For a long time it was sort of, well, almost sweet. The way Rogue would talk about Logan.

I hadn't gotten more than a few glimpses of him during his first brief visit to the school. I'll never forget how he came barging into our physics class, all freaked out and jumpy. Think we scared him even more than he did us right then.

And later, that night when we heard him yelling for help from his room… It took a while to sort of piece together what had happened. At first I thought he had hurt Rogue, the way she ran out all scared, but then I saw him on the floor and wondered what the hell she had done to him… The rumors flew for quite a while about that night, as we students weren't privy to the whole story and the teachers didn't feel it was our business I suppose.

I only got the entire story months later, from Rogue… But sometimes I wondered if it really was the entire story. I thought it was, well, a little strange that she just walked into his room in the middle of the night like that. I didn't feel right asking her why, asking her to justify what she was doing there, so I never pressed the issue. But it itched a little in my mind from time to time, why there was the intimacy between them like that, after only knowing each other a couple of days. Hell, I wouldn't just go into her room while she was sleeping, even now I wouldn't.

The only other time I saw him that visit was when he silently walked out the door, after recovering from the incident at the statue of liberty. Rogue sprang away from our game to say goodbye to him, and from then on she wore his dogtags like a talisman. Oh, well, I thought, a little hero worship never hurt anyone. He had saved her life, after all.

---

When Logan returned, though, I started feeling real different about him. Since Rogue and I had been dating for a while, and I felt we were "an item" (silly, but that's how I thought of it), the hero worship wasn't so cute anymore.

The timing of his return couldn't have been more annoying, for one thing. I tell you, sometimes almost kissing Rogue is as exciting as kissing anyone else would be, and we were in the middle of one of our best almost kisses when that damned motorcycle drove up. And she was gone from the couch without a backward glance.

The first real hard look I got at The Wolverine was that day in the foyer, seeing him with his arms around Rogue and his face in her hair. I felt sick in my stomach instantly, seeing how hard and long she hugged him and how her right foot actually left the ground like in one of those old-fashioned movie kisses… It made me scared and angry and hurt and defensive, and made me freeze Logan's hand in a stupid show of temper when we were introduced. Yeah, right, like I was trying to intimidate him? I think I almost made him laugh instead.

Yeah, he didn't see me as any threat at all, it was written all over his face that I was just an amusing kid. And then he pretty much flat-out asked us about our sex life?!?! That was below the belt, seeing as only ten seconds before he had come about as close to sex with Rogue as I ever had… I was getting my hackles up for sure, but at the same time his confidence really threw me for a loop and I was just getting all confused and didn't know what to do or say. I choked out something stupid like "We're working on that".

---

Rogue was real happy that Logan was back. She started retelling some of her favorite "me and Logan" stories until I got real tired of them. I felt so unable to compete with those stories… I mean, she's not going to sit around and tell excited stories about the boy who went out for ice cream with her, or the boy who had a snowball fight with her, or the boy who got an A in history, now is she? But her Logan stories just light her all up.

I was thinking just that when Logan walked into the kitchen that fateful night looking for beer. He was not who I wanted to see, but we ended up sitting there rather comfortably, almost chatty. I let that little line slip about how he looks at Dr. Gray - I wanted to get him talking about her, see if the flirting with her was more than just a game. But that look he gave me and his tone when he said "Excuse me?" stopped me in my tracks.

Remember when we were standing in the foyer and he asked that rude question about me and Rogue's sex life? Why didn't I give him a look like that and say "Excuse me?" in a voice that would stop him in his tracks? Boy, in that one look and those two words that he gave me in the kitchen, any power struggle between me and Logan was OVER. He had won hands down, by proving that he could ask me embarrassing questions but when I tried to turn the tables I couldn't do it. I might as well have bared my throat to him or stuck my butt in the air to acknowledge him as alpha male, damn it.

But I had never even been in a real fight, I really was just a kid. I didn't blame him for finding my behavior amusing and my desire for Rogue inconsequential. I still don't blame him, but it sure hurts. It hurts and is insulting that he feels that way, and it hurts ten times as much that Rogue probably feels that way too.

But back to my story… That night in the kitchen, after my stupid question and resulting humiliation. Back to when all hell broke loose at the mansion.

When the fighting started, all I could do was duck behind the counter. I don't consider that cowardice, I mean after all, there were bullets flying around the kitchen almost immediately. My normal high school life [well, normal mutant high school life] was instantly turned into a war zone. Nothing in my life had prepared me for the noise, the terror, the glass [the everything] shattering around me… and The Wolverine in combat.

---

Oh, yeah, Logan disappeared and only The Wolverine was in that kitchen then. He had begun to change the second his head tilted toward the sounds I couldn't hear. His stance shifted and his eyes narrowed, and then he sniffed the air and what he smelled made the claws come out. I had not seen them before, although they had been explained to me. Seeing them was a shock, but the real shocker came a minute later - as I watched frozen while Wolverine roared and threw himself at [into] the man with the gun.

I'll never forget that roar, filled with more rage than I'd ever imagined. Rage I could at least sort of understand, but that roar was also filled with… well, a sort of exhilaration, a thrill at coming completely unhinged, a sick pleasure in the kill. I couldn't see Wolverine's face as he impaled the man against the refrigerator, I just saw his back while he stood for a moment with his claws still embedded in his victim, shaking violently. Then he thrust his claws further in and up into the man, and yanked them out, and turned slightly toward me.

I saw his face then, and he looked completely insane. He was heaving and shaking, his nose flared, he was half-crouched with his arms and claws at the ready, and for a few seconds he looked sideways at me with his head lowered and his eyes full of hate, and I was truly afraid that he was going to kill me right there.

This is one of the GOOD GUYS?!?!? I thought. I mean, the man with the huge gun had been scary as hell, but Wolverine was something else again. I couldn't believe I had been sitting there drinking a soda with Logan a few minutes earlier, that my hand had come within an inch of his knuckles when I took the bottle from his hand to cool it for him… I couldn't believe this was the man Rogue trusted so much.

A bit of reason came back into Logan's eyes, and presently he sheathed his claws. Even recovered his powers of [minimal] speech to ask "You alright?". I squeaked out an answer that was not really the truth -"Yes."

---

The rest of our escape from the mansion was just one long nightmare of running through corridors, first looking for Rogue and then looking for a way out. THEY seemed to be everywhere we turned, and students were running in all directions, and many bodies were sprawled on the floor, and in many places there was blood on the walls or carpet.

During all the chaos, we saw Logan kill many men. We never would have made it out without him. The killing was horrible, as killing must always be, but Logan's fighting in the corridors of the mansion was also something beautiful. It was controlled, it was graceful, and it was silent. Many of the men he killed probably never knew he was there except for the six blades slicing through them. The Wolverine did not surface, there was never the insanity I had seen in the kitchen, never the triumphant roar, never the fear in my mind that he would turn on us too.

I have tried to explain what I saw in the kitchen to Rogue a few times over the months, tried to tell her that there is another part to Logan that she has not seen, tried to explain to her how much he scared me [yes, even at the risk of looking weaker in her eyes]. I know he saved us, I know he saved Rogue before and after that night… but I can't completely trust him like she can, not after what I saw. I can't help but fear for her, that something will happen and she will trust him too much, and in the heat of battle [passion] he will turn into The Wolverine and just for a split second not recognize her. A split second's all it would take.

Rogue won't hear me, though - not really hear me - when I tell her that. He's her hero and she believes he would never hurt her.

---

Life has gone on, other battles have happened. People have died on both sides. I can not see the world the way I saw it a year ago. Now there are much bigger issues in my world than classes and grades and whether I can kiss Rogue. Kissing Rogue is still a big one, though, of course.

I love Rogue. She's my first love, but I know she won't be my last because I know I am losing her already. Hell, I lost her before I had her, I know that.

Sometimes I hate Logan. When he looks at her in a certain way and she doesn't mind. When she leaves me to go to him as though it were only natural. When he sees me for the sorry love-struck teenager that I am. I'm growing up, but I'm never going to be him. I don't think I'd want to be him, really. There are a lot of ways to be a man - I know that and I have no problem liking myself for the man I'm turning into.

The man I'm turning into knows that if Rogue doesn't call it off soon, I will have to do it myself. Because there is not a thing or person in this world that I would not fight for Rogue… except Wolverine. I won't fight him. Why? There would be no point in fighting him. They belong to each other, it's as plain as that.

God help them.