces away with her hand. They sway, but none of them fall.

While his fingers guide the pieces back upright, Erik continues, his voice rising sharply:

“Ashamed of your own strength, idling away in some elaborate parody of ‘humanity,’ you took the cure hoping it would relieve you of the burden of having to truly confront your own power—”

“That’s enough,” she says.

His voice is firm and unrelenting: “But you are not and never will be like them—not like the humans, and not like other mutants, either, and it’s time you start embracing that fact, if you don’t want to end up like Jean—”

“That’s enough,” she cries, and shoves all the chess pieces to the ground before realizing that she hasn’t touched a single one.

Now Erik’s smile is wistful when he tells her, “My dear, haven’t you noticed already that not all of the mutants who took the cure are getting their powers back at the same rate?”

He leans down, and begins to retrieve the chess pieces, one by one, with his hands. “For now, it’s only the strongest ones.”

She stares at him, mouth agape, then turns around and leaves him there, picking pawns off the ground. He doesn’t call after her as she walks away.


*


And when she gets home, her entire body is buzzing, and she knows it is back, and once again she looks down at her hand like it is a stranger.


*


He is wrong. What would Erik Lehnsherr, official spokesperson for the ‘destruction-is-best’ approach to mutant powers, know about her mutation and how she has had to live with it? Someone who sees every mutation as a potential weapon, a vital advantage in the guerrilla war he had only recently stopped fighting—what can he know about having to protect the people you care for from yourself, about a body that forgets nothing, about keeping everything you touch.

When she had first heard about the blocks Xavier had constructed in Jean’s mind to manage the more volatile aspects of her power, she had thought the blocks sounded an awful lot like what she herself had already come to do, on her own, without help, instinctively; not only with her mind, but with her body, her flesh.

Even to herself she finds it difficult to explain exactly what she has learned to do. Something a little like selective amnesia. After the Statue of Liberty incident, she had felt the staggering sensation of suddenly containing another person’s near-entire life and strength within her body, the soul-tearing rush of having every single cell of her body open, bare, exposed; of losing in less than an instant the limit between everything that was her, and everything that wasn’t.

And during the counseling sessions with Xavier, she had glimpsed the infinite possibility of what she could become, of everything she could obtain, everything she could know, and for a split second she had even entertained the idea of reaching forward and touching the professor’s hand with her lips.

And Xavier had seen it, had sensed her idea; but he must have chalked the desire up to Erik, not her, because then he had rolled forward, taken her gloved hand between both of his bare ones and said, with a voice full of a love she could not understand and certainly did not deserve, “Rogue, you are stronger than your power.”

She proved she was stronger than her power by throwing a blanket over it. She established her skin as a forbidden zone, a thing to avoid and ignore, and made a point of training without using it, as if she were simply an eager martial arts enthusiast who had joined the team in a burst of pro-mutant sentiment. She labored to forget the things she learned, the instincts she had gained, and, obediently, they all faded, or at least lay dormant, and she told herself that she had successfully erased the things she had taken.

Then, on the porch of Bobby’s childhood home, she had touched John’s ankle, with an intuitive awareness of what she was going to do; but something had been different, she was touching him and he wasn’t collapsing, and she wasn’t getting nearly as much of his memory; she was taking almost exclusively his power, his instinctive knowledge.

And it reminded her a little of the first time she touched Logan, unthinkingly, with blood spilling from her wound; when she had somehow known exactly how long she could hold on before she would kill him, when she had felt herself coming dangerously close to that limit before she saw his eyes full of confusion and supplication and she finally forced herself to tear her hand away. And when she had said it was an accident, she hadn’t been sure if it was the truth.

She had always thought Xavier had meant: strong enough to overcome your power, strong enough to suppress your power. Strong enough to erase your power altogether.

Now she thinks he might have meant, as Erik does now: strong enough to accept your power, strong enough to use your power without fear. Strong enough to stand inside your own body, and trust it to be good.

*


She doesn’t leave her apartment for nearly a week, eating almost exclusively delivery sushi and Indian food and responding to Logan’s emails about training sessions and sports-related injustices with her regular blank messages. And then, just like that, it is her twenty-first birthday.

She has already decided she will call Logan, but she delays her anticipation until the late afternoon. Around two o’clock, her neighbor fuck-buddy knocks on her door and they have sex—probably for the last time, she thinks to herself. She doesn’t tell Brian or Byron that it is her birthday.

At five o’clock, she goes to the payphone near her building, with yet another roll of laundry quarters. Logan answers before the phone even finishes the first ring.

“That you, kid?”

Her somewhat stunned silence is the response. It is strange for him to answer so quickly. He must have been waiting for her, knowing it was her birthday; although there is something in his voice she cannot quite identify, which doesn’t sound like congratulatory cheer.

Then he says, “Hank’s at the mansion right now.”

She doesn’t think anything of it, then gasps so loudly there is no way he has not heard it.

“Yeah,” he says. “He just told me that ‘apparently, a small percentage of mutants are experiencing gradual weakening of the cure serum’s effects.’”

The last half of this sentence is spoken in an exaggerated accent that is meant to imitate Hank’s voice. She wants to say, That’s not a regional accent, that’s just what sentences sound like when you use all eight parts of speech.

Logan continues, “And Storm said she thought you were part of that percentage.”

He sounds far less angry than she had been expecting him to sound when he discovered the news about the cure, but she is not sure she likes whatever it is that is now standing in the place of anger in his voice.

“I’m sorry, kid,” he says, and she thinks it might be pity—and fuck him, if that’s the case. “I know you really wanted it to work.”

She wants to hang up the phone now. If he gives her any more kind, considerate words, she is going to hang up the phone with a bang so loud his sensitive hearing will mistake it for a car bomb.

“Though—it’s kind of a dick thing to say, but—I’d be kinda happy if it’s true,” he says, and so she doesn’t hang up, but puts another quarter in the payphone, and waits.

“I mean, I get why you did it. I just felt kinda—I don’t know.” He makes a sound, and she can hear his grimace through the phone.

“I don’t know. Lonely, I guess. Left behind. Or something. And I didn’t want—I didn’t want.”

She is not sure she wants to hear him say, I didn’t want to lose you, too.

But he says it anyway. Then, after a little laugh: “Fuckin’ selfish, I know.”

She thinks, this isn’t the best birthday, but it isn’t the worst, either.

Then he says, in a low voice, “When you’re done doing what you need to do, come back.”

She chokes. Her skin is starting to buzz, and it isn’t her mutation, but her own terror and dread. She had thought he knew better to ask something like that; had thought he would never use their unmentioned but unmistakable bond to invoke that kind of obligation from her. She thought they had an understanding about what their relationship was and was not. He respected her boundaries infinitely, as she respected his. They are not beholden to each other. Not family, not friends, not lovers. Something else. Something sharper than love, starker than passion.

But he says, “Come back,” in a strangled voice that she barely recognizes, and she thinks, you put your hand on my face when you thought I was dead; and in the forest looking for Jean, Erik held you up like a puppet, and it must have hurt like hell, to be lifted by your skeleton.

“Come back,” he says again, and, “Come back,” again, and again, softer, softer, “Come back.”

And then he is silent for a long time, and she has to put in two more quarters until she hears him finally croak, “Happy birthday, kid.” Then there is a rustle in her ear as the phone pulls away from his beard, and he hangs up the phone.


*


That night she is waiting at Bob’s Donuts long before Erik shuffles through the door, and she is once again struck by how old he looks.

He seems genuinely surprised to see her again. She catches his eye and points down in front of her, where there are two plates, each with an apple fritter.

“I was certain I would never see you again, my dear,” he says when he joins her at the bar. Then he looks down at her hands, which are gloved again. “Ah,” he says.

“Don’t,” she says, and slides one of the plates over to him. “Just take the peace offering.”

“While I am generally opposed to empty diplomatic gestures,” he says, smiling, “I will accept, just this once.”

They eat in silence for a few minutes, both unsure how to begin speaking to each other again.

She sees another old man, seated a table away, glance at Erik, look away, then glance at him again, as if trying to figure out whether he is an old friend, colleague, or neighbor. She holds her breath, but the man returns to his donut and does not look their way again.

Finally, she says, “It’s my birthday.”

Erik blinks, stares at her. “Your birthday? Today?” She nods, her mouth still full. “How old are you?” he asks.

“Twenty-one,” she says, then snorts and adds, “Old enough to drink legally.”

“Twenty-one,” he repeats in disbelief. “I thought you were younger than that.”

“Twenty-one is still young.”

“It is,” he agrees. “But it’s not so young, either.” He shrugs, brushes flakes of sugar glaze from his fingers and looks around. “Well? What are you doing here with this old man? Shouldn’t you be gallivanting about town with people your own age, doing all manner of things you’ll regret in the morning?”

She wiggles her gloved hand at him. “Not taking the chance anymore.”

He gazes at her. “No, you aren’t, are you,” he observes. Then he looks down at her donut. “Finish that, and then we’ll go.”

“Where?”

“Where” turns out to be a dark and nearly empty Irish-American pub a few blocks away, run by an older mutant who stands up straighter when Erik enters the bar, bowing his head in respect. The bartender, covered in tattoos and piercings, also smiles knowingly, greeting Erik with a tender, “Hey, boss.”

“Two vodka shots,” Erik calls pleasantly. “It’s the young lady’s twenty-first birthday.”

“Congratulations, honey,” the bartender says. “Can I see some I.D., though? Sorry, but—”

Rogue waves away his apology and displays her I.D. The man looks down at the picture, furrows his brow, then looks back up at her, comprehension dawning on his face.

“Liked your hair better before,” he says kindly. “Two shots of Polish vodka, on the house.”

Erik picks his shot glass up, nods his head at her. “To your health, my dear.”

This feels like a very strange dream, watching Erik Lehnsherr expertly down a vodka shot. She does the same, much less expertly. She coughs heavily. “Jesus Christ,” she says. “That burns like hell. And tastes like it.”

“Another two shots, please, Juan,” Erik says, and the bartender—Juan—pours two more shots.

The second shot burns less, and she thinks it is because her throat is still in shock from the first. “I never took you for a drinker,” she says, when she can speak again.

Erik chuckles. “In some ways I’ve remained a German who also lived in Poland, in that I generally prefer alcohol to water.” He gestures to the bar. “They carry a brand of Polish vodka here that I have grown quite fond of.”

“They know you,” she comments as the bartender retreats to another corner of the bar, busying himself by discreetly wiping glasses. “I thought no one here knew who you were.”

“They were former members of the Brotherhood,” he informs her.

Her hands stiffen, her blood runs cold, the bar stool seems to sway beneath her. Thinking, they might have fought Bobby, Storm, Logan—

“Relax, child,” Erik says crisply. “These two helped run an underground newsletter; they didn’t fight at Alcatraz. But their friends did.”

She visibly relaxes, and this only seems to anger him more. “But if they had fought, what of it? Is it so difficult to conceive of the urgency of their struggle? That they would feel compelled to oppose a policy of state terror and repression that excluded them from the protection of juridical law and forcefully claimed ownership over their biological lives?”

He is breathing hard now. “That we would have the audacity to demand a world in which rights are universal—to demand that our lives also be conceived of as lives?”

She opens her mouth to speak, but Erik is not done, leaning forward, gripping his empty shot glass so hard she thinks it will break. “You do know what was done to your Wolverine, don’t you? You wouldn’t have tried to stop that—you wouldn’t have lashed out against the world that sanctioned such a thing?”

He laughs bitterly. “It may come as a surprise to you, but not everyone has been served well by your professor’s ‘glorified U.N. Peacekeepers’ model of mutant-human relations.”

Juan the bartender, who has been listening to this speech from the other side of the bar, approaches, silently pours another two shots into their glasses, then just as silently walks away again.

Erik heaves a sigh, turns his head, picks up the full shot glass. His hand is shaking as he takes the shot. “My apologies, my dear. It’s your birthday, and I don’t care to start another argument with you.”

“You’ve already started one,” she hisses, also shaking. “How dare you. Don’t talk to me like I don’t know anything. They came to the mansion, they shot at children. I know what’s at stake as much as anybody.”

“And yet you willingly took their cure,” he charges. “They told you that you were dangerous, that you needed to be controlled, and you believed them.”

She takes the shot glass and downs it. “You don’t know anything,” she says, swallowing. “I am dangerous—the people I cared for—”

“The people you cared for knew full well who and what you are, and loved you for it, not in spite of it, and you slapped them in the face with your pathetic attempt at normalcy,” he counters fiercely. “Do you think I don’t know why you’re still alive today—what your Wolverine did for you after I nearly killed you?”

“And it nearly killed him,” she declares.

“Precisely,” he says. “You seem to think that if you ignore the reality of your mutation and its power, you can live a life without vulnerability; a life in which you are exposed to no one and endanger no one, and in which no one is exposed to you or endangered by you. But there is no such life.”

“Listen to me, my dear.” He leans forward and grasps her gloved hand, more tightly than she would have thought his aged hands capable.

“We will, all of us, lose each other,” he says. “That fact makes us.”

She shakes her head, and she is already drunk, and she doesn’t want to hear this, doesn’t want the weight of his trembling hand on hers, doesn’t want his eyes, steady as stone, staring into hers.

“That we can undo others; that we can be undone by others. But you refuse to know that. You cut off your arm because you don’t wish to choke the one you love, rather than recognizing that an arm can do many things.”

She is still shaking her head, saying, “That doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m doing—it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be careful—”

“You’re not careful, you’re terrified,” he says, still grasping her hand. “Terrified that you will one day be responsible for the death of someone you love; terrified that for all your strength and control, the fateful moment may come when you are unable to stop yourself, when you realize that you are, in fact, not stronger than your power, and you will have the unbearable experience of holding someone’s death in your own hands.”

His voice lowers. “As your Wolverine did, with Jean.”

“Don’t,” she says.

His gaze does not waver. “Do you think your fears are unique? Do you think that was easy for him? Could you ever do what he did?”

She yanks her hand back. “Could you?” she retorts.

Though he is still looking at her, he is not seeing her anymore. “I would like to think so,” he murmurs.

He makes a gesture for another shot, and Juan refills both of their shot glasses yet again. On his right arm, she sees the tattoo of a woman with no arms, and no legs; only a human head and a snake’s body, sleek and green. Above her, the words, Mi vida es para ti.

And then she hears Erik say, “You know, I nearly killed Charles, once, long ago.”

She shoots a glare back at him. “Haven’t you nearly killed him plenty of times?”

He laughs. “Actually, no—neither of us ever sought to directly harm the other, though I had always accepted that we might be forced into a hostile confrontation at some point. But this happened when we were building Cerebro. We were nearly finished with it, and he was testing it out for the first time.

“You know how Cerebro works, it amplifies a telepath’s abilities, his psychic sensitivities, so to speak. Well, the moment he turned the machine on, something happened—it was probably caused by the unconscious electromagnetic field around my body, and the fact that I was standing so close to him; I still don’t know exactly—and suddenly he was screaming, in agonizing pain.

“I had no idea what was happening. I tried to remove the helmet, but touching him only seemed to make the pain worse. By the time I was able to remove the helmet, he was in a coma. When he woke up, three weeks later, I had already nearly finished my own helmet. After that, I almost never took it off. It’s still the same one.”

Erik takes the shot. She does the same.

Then she says, “I thought that you wore it to protect yourself from his telepathy.”

“Well, it became a convenient accessory, I suppose, when we later found ourselves on opposing sides. Because it was meant to specifically conceal my magnetic field from telepaths, it was difficult for him to sense me normally. Over the years, with improvements in technology, I was able to vastly increase its strength, so that it would shield me from his telepathy entirely. Eventually, he would have had to use his full telepathic ability to locate me, or even read my mind—and doing so would almost certainly kill me in the process. If he so wished.”

Erik smiles and shrugs. “But in the beginning, my helmet’s purpose was to protect Charles from me. Not the other way around.”

She can see a young Erik, eyes wide in horror, staring at Xavier’s unconscious body in the medbay, knowing he had done that to him, with his body—without thinking, without knowing how, just by being there, just by virtue of his own life and its presence. She can see him staying up nights, crafting the circuitry for this ridiculous and unflattering helmet, which he would rarely be convinced to remove.

She whispers, “Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because we all have the same worst fear. Even someone like me,” he says. He shakes his head. “What your Wolverine had to do—” he begins, then pauses. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

He looks down, and his hand tightens into a fist. “I very much regret my role in it,” he says softly, and she knows the magnitude of that admission.

Then he looks up, and he is wearing that knife-edge smile again. “But then,” he says, “at this point, I find that I regret nearly everything.”

She stares at him. “Well, happy fucking birthday to me,” she says, and calls Juan over for another shot, then another, then another.


*


She is almost too drunk to walk by the time the bar closes, so when Erik insists she sleep at his apartment, which is closer than hers—“It’s the least I can do for antagonizing you on your birthday, dear girl”—she does not have the presence of mind to argue with him.

The apartment is unsurprisingly spacious, clean, with minimal furniture and a large window with a view of Coit Tower, and the new bridge in progress. She leans on Erik slightly, still careful to keep a safe barrier between them, as he guides her to the guest bedroom.

“The bathroom is down the hallway to the right,” he says. “I feel you may be visiting it in the middle of the night.”

“Thank you,” she says, and crawls into the bed, grateful for a cool, unmoving surface.

Standing in the doorframe, he watches her for a moment. “I apologize if I was—harsh, this evening. I’m afraid not even I am entirely immune to the effects of Polish vodka.”

She snorts. Her face buried in a pillow that smells like lavender, she asks, “Why’d you tell me all that shit, anyway?”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then she almost does not hear him answer, “At the end of my life, I find myself compelled to tell the truth.”

“You’re not at the end of your life,” she mumbles into the pillow, but he has already closed the door.


*


She dreams of Xavier. In her dream he walks towards her and cups her face with his hand, smiling, and she thinks she is actually Erik, until Xavier says, “I’m glad to see you’re doing well, Rogue.” And she wants to tell him she’s not doing well, she’s not doing well at all; she wants to tell him to be careful, to not touch her face, but she cannot find the words, and it is too late, and he is cupping her cheek with his hand, still smiling, and all the words are gone.


*


She awakens with a massive headache and no idea where she is. It takes her a few minutes to remember the previous night. She groans and tries to fall back asleep, and succeeds, for half an hour, but the sunlight upon her face will not relent, so she sits up, stumbles out of bed.

She licks her lips, in desperate need of a glass of water. She is proud of herself for not throwing up; at least there is that bit of dignity, not having projectile-vomited in Erik Lehnsherr’s million-dollar apartment.

When she opens the door and tries to make her way to the kitchen, she finds Erik already there, seated at a small table, reading a newspaper, drinking a glass of orange juice. “Good morning,” he greets her.

“I’m not so sure,” she mutters, clutching her head. She spots a carafe of water on the kitchen counter, and two tall glasses on the shelf. She takes one glass and fills it with water, gulps it down immediately; then another one, almost as fast. “Thanks for letting me crash here.”

“And how are you feeling now?” he asks. “Like Christmas morning,” she replies.

“Good,” he says pleasantly. “Because I have a favor to ask of you.”

“What, right now?” Still standing, she pours another glass of water for herself. “I don’t think I’m much use for anything at the moment, but shoot.”

“I would like you to take my life,” he says, and she chokes.

When she can breathe again, her shirt is soaked. She whirls around to face him directly. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“As I said last night, I know I am at the end of my life,” he says calmly. “While I can feel my powers returning, I don’t believe I will ever regain the same vitality I had before they were taken away by the cure. And frankly, even if that were not the case, my feelings would be the same.”

He folds the newspaper, placing it on the table, and she sees Hank’s face peering up at them.

“In a time of peace, no one wants to see the old generals and be reminded of the war,” he says. “My place in this world is gone. I can’t go on much longer like this, unrecognized, protected by the few surviving mutants who remember me. And if I were to be publicly captured by the U.S. government—it might do more than simply reopen old wounds. Those looking for a reason to start another war will find it, if I am found alive.”

He gazes at her. “It’s time for me to end my life. And I’m asking you to help me.”

“I’m leaving,” she says. “You’re fucking crazy.”

“My dear—”

“‘My dear’ nothing,” she spits out. “Is that why you were spending so much effort last night trying to convince me not to be afraid of my power? So I would fucking euthanize you?”

“No,” he says. “I only had the idea after I left you to sleep last night.” He lowers his eyes, then looks back at her again. “But I do think doing this might help you to understand the true scope and significance of your gift.”

“You can fuck yourself,” she says again, and slams the half-full glass of water down.

She leaves the kitchen, finds her way to the foyer, where her shoes have been neatly lined up against the wall, next to his much larger ones. She distantly remembers kicking them off with abandon, the night before. She does not want to think of him, bending over to carefully re-arrange her shoes.

Erik has followed her. “At least listen to my reasons,” he says.

She ignores him, sliding her feet into her shoes and turning to open the door. But the lock will not move.

She turns around, and his hand is outstretched towards the door. “I’m sorry, my dear, but I need you to listen to me.”

“I think you’ve done enough talking,” she says. She swipes her hand over the lock, and it pops back with a click. She can hear his sharp intake of breath before she leaves, without looking back.


*


Back at her apartment, she strips off her gloves, all her clothes, and climbs naked into bed. She covers her head with the blanket, feels her head crushing her from within. The idea of using Logan’s healing factor to speed her recovery jumps into her mind, and just the thought of it automatically starts the process. She can feel her headache beginning to clear, recede—and before it goes any further, she shuts the process down instantly, struggling to catch her breath. Feeling much better, feeling much worse.

She thinks of Logan. Logan, teaching children how to throw mutants twice their size and weight. Logan, who receives her calls and talks nonsense to silence. Logan, whose body recovers from everything almost faster than he can feel it.

She knows he must have been able to stop Jean because she wouldn’t have been able to disintegrate him so quickly; not with his healing factor and that damned skeleton. And so he would have been holding her dead body, with its three wounds, in his perfectly unbroken arms, against his totally unmarred chest. His own flesh would have already long moved on. A body that left no time for mourning.

What can she do for him. She had thought this when she had seen him again for the first time, back at the mansion, just after receiving the cure, just after the others had returned from Alcatraz.

He had caught her in the hallway, on the way back from Bobby’s room. “Hey, kid,” he had said, a little too brightly. “Goin’ to train some new blood. You doin’ okay?”

She had only looked at him, and his eyes had widened as he remembered. “Did you do it?” And she had nodded, mutely.

She had wanted to say, I heard about Jean, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—

But he had smiled, just as easily as he had smiled before he let her leave, and then, without hesitation, he had pressed his bare palm against her forehead and said, wondrously, “Well, look at that. Works.”


*


Once again, she doesn’t leave her apartment for a week. She receives an email from Logan nearly every day.

Hey, kid. I know I was kind of weird to you on your birthday. But I meant what I said. I’m still kinda happy your cure is wearing off. Even if that means you might suck the life outta me again. And I really do hope you’ll come back. This place ain’t the same without you. Take care of yourself.

Hey, kid. I bet you’re still hungover from your birthday. Shame I didn’t get to take you out drinking. Weirdest thing happened today. I thought I heard your voice in the hallway. I was sure it was you. But no one was there. I thought I was going crazy. You see what I mean about having to come back? I’m cracking up over here. Take care.

Hey, kid. Took some of the kids to a concert in the city. It wasn’t half bad, but don’t tell ‘em I said that. Band’s called Passion Pit. I thought that a passion pit was a place you drove your girl to make out. Ever heard of ‘em?

Hey, kid. Had a little fight with Storm today. Mostly about you, and how she treated you before you left, and her attitude about the cure. The fight was a long time coming, sort of. It’ll blow over. Anyway, you haven’t responded to any of my emails recently, even with your blank things. You doing okay? Send me a sign.

Hey, kid. I was serious about the sign thing. You okay? Don’t worry me.

She wants to write, I wish I had been strong enough to stay. I wish I had been strong enough to force you to grieve. I wish I had stood next to her grave with you. I wish I could have helped you to feel your loss, to feel your loss like a real, lasting wound. I wish I could have told you how grateful I am that you heal so fast—I wish I could have told you how sorry I am that you heal so fast.

Finally, she brings herself to send yet another blank message, feeling empty, pathetic, cowardly. Almost immediately, there is a response.

Hey, kid. Thanks. Set my mind at ease. Danger Room simulation in five minutes. Gotta go.


*


She finds Erik in Golden Gate Park, not playing chess, but sitting alone on a park bench, watching the chess players.

“My dear,” he says when he sees her approach. “For the second time, I was certain I would never see you again.”

She sits down next to him. She is silent for a long moment. “All right,” she says finally. “I’m listening.”

He glances at her, uncertain. Then he smiles and says, “I’m eighty years old, and that feels like a nice number to end on.”

“Be serious,” she says.

“I am,” he laughs. He goes on, “It would be perfect revenge for the fact that I would have taken your own life, not so long ago.”

“I like that one.”

“Not to mention, I am more or less responsible for most of the suffering and hardships your friends and loved ones have had to endure. Particularly your Wolverine.”

“That’s true.”

“You would gain my formidable powers; though I don’t know how they would translate to you if I am this underpowered—whether or not you would be able to receive the full spectrum of my mutation, that is, or just what’s available to me right now.”

“I see.”

“You would have my memories, which may not actually be such a positive thing, emotionally speaking. Though it does mean you would know all the information regarding my various homes, bank accounts, offshore accounts, et cetera. You would, essentially, inherit my estate. You would be quite rich.”

“That sounds interesting.”

“My dear,” he says, turning to look at her directly. “I must warn you—and this may turn you off from the idea entirely—if you were truly to absorb me to the point of death, I suspect it could result in something akin to a transferring of consciousness. That is to say, you wouldn’t just have my memories—you would have some facsimile of me, myself, my consciousness, alive inside your mind, for an indefinite period of time. I know Charles firmly believed that sort of thing was possible.” He sighs. “In fact, I suspect he did just that, right before Jean destroyed his body.”

“Really?” she asks, and the thought makes her hands tremble with joy. “You think the professor’s alive?”

“I think it’s a possibility his consciousness has survived, yes,” he says. “I always have.”

She blinks. “Then why not—try to find him and—”

“And what?” Erik laughs. “Pick up where we left off?” He shakes his head. “No, my dear. We have been friends and antagonists much longer than anything else we had once been. Life has gone on since then. The past is in the past.” His voice is tender when he adds what she already knows: “Where I cherish it.”

She looks down at her gloved hands. Finally she asks, “Why me, why this way?”

“It seemed like a better idea than throwing myself off the new bridge with rocks in my pockets,” he jokes.

Then his face softens. “And because I saw a possibility in which my death could be a gift.”

Still looking at her hands, she thinks. Thinks about Erik, about Xavier, about Jean, about Logan. About a ridiculous metal helmet. About blinding pain caused by the one you love, the one who loves you. About the wall of water crashing over the body of the woman who had just saved her life. About something that hurts every time, and heals every time.

She thinks about her hands, about what they can do. What she can do. About every cell of her body open, bare, exposed. About the limit between everything that is her, and everything that wasn’t. About infinite possibility and infinite vulnerability. About standing inside her body, and trusting it to be good.

“Okay,” she whispers, and when Erik looks at her, it is an expression she has never seen before, and does not recall from any of his memories. He smiles, and there is no knife-edge in it, no melancholy Casanova allure. Only his pure, open gratitude, and for the first time she sees that his eyes are blue.

“Where—” she asks, but finds she cannot speak.

He smiles. “Here is all right,” he suggests.

“Here?” she cries out. “Now?”

He gestures down at himself. “I might have been able to pass mostly unnoticed all this time, but there would be no way for you to be able to successfully bury my body without someone realizing who I really am, which in turn would immediately draw suspicion and scrutiny upon you.” She opens her mouth to protest, but he shakes his head.

“It’s better if you leave it here—it’s better if they think they just found Magneto, all alone, having mysteriously and miraculously survived the events at Alcatraz, now dead from old age.”

“So what—” she chokes. “I should just walk away afterwards?”

“Ideally, you would wait until no one else was in sight, then slip discreetly away,” he explains. He gestures around the park. “There aren’t many people here today, luckily.”

Stricken at the thought, she insists, “I’m not going to just leave you here.”

“You’re not leaving me here,” he says, and her chest pains her.

Then he looks down at her hand, says, “May I?”

“Wait, wait, wait,” she yells, “I’m not ready, wait, wait, just wait.” He starts to laugh. “I have things I want to ask you still, I have things I want to know—”

“All right,” he says patiently, amusedly.

Abruptly, she asks, “Why do you always call him my Wolverine?”

He looks at her, puzzled. “Isn’t he?”

“You said yourself he loved Jean,” she says, and it sounds a little too much like a whine for her own taste, and she feels her age acutely.

“Because he obviously did and most likely still does, very much,” he says, speaking to her as if she is a particularly slow child. “Do you think that somehow precludes his connection to you?”

She doesn’t know what to say. He smiles. “I often thought that, although I loved Charles, in a way, it was also something else entirely; some other, stranger, deeper thing. Not family, not friends, not only lovers. Something sharper than love, starker than passion.”

And she freezes, hearing his words in her ears, his words in her mind, the echo she has already been living with, and now the tears come fast and hard and hot, spilling from her like blood.

He laughs again. “Oh, my dear,” he says, pulling her head against his shoulder, where she weeps like a child. “My dear.”


*


They sit together for another hour before she is able to remove a single glove. “Wait,” Erik says, and she looks at him, hoping he will have changed his mind.

“Control it,” he says instead.

“What?”

“Your power,” he says. “You know you can. You know you’re capable of accessing much more than you’re brave enough to admit. Control it now, with me.” He holds his hand out to her. “Just hold my hand, before you begin.”

“No, no,” she stammers. “I don’t know, I don’t know, it might start up anyway—”

“That would be fine, too,” he says mildly, “as that is the ultimate objective.”

“Don’t make jokes,” she says, laughing, hating herself for laughing, laughing more, feeling her entire body convulsing with anxiety.

“My dear,” Erik says, and he has called her ‘my dear’ so many times, in so many voices, and yet this time still sounds different. “Please take my hand.”

So she looks down at her own hand, and looks down at his hand: his large, deeply-lined palm turned upwards, waiting in mid-air, for her.

And she trusts it to be good—and puts her small hand in his. And his fingers curl around hers, and he is smiling at her, and he squeezes her hand, and she is laughing, crying, daring to squeeze his hand once, twice, again, again, again. And it feels like the first time, the first time she has ever touched anyone, the first time she has felt what it is to meet someone else’s skin with her own.

Erik draws her close and murmurs, “You see, you see what makes us.”

Then he lowers his chin to his chest, squeezes her hand once more, and, with his eyes closed, says, “Whenever you’re ready.”

And she isn’t ready, not yet, not yet, not yet—and she looks at him, seeing his face, the surprisingly large ears, the shadows beneath his eyes, the overgrown eyebrows, the skin that Xavier touched and loved, and she thinks there are a million things she wants to say to him but she doesn’t know how to speak, doesn’t know how to convey any of these important and wordless things to him—

And her body, which knows better, opens the connection and lays her bare; and she feels Erik’s life coursing into her, and she knows, that’s how, that’s how.

And she can hear him, saying nothing, saying everything; she can feel him giving himself to her, entering the space she has opened for him, and she is thankful, he is thankful, and she knows, she knows, she knows it.

And when the hand she is holding goes slack, the agony of it splits her entire body open, breaks apart the ground beneath her; and as the death fills her hands, she knows an entire world has been lost, she cannot get it back, time will not remake this, this single hollow will never be filled again, and now she can only answer to someone who isn’t there, over and over, over and over: I see, I see, I see what makes us.


*


From a payphone outside the park, she calls the police and, struggling not to scream, says that she saw an old man slumped over a bench in Golden Gate Park, and she thinks he might be dead. She gives the exact location, then hangs up when they ask for her name.


*


She goes to Erik’s apartment, opens the lock with a pass of her hand. It takes her less than half an hour to retrieve all of his credit cards, bank statements, homeowner’s contracts, forms of identity—and in his bedroom she sees the helmet, and she picks it up, placing it in a plastic shopping bag, coddled within one of his wool jackets. And by his bed, she sees a book of poems by Paul Celan, and so she takes that, too.

Back at her own apartment, she books a flight for the next day, this time with Erik’s most recently used credit card.

Her building manager isn’t home, so she leaves a note giving her 30-days-notice and waiving her initial security deposit, along with a check for the next month’s rent.

She has difficulty packing everything back into the bag she originally brought; the helmet takes up a lot of room, but she knows she has to check it. Finally she is able to make everything fit.

That night, when she looks in the mirror as she brushes her teeth, she notices that the white streak has widened, and she cannot distinguish her laughing from her wailing.


*


On the plane, she is reading the Celan book, and her vision blurs as she reads the words:

How you die out in me:
down to the last
worn-out
knot of breath
you’re there, with a
splinter
of life.

And the man next to her is reading a newspaper with the headline: MUTANT TERRORIST MAGNETO FOUND DEAD IN SAN FRANCISCO PARK, OF NATURAL CAUSES.

And she thinks, collapsing over her knees, feeling every piece of metal in the plane in her veins, “You see, my dear, it was better that way.”


*


And when she arrives at the mansion, having paid a taxicab fare nearly as high as her rent, she is not surprised at all when Logan is the first person she sees, sitting down on a bench near the entrance, smoking a cigar. Though his total, utter surprise makes up for her lack of it.

“Kid?” he sputters. “Jesus Christ, why didn’t you tell me you were coming back today, I woulda—”

And she hugs him before he can stand up, before he can start to grin, joke, complain, scold, make plans, tell stories, promise beers—she hugs him with her arms tight around his jacket and says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And below her, she can hear him laugh nervously as he brings his arms around her waist, over her jacket and say, “For what, takin’ off? Hey, you’re back, I’m not mad anymore, no worries.”

And she says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And he asks, “Jesus, what do you have to be so sorry about?”

And she says, “I’m sorry, Logan, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And he says, “Hey, your skin is touching me—did the thing not wear off, or can you control it now?”

And she says, “God, Logan, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And he asks, “Did that streak of yours get bigger?”

And she says, “I’m sorry, Logan. I’m sorry.” And he says, “You don’t have anything to be sorry about.”

And she says, “Logan, I’m sorry.” And he says, “I said—”

And she says, “I’m sorry, Logan. I’m sorry.” And he says, “Stop it.”

And she says, “Logan, I’m so sorry.”

And he doesn’t say anything this time, but holds her, already poised to comfort her, until she can feel his body tense when he realizes that he is the one being comforted, that her arms are the ones protecting him, holding him steady, keeping him safe. And when she says again, “Logan, I’m so sorry,” the hands on the back of her jacket tighten.

“Kid,” he says. “Kid,” he says again, and it is a broken, long-unused sound. “Kid,” he says again, and again, and again.


*


In his room, she lies at the foot of his bed while he sits across from her in his armchair and asks again, “Wait, you were the one who killed Magneto in San Francisco?” Logan shakes his head. “I need to hear this story.”

“Later,” she says. “First I want you to tell me about Alcatraz,” and she can hear his entire skeleton humming, and she knows that the sound she hears is both a gasp of pain and a sigh of relief.

“And then,” she adds, turning over to look at him, stretching her bare arm out in front of her so she can see him through the gaps between her fingers, “I’m going to tell you everything I remember about Japan.”

She lowers the hand and looks at him directly. “And if you want to know more—let me touch you, and I’ll tell you more.”

And it is not such a long time before he says, “Okay. Okay.”