Chapter One

THE NOT SO DISTANT FUTURE

It was a workman�s boot, steel-capped. Something you could drop an anvil on without crippling yourself. He felt himself curl inward, stomach muscles clenched. The foot drew back, returned lower, between his legs. It took the breath straight out of his lungs. A kick like that sounds an alarm through the whole body, like sirens up a quiet street. Up his hips, his guts. Organs stuttered in the middle of their work. It was a nauseating pain, a paralyzing pain, a finishing pain.

For most.

Logan straightened up. He grunted, a sound which expressed weeks of bruising compressed into seconds, tissue springing back into place, nerve endings shushed. A beer bottle shattered against the cage to his right, splashing glass and Molson across the floor. Fuckin� waste. His opponent wasn�t looking at him, he was looking at the crowd. The room was screaming, stomping, spitting their encouragement, and he was high on it�on the cheers, on the bloodlust, on the idea of looking the way he thought a man should. Logan sniffed, registered the spike in his bloodstream�adrenaline and arousal, jeans tight with excitement. The man had climbed into the ring pale, but he was flushed now, breathing fast. The lopsided swastika on his throat shuddered. Logan tended to respect people who got in the cage, even ones who snuck in brass knuckles. They wouldn�t be in a place like this if they�d won often in life and Logan saw no reason to embarrass them. They were both here to do a job and if they came packing--well, so did he. Everyone who climbed into the ring was prepared to hurt. He liked that. The least he could do was make them feel like they had a chance.

But this asshole. .

He walked across the cage. Stalked, fans of Animal Planet would have said. He heard heartbeats pater like rain on a trampoline, heard stomachs gurgle, heard the toilet flush, heard engines turn over in the parking lot. But all he saw were his opponent�s eyes�not stupid, realizing there was something off. There was a moment�that moment, where the decision on fight or flight needs to be made. To the boy�s credit, he swung. Logan took it straight on the jaw, didn�t try to duck.

And then he wrapped things up.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________


He fucked a waitress in the backroom, against a freezer stocked onion rings and hamburger patties. He wasn�t really in the mood, but she reminded him that she had kept his whiskey topped all night and he didn�t want to tip her. Afterwards, he walked through peanut shells and pretzel crumbs to the bar. It was so late it was nearly morning, and the rooms were as quiet as they ever got. Employees were sweeping the cage, picking up unbroken bottles and setting them carefully aside, to be refilled and sold tomorrow night. There was a man passed out on the sofa, making cozy gurgles in the back of his throat. The bookie and his partner were counting out tonight�s winnings, minus Logan�s take. The bartender was rinsing his cleaning rag out in the sink so as better address the next glob of vomit. He used the same cloth to wipe the last round of glasses before setting them on their shelf.


�I�ll have a beer.�

He smoked between sips, drawing the flavor of the cigar deep into his chest, feeling it scrape gently against the interior of this lungs. It was the good kind of discomfort, like the way the waitress had bit his shoulder. A scratchy country song played on the radio. He�d stay here long enough for the sun to finish getting up, drive all day and cheat one night out of its dreams. He took a deeper drink, wishing that he wasn�t so goddamn tired.

Somebody is watching me.

A few seats down the bar a small sat in a green coat, hood shielding hair and face from view. He hadn�t noticed her before�and it was a her, a young her. He could smell that much. He knew that she�d walked a long way�blisters had popped; pus all but glued her socks to her feet. He knew that she was hungry, that she needed to wash her hair. But he didn�t know the color of that hair or why, a second before he turned, she�d been staring at him. Waitress notwithstanding, he was surprised to find that he wanted to.

�You owe me money.� The voice was slurred in a way that was less due to alcohol and more from biting into his tongue. Half of his face looked like the kind of meat you�d throw in a stew before it could go bad. �No man takes a beating like that without a mark to show for it.�

�You lost your money, you keep this up you�ll lose something else.� In glancing back at the men, Logan missed seeing the girl, who he was certain had peeked their way. His opponent�s friend, who looked embarrassed, afraid, and a little bit like Jerry Seinfeld, tried to talk him down. But people don�t like to be talked down, especially when they think they�ve been cheated�and he was right, he had been cheated. Not that I particularly give a shit.

He heard the click of the switchblade. He heard the scream. Things happened quickly then�the man against the wall, Logan�s own blades sliding silently out of his arms, the bartender�s gun against his shoulder. �Get out of my bar, freak,� he said. As if anybody was going to leave here without bleeding. Logan moved�the rifle spewed grey pellets as it was cut in half. Thoughts flipped through his mind like fingers over a stack of well-worn playing cards. He knew he couldn�t kill one without killing the other. But what about the rest? The bookie and the truck driver, still sleeping in the corner? He�d have to cut phone lines, incapacitate vehicles. But still, calls would be made and once again he�d be the hunted one.


And what about her, he thought. What about that scream? �Look out!� That was a new card. He heard her pulse, smelt fear beading up out of her pores.


He looked at the girl on the stool, and froze, horrified. The claws shrank back into their sheaths. He didn�t care anymore about the men, the bar�he left as fast as possible, boots crunching over peanuts and hardwood and then snow. I didn�t see that. His hands shook putting the keys into the door, and then the ignition. I�m drunk. He�d never felt so sober. Logan drove for ten miles, and then twenty, and then thirty, trying to convince himself that he had imagined it. It wouldn�t be the first time. He�d hallucinated, he�d had bad trips�with his healing factor, Logan took a Why Not? approach to drugs. But that. Jesus. That was a first.


Still, nobody experienced the things that Logan had without learning to compartmentalize. It was just another thing the weird world had thrown up at him. Like the dog tags around his neck. Like the nightmares. Something had happened, but he had to move on. He lit another cigar, reminded himself to pick up a new box at the next town. The snow stopped, but it draped thick across the road and the trees. He loved silence like this. It reminded him that there were places in the world that people hadn�t scarred up. Being alone allowed him to appreciate it more, although once in a while he thought he wouldn�t mind appreciating it less, just to have someone with him.


At that moment, a turn in the road caused things to shift in the back of the trailer. He heard boots fall out of the cupboard, bottle clinking, a toolbox sliding�and a soft, feminine shriek.


He stopped the truck�in the middle of the road; nobody was coming either way�and got out. Bemused Logan walked to the back of the trailer. He noted the tarp, the lumps underneath too large to be simply his rust bucket of a bike. He could smell her now, and he was afraid. But he was also the Wolverine, and the Wolverine didn�t panic in the face of things he couldn�t understand. Twice. He poked where he thought her shoulder might be, and then he jerked back the tarp. �What�what the hell do you think you�re doing?�


The girl sat up. Around her neck was a purple scarf, but the rest of her was covered in greens and browns. She had long hair, and it spilled out of her hood. A delicate neck, and small breasts.


And no face. No face at all.

The figure stood, clumsily. She hooked a leg over the side of the trailer and jumped down. Her boots sank into the snow. She walked towards him, slipping a little.


He backpedaled. He couldn�t understand how she knew where he was. Where eyes should be, there was a blur. Her whole face looked like smeared clay or a painting that water had melted the features from. And yet she followed him. And when he stopped, she came close, standing on tiptoe until her head was close to his. He heard her speak, although she didn�t have the lips to do so with.



�I really wish you would remember me.�



He woke up.

Reminisce
Chapter Two


THE NOT SO DISTANT FUTURE


She sat on the bed to zip up her boots. The mattress hardly dipped beneath her weight, yet he opened his eyes. The back of her cardigan and the twin arcs of her shoulder blades were close enough for him to touch, but he didn’t, and when she finished with the left shoe, she stood and moved towards the dresser. “You’re late for class,” Jean said. “You should get an alarm clock.”

“You’re my alarm clock.” It was more or less true, leaning towards more. He’d acclimated to sleeping in a mansion full of people, but the nearness of her, all her morning noises, was still recent enough to jar.

Yet he rarely woke before her half of the bed had cooled. She was usually dressed, ready to leave. Right now she putting jewelry on now, choosing between a pair of tasteful black earrings and a pair of tasteful red. She selected the red and pinned them on, delicately, and then flicked through a tower of folders on the table, searching for today’s lesson plans. The curtains sifted the light like flour; what got through dusted a pink tinge over the room. That window had been a big selling point for this room, smaller than the others and irritatingly close to the children’s wing. But it was nice to smell the lawn, Ororo’s garden, the potential approach of enemies.
Last night, she’d closed it, citing the waste of good air conditioning.

Logan made his way to the bathroom, scratching his stomach and behind his ear at the same time. He took a piss, dropping the toilet seat back down afterward, loud enough for her to hear. The curling iron lay in the sink, turned off but still hot—a discovery he made with a searing pain across his palm, an angry line which calmed and disappeared in moments.
“Sorry,” she called, though the door was closed, and he hadn’t made a noise.

Most of the time, he avoided the mirror—as far as he could tell, he hadn’t changed in decades. But after splashing water across his cheeks, his forehead, his throat, he stared at his face in the glass. Thin lips, crow’s feet beside his eyes, unkempt hair. Same as ever. Nothing wrong with that face except that it was far younger than he felt. Logan gazed a bit longer. The figure in the glass did the same, seeming tired and confused and sad all at once. He told himself that it was probably what most men saw; he had no reason to believe otherwise.

Jean was waiting when he came out, but she didn’t look at him until he was dressed. She often didn’t. “You were talking in your sleep again,” she told him, scribbling a few last grades on some essays—A, A+, B-, D—please try harder.

“Again.”

“Fourth night in a row. Did you have a bad dream?”

He looked at her with some surprise. “I don’t have dreams.” It had been years since there had been anything between him closing his eyes and opening them.

“Hmm,” she said, but didn’t contradict him. She patted the papers in her lap until all the edges lined up, then stood—crossed to his side and kissed him. Mouth closed, brief. “Well. Have a good day.”

“You too.”

Logan thought about what she’d said, for a little while. And then, like so many other things, he put it behind him.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
BACK THEN

At night, she snuck down to the lab. There was nothing else for her to do—she wasn’t going to lay in bed waiting for the nightmares to get her; she wasn’t going to sit in the den watching cartoons with Blinky. What Rogue really wanted was to drive over to the nearest bar and have a good fuck, but she’d been advised against it and, anyway, they’d locked the garage. The Professor kept reassuring her that the Wolverine’s moods should subside, once her subconscious identified it as foreign and locked it away with the others. As if she minded.

They couldn’t have cared about it too much—otherwise, she wouldn’t be doing it. They would have stopped her. He would have stopped her. There wasn’t much leeway for misbehavior in Xavier’s School for Gifted Children. But around midnight she took the elevator down four levels of the house and walked through the always-lit corridors to the med bay. It smelled like bleach, rubbing alcohol, and the tuna sandwich someone had eaten down here last Wednesday.

The table they’d laid him on—she refused to call it his, though he’d laid on it for the better half of a month. Tubes sprouted out of him like some hypoallergenic plant; he had a blanket covering his lower parts and strips of gauze across most of his upper. She dragged a chair across the room, straddling it backwards beside the medical bed. His forehead was close enough for her to stroke, but she didn’t—Logan wouldn’t like to be touched while he was unconscious. She studied the veins in the backs of his hands. She could hear the blood coursing through them, like water in a ditch after the heavy rains. Someone had trimmed his fingernails. Someone had brushed his hair. Someone had put a catheter inside him. For a few minutes, she entertained herself by imagining his reaction. And then she looked at his eyes—shut, purpled, nothing moving behind them.

“At least you’re not dreaming,” she murmured. Same way she had spoken to her dolls as a child, past the age when other kids would have teased her for it. She knew Logan couldn’t hear her. At the same time, the deep-hope part of her knew he did. “That’s gotta be nice.”

The heater kicked on, roaring like a great beast. Machines beeped digital conversations that didn’t include her. Above her snored a hundred sleeping mutants. If his senses stayed with her much longer, she’d learn how to tell them apart. “I know why you like Canada so much. It’s quieter. And the beer’s better. I don’t know why I know that. I don’t drink.”

He breathed, slowly and evenly, helped by the tube that ran across his nose. “You wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t hidden inside the trailer.” She crossed her arms carefully on the edge of the bed and laid her head down on them. “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t hidden inside your trailer.”

“We’re glad you are,” said Scott, from the doorway. She sat up sharply.

“I didn’t hear you.”

He shrugged, pointed at the slippers poking out from the hem of his pajama bottoms. “Jean calls them old man slippers. She underestimates what they do for my ninja stealth capabilities.”
“But I can hear everything now.”

“Don’t underestimate the power of being distracted.”

He crossed the room to the two of them, stopping well before entering anything close to her personal space. Scott had a way of doing that—not just with her, but all of the mansion’s runaways, boys and girls alike—keeping a respectful but not uninviting distance, resting his arms behind his back. I am not a threat. She liked that about him.

“Are you going to tell me I shouldn’t be down here?”

“Oh, you’re old enough to know where you’re supposed to be. Ms. Grey, however, has asked me to remind you of the test tomorrow.”

“Math?”

“History.”

“I haven’t been studying. Although I think I could answer a lot of questions about the Statue of Liberty now.” That surprised a laugh out of him, and in turn, drew a smile out of her. She watched as he pushed a hand through his hair—some of it was caught under his visor. She wondered if he had to sleep it in; wondered if it rubbed his scalp raw. When he glanced up, she flushed and turned back to Logan, hoping Scott didn’t think she was gawping. “Do you think he’ll wake up soon?”

“I’m positive.”

“Why?"

“Because I’ve never been that lucky.”

She shot him a hard look, but Scott was grinning. “You can’t tell, but I just winked.” Though the Wolverine in her head had a different reply for him, for once she ignored it in favor of the natural voice in her head, and made her shoulders relax. “Anyway, I was just sent down here to make sure you’re okay.”

“I’m fine.”

“Need anything?”

“No.”

“Okay. You know where to find us.” He gave a little salute, the kind of harmless gesture that summoned an image of what he must have been like, at her age, well-intentioned but awkward.

Scott was almost gone before she remembered, twisting around in the chair and raising her voice. “Thank you!”

“Welcome. Goodnight,” came his voice, from the hall.

She turned back to Logan, feeling better, and it was several minutes before she resumed whispering.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
THE NOT SO DISTANT FUTURE

The members of the junior team were improving. Most of them. Especially Jubilee and Bobby, the first of whom he liked in spite of himself and the second he didn’t, for no reason he could put his finger on. Every other morning, he made them run laps around the mansion until they collapsed. And every other-other afternoon he made them fight against one another until they collapsed. Twice a week, a lucky student was selected to fight him. Although there were plenty of visits to the med bay, few of the younger mutants complained about Logan’s training methods—or not very loudly. He was gruff with the group in general, but patient with them individually, and once or twice had shaken someone’s hand when they managed to get in a solid hit. He was uncompromising, but his respect, once earned, felt far better than the grade cards he forgot to fill out.

He taught Geometry on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Driver’s Ed Tuesday and Thursday. The latter was more interesting; both because he didn’t have a license of his own and an only grudging regard for speed limits. He was learning to give instructions calmly in the car, especially with the mutants whose gifts were volatile. They were sensitive to stress: Kitty had melted into the backseat when he raised his voice, leaving nobody to hold the wheel. Another girl exploded black ink all over the interior of the car, herself, and Logan. And one boy, an obsessive-compulsive budding illusionist, had helplessly projected images of wrecks into Logan’s head until they were both too nervous to leave the garage.

The Professor had promised him weekends off, but that was subject to the needs of the team, and he was more often away on missions than in his choice of Westchester bars. There were pick-ups to be made, kids who didn’t know they were about to be enrolled in Xavier’s School for Gifted Children. There were also threats to sniff out, and inevasible threats to be snuffed out.

All considering, Logan had a lot on his plate. Sometimes he resented Scott for leaving so much behind for him to deal with. But then he usually reminded himself not to think ill of the dead.

Reminisce

Chapter Three

BACK THEN

Logan came back on a Friday.

It had been two years.

It was long enough for what happened on Liberty Island to settle down from school gossip to school legend—students spoke of The Wolverine and when he might return, but it took on a bored wistfulness, the way one always refers to miracles. Marie asked The Professor about Logan several times; she was sure he was tracking him. But all he would say was, “Not much longer, I imagine.” And then, when pressed, that Logan needed time to find himself, and perhaps longer to process the results. She stopped asking.

Two years was long enough for her to begin taking classes at a local college. Most online, although twice a week she attended lectures on art history. Sitting in the fold-down seats, surrounded by so-called normal men and women, she felt mischievous, as if she was getting away with something. Much of the coursework was the same as that taught at the mansion, but no one tried to dissuade her, and when the bill for her tuition came, Xavier paid it without comment.

She joined clubs. She went to coffee shops, bookshops, art galleries. She had conferences with professors who asked about her plans as if they were hers to make. Two years was long enough for her to find hobbies and tastes the people in Meridian, Mississippi couldn’t imagine. Two years was long enough for her cheekbones to sharpen, her hips to slim in an inviting way as if calling for hands to rest on them. Who those hands might belong to was up for some debate. She was with Bobby. And then she wasn’t. Boys flirted. She flirted back. “What’s with the gloves?” “I have a thing about germs. ” It didn’t go too far.

Marie sometimes had the feeling of being in a long, winding corridor and bumping into new versions of herself, walking too fast to look behind.

They weren’t bad years. They weren’t wasted.

And yet.

Two years was less than the time it would take for The Wolverine, what she’d absorbed of him, to fade. He was a part of her, like the shadow stuck to her back. She couldn’t feel Magneto anymore; he’d been muzzled by the stronger presence. Cody was gone as well. It was just the two of them. He’d once told Marie to trust her instincts; but now her instincts were Logan, her intuition speaking with his gruff accent. She could tell when people were lying now. She could tell when they were sick. Excited. Scared. Dying. Dangerous. But still, that was just an echo of him in her head. An imprint, like a boot that had stepped through wet cement. It was real, but it wasn’t Logan.

“You’re growing into an impressive woman,” Ororo said to her one morning. The comment was met with a chorus of agreement from the other teachers. Marie had flushed with pleasure. But only she knew that this was Logan’s doing. Just knowing that there was someone out there who had thought her worth dying for—it made her back straighter, her eyes brighter.

And she missed him.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

THE NOT SO DISTANT FUTURE

The sun dug into the back of his neck and his sleeveless arms like fingers, a massage of warmth. It sparkled off the hedges and the grass, shimmered above the gravel. It was a Friday, the second week of the heat wave, and a sticky lethargy had taken over the student body. He’d canceled class. The whole building hummed with the sound of electric fans, the A/C doing it’s best to keep up. Logan had been outside for an hour, doing repairs on the bike that likely could have waited another month. He replaced the clutch, then the plugs. He figured the battery could be charged as well, but he’d need to push it back into the garage and that was several steps too near pubescent sweat glands.

While he was bent over the machine a car pulled up the drive, parking near the fountain. The driver, a plump black woman with hair knotted at the back of her neck, climbed out. “Well, this is convenient. I really wasn’t sure this was the right place until I spotted you,” she called over to Logan. He straightened.

“Excuse me?”

“The address was in the file. I knew it was a school. But I suppose I was expecting something a little less—castle.” She gestured behind him at the ivy-choked walls.

“You here about a job, or a student?” She had no outward mutation and no scent of motherhood, but that ruled neither out. Logan cocked his head, watchful, bike and his tools between them.

She tore her gaze away from the stone gargoyles. “Student, but don’t tempt me. What a beautiful place. I had no idea she came from this.” She reached a bangled wrist into a satchel dangling from her shoulder and drew from it a slightly crushed folder. “You have to understand, home visits are not orthodox, but my brother lives in Westchester, and I’m visiting for his birthday. I thought I’d take the chance.”

“What chance?”

“She never collected her portfolio at the end of the semester, and I wanted to return it to her with my notes—the work is exceptional.”

“Just who are you lookin’ for?”

“Well, Rogue”. She said the word like it had taken a long time to get used to. Also, as if it should have been obvious. “She hasn’t been responding to my emails. I don’t suppose you could ask her to come down? It’s just--I’ve got an ice cream cake in the car.”


“I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Rogue. Jesus. What kind of name was that? Though God knew there were plenty of stranger ones floating around the school.

“You don’t? But—I teach art,” she frowned at him as if he should know that, too.

He gave a brief shrug, more effective than a verbal who gives a fuck? “You can try inside, speak to The Professor. Charles Xavier, first floor, left hall.” Logan jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

“Oh. Okay. Well.” She still looked perplexed, but she started up the steps to the front door. At the top, she turned. “It’s just, the last time I saw you, it seemed like you two were pretty close.”

The woman was gone a long time, certainly long enough for that ice cream cake to melt. He could smell it, sugar and milk in the hot air. Logan removed one of the beers he’d hidden in the toolbox, popped the lid off with his thumb. The contents were warm, but that didn’t especially matter as he forgot to drink. Who had he ever been close to?

Last night, he’d walked in on Jean, her eyes pink from crying. He still wasn’t sure what was worse—that she refused to say what was the matter, or that he hadn’t really wanted to know. Even asking had been a token gesture. That was wrong, a part of him thought. If you cared about someone, then you cared when they were upset. Even he knew that.

Thirty minutes later, the front door reopened. He listened to the woman’s low-heeled boots on the brick. “Find who you were looking for?” He noted that she wasn’t carrying the folder now. “Where did you say you saw me, lady?”

She didn’t answer; she didn’t even look around. She walked straight over to her jeep, unlocking the door with a press of the fob. She got in, started the engine, and was peeling down the driveway before he could make up his mind to stop her. She didn’t respond to the sight of him lifting his hand-- hang on a second--in her rearview.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________


BACK THEN

The sound of the bike’s engine cracked the afternoon in half.

That Friday, the Friday Logan came home, Marie was in the game room--ignoring Bobby, who appeared dangerously close to making an attempt at reconciliation. One of her legs was stretched out on the couch, but the other was bent, propping up a sketchbook. She wasn’t drawing—flicking through the pages, unsatisfied with everything she’d made. Nothing ever came close to the things she’d imagined. Sometimes she almost thought it would be kinder to leave the pages blank. In the art club she’d joined, she felt as if she stood out more as a beginner than she did as a mutant.


But hearing it—that growl, like a mechanical beast running up the driveway, she dropped the book and all other thoughts. She was up, moving, nearly tripping on one of the rugs. If hadn’t been him, she might have been too embarrassed to return to the room, with all the kids who were exchanging Rogue-is-acting-crazy-again glances. If it hadn’t been him, something inside her might have blinked out—like a strand of Christmas lights she’d left hanging too long. But Marie did not pause to consider those things, because she knew, in the deep and wordless part of her mind.

And it was.

“Logan!”

Two years was not that long.

Reminisce
Chapter Four

BACK THEN

"Hey, Kid.
This was the first time she'd hugged him. Rogue didn't realize that until her arms were reaching for them--she watched them as if they belonged to someone else. Had the thought occurred a moment sooner--but it was okay. She didn't balk, she didn't trip. She just-she just put herself in Logan arm's. And he let her. He didn't watch her hands; he didn't flinch when her bare neck came close. His hand went to the small of her back. Pressed.
Rogue heard and felt him sniff at her, his breath tickling the little hairs behind her ear. He smelled like gasoline and pine sap. When they drew apart, the look in his eyes warm, like the glow of a front porch light, let her know something incredible, as clearly as if it had been whispered into her ear: Logan was glad to see her.
Everything in the whole world felt, briefly, better.
But she didn't have long to revel in it. Students were crossing the entry hall, some on their way to class, some coming to view the new arrival,” drawn by the thought-quick pipeline of mutant gossip. Logan was still examining her, and Rogue’s heartbeat sprinted forward in the embarrassment of what she might be telling him without meaning to.
"You missed me?"
She squirmed. "Not really."
"That right?" Logan was trying not to smile, and the struggle was almost better to watch than if he’d just done it. Two years hadnt aged her friend, but it had made his back straighter, his eyes more clear. She wondered if he'd been drinking less. She wondered if he'd been doing other things, less.
"Did you find what you went looking for?"
He shrugged. Something flickered off in his face. That porch-light look, going out. "Not really", he said.
"No?" She tried to show, without speaking, how disappointed she was for him. I'm sorry wouldn't cover it. But Logan wasn't paying attention. He looked over her shoulder now, at the kids, at the decorative urns, at the paintings on the wall (the pieces of 16-year-old art students beside 17th-century Dutch painters, hung indiscriminately). And the closest he came again to smiling was the smirk when Jean came down the stairs.
_____________________________________________

Their school had too much class for anything so institutional as a cafeteria. Instead, the X-mansion offered four kitchens and six dining rooms, variously stocked and styled so that the residents, from all backgrounds, had a chance of feeling comfortable in at least one of them. There were well-balanced meals at regular hours, and Saturday was the much-celebrated pizza night, but otherwise, the students were at liberty to shift for themselves. Scott always said--pausing for them to appreciate the pun--it gave students a taste of home.

Most days, Rogue ate late as well as alone. She'd balance a plate on a stack of textbooks and carry it off to some discreet corner; eating while reading, blurring out the rest of the world, was something she'd grown quite good at. This had invited her to more than a few chats about trying harder to fit in. She did try, actually. Rogue wouldn't have called herself antisocial any more than the Xmen would have considered themselves unkind. She didn't know how to tell them, how to explain that dining with the team made her feel young and dining with the students made her feel old, and dining in any crowd at all made her feel as if she were on display. Two years and people hesitated to pass the salt if her gloves were off. Two years and they made sure to keep their bare limbs away from even her covered ones.

Maybe that was it, the struggle not to look bothered which instead caused a certain tightness around her nose--called ‘uppity’ in the South. Or maybe it was because, after two years, she had neither left the school or committed to staying, as an Xmen. Or maybe it was that she couldn’t relate to their discussions--which bill had been recommended by which congressman, which sportsman had scored which goal, which resident had let John do what in which coatroom. Or maybe it was just what had happened with Bobby. Or maybe or maybe or maybe--it didn’t matter.

There was a barrier, something thicker than the gloves she wore.

But Logan had come back.

That evening, she dug one of her better sweaters out of the closet, scrubbed the watercolors out of her nails, smoothed her hair into a ponytail. She turned her head back and forth in front of the mirror, the portions of glass not eclipsed by sticky-note reminders, doodles, pages torn from art magazines. At least her skin was clear today, she thought--then wondered why she’d thought it. Nobody would notice. Her reflection smiled, and then snorted, and then laughed outright, for no reason at all except for the fact that the evening was glimmering ahead of her, as inviting as pool, hers to wade into, or splash, or drown.

She made her way to the first floor, still feeling laughter tickling behind her cheekbones. Her steps were light; she practically bounced down the stairs. Ororo passed her, winked. The kitchen down here belonged to the older students and the teachers. (Belonged in a sense that children were welcome, but not enthusiastically.) There were two tureens on the counter, whatever in them still hot enough to bubble, and towers of dishes teetering on the side. For some reason, she had the urge to go sketch them, but couldn’t remember where she’d left her book and, anyway, Piotr was shifting his weight back and forth behind her. So she just took a dish off the top and ladled some of the contents into it, hardly noting what she’d taken. She spilled some tea into a cup, the pitchers heavy, filled to the brim, sides bedazzled with condensation. “Borscht is better,” said Piotr to nobody in particular, as he helped himself to three servings at once--fitting one bowl into the crook of his arm.

The adult dining room had green walls and brown carpets, a few smaller tables with darkened wood as if someone had slow-cooked them for a few centuries. There weren’t as many windows in here, just two that looked over the pear trees at the back of the house. In April they opened the windows up, and the petals found their way to the carpets like drifts of snow. Each table had a vase with a single lily, a platter of bread, and a bowl with more flowers--these ones carved from butter. There weren’t as many windows in here, just two that looked over the pear trees at the back of the house. In April they were left open, and petals found their way to the carpets like snowdrifts.

Piotr waited until she’d taken her seat to chose his--across the room. Rogue didn’t notice. She set her bowl and spoon and cup carefully in front of her, then rearranged them--twice. She wasn’t really hungry--there was a little fluttery feeling in her belly like the laugh had settled in for the long haul, and she wasn’t sure that went well with bouillabaisse. Did she even like French soup? She couldn’t remember, suddenly. It wasn’t something they had in Meridian. Did Logan like French soup? Would she see him tonight? It was fine if she didn’t, of course. But it would be nice. She could ask about Canada. She could ask about traveling. She could ask how long he was planning to stay. She took a slow breath.

Students came in, in pairs and groups, and then Professor X and Dr. McCoy. The latter seldom ate in front of them and didn’t do so now--although he sat with Xavier and continued some serious, quiet conversation. The old man looked strained, Rogue thought. Almost frail. But he looked around the room, the usual fond light in his eyes, and she tried to think of something else before that gaze reached her. “It’s nothing to concern ourselves with now, in any case,” she heard him murmur to the doctor.

She smoothed a napkin across her lap and tore one of the rolls in half, buttered it--although spoiling that butter rose felt criminal. She made herself chew, swallow, dip her spoon into the bowl. She reached across and turned the vase back and forth, trying to see something in its steady dull prettiness worth putting on paper. Just as she’d convinced herself he wouldn’t come, and had reasoned herself into not minding, Logan appeared in the doorway--peering in, brow furrowed. He saw her, and it smoothed.

There was nothing in the world which could have stopped her lips from jumping up--although she wished she hadn’t been holding a mouthful of shrimp at the time (bouillabaisse had turned out to be delicious).

“Is this where everyone porks out?”

“Well, we try,” she told him, wiping her chin.

He took easy, loping steps towards her. Other kids at other tables gaped, not even discreetly. His return and everything about it would be gossip fodder for the week. Anyone who hadn’t lived here during the Liberty Island incident was curious to see if he lived up to his name, anyone who had was hoping he’d do something to prove their exaggerations. “You look nice, kid. If I’d known we changed for dinner here, I would have rented a suit and tie.”

“Oh, we-we don’t, usually,” Rogue blushed, caught in admitting that she’d gone out of her way.

Xavier saved things, calling across the room-- "Logan if I thought you would substitute even one layer of plaid for a dinner jacket, I would pay the tailor’s bill myself.”

“That’s real generous, Charles, but I don’t want to put you out. I know how tight things are.”

“We’ll hold a bake sale. Cupcakes for a cause,” Xavier laughed, turning back to Dr. McCoy, and Logan did the same with Rogue. He leaned down, just slightly, and though there was hardly a change in the way he spoke, his voice seemed to rumble against her ear, for her and her alone.

“How’re we doing, kid?”

“Good.”

“Really?”

She blushed again. His eyes tickled down her face, her arm, to the bowl at the end of it.

“Better than gas station jerky.”

“No,” she told him. “But it’s alright, anyway.”

At that moment, a streak of lightning jostled Logan aside. That was at least what it looked like. That was what Jubilee always looked like. One of those people who forever seem to be mid-sentence, she kept talking as she dropped her purse on the floor, as she dropped her bowl on the table, as she took the chair he’d been reaching for. “S’cuse me,” she threw over her shoulder, like an unwanted wrapper.

John and Bobby followed her, giving the Wolverine a more natural birth. Not participants in the conversation, or even happy members of the audience, but that didn’t matter. Jubilee was a one-woman monologue, a forest fire of speech, a solid wall of it. “--so Bella cuts her finger on the wrapping paper, yeah? An’ this tiny little bead of blood comes up. And it starts all this drama at the party because the blond vampire isn’t fully trained or something. But what I wanna know is, is y’know, how a papercut caused him to fang out and not all the times she got her period. Cuz y’know that had’t’ve happened; she’s been with them for months. And they go to a high school. Five days a week! Literally, dozens of girls must have been on the rag at any given point. More, because we synchronize.”

Rogue liked Jubilee. She really did. But she found herself lightly picking at the edge of her gloves. There was still an empty place to her right, but she knew no reasonable Canadian cage fighter would--sure enough, when she brought herself to check, his eyebrows were raised to an unprecedented height. She thought Logan might backpedal out of the dining room entirely. Please let him stick around. Please, please--

And then, of course, again, Jean entered--with the kind of serene confidence of someone used to being the addressee and answer to most prayers. “It’s nice,” she said, “to see a man with an appetite. Are you going to join me--us?”

Behind her, Scott was gripping a tray with both his and the doctor’s supper. “No pressure. Seriously. At all.”

“Oh, but it’s good to have mature company now and then.”

“I didn’t realize he’d been short of it.” Scott glanced at Rogue, somehow managing to give the impression of winking despite the glasses.

“But I’m always happy to help you out, Jeannie.” Logan touched Rogue, a perfectly friendly, perfectly platonic pat on the shoulder. “Catch up with you later, kid?”

“Oh. Yes. Yeah. Sure.”

He let himself be led across the room. How it felt to watch that happen, Rogue couldn’t have said, because she didn’t. She finished her meal, scraping the bowl. She had another roll. She sipped her drink, enjoying the way it cooled her burning throat. When Bobby started making jokes about iced brew versus boiled (“I honestly thought the revolution happened because the British thought we were doing it wrong. The Boston Tea Party? Just a bunch of nitwits who didn’t own a kettle.”) she laughed. She’d forgotten how nice it could be when he was trying to be her friend and not the other thing. She told Jubilee about a book she’d finished, offered to loan it to her. She pretended to understand what John was saying about boxing versus wrestling--or, at least, to care.

She had a nice evening. It was fine.

____________________________________________________


Four days passed without Logan and herself speaking privately. They were busy--he with the Professor or the team, she with preparations for midterms. In addition to a new piece, which they’d be refining for months, the instructor wanted a portfolio of their best work; but in retrospect, nothing she’d done seemed good, or even better than the rest. She couldn’t sleep.

“Make something that matters to you,” Scott told her. She’d taken to visiting him while he tinkered in the garage. He was giving his bike another examination, searching for a further reason to dislike its abductor. “That’s going to show, even to people who don’t want to understand.”

She thought about that. For a while.

And then she started the new project.

She borrowed material from the mansion’s art closet but did most of the work at the university. She’d never tried anything like this before--there were false starts that bordered on mental breakdowns. Sometimes her classmates asked questions about what she was doing, but most of them were caught up in their own assignments. Her instructor didn’t ask any questions at all but gave her permission to stay late.

It made a difference to know Logan and she were under the same roof. He wasn’t showing any sign of leaving soon--not that he would. They passed in the hall, and the little jolt she’d get, seeing him, would last all day. Something in her felt simultaneously more relaxed and more alert.

But that only drew attention to the sense that something here, alone, had been amiss.

She couldn’t sleep.

___________________________________________

“You don’t mind?”

“No!” Bobby’s eagerness was almost painful. He rubbed his hand over his face, across round and stubbornly unstubbled cheeks. “I still have half a case of that Canadian brand. Nobody else likes it.”

“Well, then, I guess I need two.”

“Yeah? Awesome. Let me just--”

She watched him from the doorway. Tripping over clothes, an empty Taco Bell box, the controller to a video game console. In the bed against the far wall, the other boy rolled over, raising the lighter he’d must have fallen asleep clutching.
“The fuck, Iceman?”
“Shut up, John.”
“Oh, man. Tell me you’re not doing this again.”
“Shut up, John.”

Bobby dove under his bed. His pale legs wriggled among the clutter like the limbs of some pitiful insect under a boot. She backed up and fixed her eyes pointedly down at the rug until he reappeared, breathless, dust bunnies in his hair. He crinkled his nose, and she wondered why she’d stopped liking it when he smiled at her.
He held the Molsons loosely. It’s hard to keep a secret in a house with not one but two telepaths, not to mention the other gifts that tended to make private thoughts public. So the stash was probably not the buried treasure the kids pretended it to be. But there it was and stayed, undisclosed and unrebuked. Maybe Xavier knew that a little rebellion would keep them tame in other ways. “We could go to the balcony with these. Y’know? Like before.”

She swallowed. “Oh-oh, no. I’ll just take them to go. Let you get back to sleep.”

“You’re going to drink alone?” He laughed, but nervously, not as if he thought it was funny.

“I don’t think so.”

His lips made a little ‘o’. “That’s--right. Well. It’s none of my business. I’ve got training in the morning, anyway. Gotta earn my keep around here.” He didn’t hand the bottles to her so much as drop them. With that, she remembered why she didn’t like his smile. It had terms and conditions.
“Goodnight, Bobby.” She turned to leave--
“Hey, Rogue? Wait a second.”
He tugged the drinks out of her arms and with one hardly self-conscious breath turned them frosty cold.
“Thank you.”
“What are friends for?” he asked, rather miserably.
He disappeared back into his bedroom, shutting the door with a firm click. A moment later, she heard--
“Shut up, John.”


She felt bad. Not, however, quite bad enough to keep from knocking on Logan’s door next. The growls, the mumbles, the whimpers were nearly as audible as they’d been through the vent that connected their rooms. And just like last time, she felt them shuddering up as if they were coming from herself. Two years had been enough to learn some lessons, just not all of them.







.

Reminisce, Chapter Five

THE NOT SO DISTANT FUTURE:

Sometimes now, his hands hurt. They felt cumbersome, and the claws foreign despite how many years (how many years?) he’d carried them. The sheaths they left throbbed, a reminder that adamantium was not the material Nature had designed them to hold. He felt the slice of tissue he couldn’t see, the protest between his knuckles. More and more he was aware of what was on the claws when they retracted--blood or soil or brain matter. Was that what made the pockets itch? Was that what made them burn?

Sometimes now, he felt heavy. His muscles were still crisp lines, he could lift and throw and run the same as ever. But some days he felt the earth pulling at him, asking him to set down weight he hadn’t chosen to carry in the first place.

Sometimes now, the words on the page went blurry around the edges. Sentences shrank and hid in the paragraphs. He used to be able to read in the dark; now he turned on lamps and still the tension coiled in his forehead.

“I think I could be getting old,” he told the Professor one evening, sitting in the armchairs in the latter’s study, watching flames colonize the logs in the fireplace. They were splitting the contents of a crystal decanter, although doing so in secret, as this supposedly interfered with his medication. Logan committed to silence willingly enough. It wasn’t his place to tell Charles what to do. And Hank was, in all likelihood, being his usual fussy self. Last month he’d tried to tell him to cut back.

“Mm. Nice of you to join me,” murmured Xavier. Pale, soft fingers shifted a white pawn on the chessboard, and then a black horse. He picked up his glass with both hands and took a careful sip, eyes still on the game--he was playing himself, not Logan. Minutes passed, not so much in ticks of the clock but in moves and countermoves. “Are you really coming to the gala next weekend?”
“You already asked me that.”
“And?”
“It’d be a shame to waste that fancy suit you bought me.”
For a second, he wondered if it had been a mistake, to remind him of the suit and the reason for its purchase, the funeral. The Professor’s face wobbled for a moment, and he bowed his bald head too far over the chessboard. But perhaps only for Logan did the room contract, like corset strings tightening things into airless, dignified discomfort. He stared at the crackling wood chips in the fireplace. Each time one flared, bright and brilliant red, he thought about Scott. Scott, and--

“I’d rather like that, you know,” Xavier said, abruptly straightening.

“What?”

“The idea of us being old men together. Quite funny, really, if it were you and I, in the end.”

“Don’t know if that joke would be on you or me.”

“Shame, though, that we couldn't have been young men together too.”

“Bet you were quite the stud, Chuck.” Logan forced a smirk. The embers were just embers. They didn’t remind him of anything. There was nothing to be reminded of.

The Professor, lips wrapped over his teeth, glanced sideways--that half-pride of the virtuous performing the profane. “Mm. I could have given you a run for your money. Nothing promises afterglow like knowing a lady’s fantasy.”

“Well, nothing says longevity like a healing factor, so--” He watched Charles snort so hard that the ice clattered against the sides of his glass. A little wave of cognac washed over the side, landing on his carefully creased trousers and unflinching knees. "--so there was never a ‘lady friend’ special enough to push your chair into happily ever after? You’ve never wanted to settle down, have a few kids?”

“I have kids,” the other man protested, gesturing around him, though the room was empty. “Everyone who has ever passed under this roof, been taught here, has been a child of mine.” He picked up the corners of his mouth--and then dropped them. “Except for you, maybe. Good lord, we were lucky you were even housebroken when we brought you in. Running around, sniffing at every door, looking for threats.”

“Well, I’m glad you decided to keep me.”

Xavier responded as if it were natural gratitude instead of sarcasm, nodding. “But I thought you had potential if only for the way you’d looked after her. And she vouched for you, of course.”

“Who did?” He topped up his glass, lifted the decanter by way of asking if the old man wanted more.“Who vouched for me? Jean?”

Xavier was staring at the board, at a queen he’d just laid on its side. He’d done so gently as if the piece had feelings.

“Someone being special has nothing to do with getting to keep them,” he murmured. Lately, Logan noticed, no conversation with the Professor followed a straight route. He darted from topics, doubled back, circled them like an animal.

“When you’re young, you think birthdays are about cake and balloons--I know what Hank is planning, by the way. You tell him it has to be ganache or nothing--”

“You know I don’t know what that is.”

“--and then, when you grow up, then it’s all about goals, whether you’ve missed or met them. But...by the time you get here, where I am, you understand time to be...this relentless...this accumulation of-of apologies you were not able to make.” All through the speech, Xavier’s voice had gone up and down, as if someone were fiddling with the volume button. He did not look at Logan, but into some further, nothing space. Something in his neck was trembling.

Logan felt his mouth go dry. “Jesus, Charles. Way to take it to a morbid fucking place.”

“Language,” the old man said, suddenly and quite normal. He began resetting pieces on the board.



____________________________________________________________________




Jubilee’s nose dripped steadily onto the back of Bobby’s head, like rain from a leaking roof. It stained his curls red. She pushed her knee into the boy’s back, bending his arm until it lay parallel with the bumps of his spine. He bucked and grunted, nostrils twitching fast against the sweat and fibrous threads on the mat. They were both hot, despite the patches of ice--both light frost and the kind that made cars slide off of bridges--surrounding them. In the hall, they’d said,this time, no powers. They’d shaken hands on it. She continued to hold up her end--until Bobby coughed, “Yie-ield.”
After that, lightning-quick, Jubilee gave his backside an electric slap and jumped to her feet. She took a few steps backward, half-crouched, watchful, palms-up.

“Good.”

Until Logan spoke, Jubilee’s face had been stiff with concentration. But his approval broke that mask, and delight bubbled from the cracks. She wiped her nose on her arm, a slug trail of red, and--God help him, there was no other word for it--danced over to the Wolverine. She raised her hand as if she wanted him like to shake it, but instead made a fist. “I don’t know what you want me to do with that,” he lied. “Go and tell the next pair, they’re up in twenty.”

“Right-o, Wolv-o. No? That’s still not okay? Okay. I’m going.”

He didn’t watch her skip out, but he heard her bouncing footsteps, a staccato patter on his eardrums. He crossed his arms and studied Bobby’s slower ascendance, the boy pushing himself to his elbows and then his knees. He’d have a talk with him about playing by the rules, and another one about how he could have shaken Jubilee’s grip. And then he’d have him mop up that ice shit so that the next team would get a clean fighting space.

It had been Scott’s practice to supervise these matches with all the students present. Logan put a stop to that. Helping the losers save face didn’t matter to him, but privacy cut down on theatrics. Xavier’s students were addicted to it; he wasn’t sure if that was something inherent in young mutants or young people in general, being new to and short of patience with both. The dramatics were difficult to squash--he didn’t entirely want to. For instance, he could hear Jubilee out in the hall now, describing how she had “smashed Iceman like the patriarchy.” And that was funny as hell.

“Sorry,” said Bobby, preemptively. He sounded like a toddler who’d been found scribbling on the walls. He was still rubbing the seat of his shorts; they were smoking from the sparks Jubilee had let off. Logan opened his mouth and rather than the reprimand, a sound strange and harsh, like a bark scrubbed with sandpaper, fell out. He snapped his teeth together. Bobby’s head had popped up from its contrite pose, but Logan found he couldn’t look at the boy without that sound coming back, batting against the walls of his teeth. It tickled his cheeks and the corners of his eyes.

“Shit, kid. Go ahead, get out of here.”
“That’s it?”

He glowered. It was difficult. Something was wrong with Logan; he had to focus on holding his lips tight--otherwise, they shook, and that sound burst out again. But he looked at Bobby in such a way as to promise unspeakable fury at a later date. The boy scurried. It had worked, Logan thought.

But as the door to the training room closed, he heard his voice, not afraid but incredulous--
“The Wolverine is laughing.”


__________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________
Logan worried about what they’d try to get away with, if the secret got out if they noticed if they discussed it. If they knew...the students knew that the Wolverine would do violent and incredible things for them because violent and incredible things came to him naturally. But there were other things at risk when people were aware that you cared about them. They expected things, then. Permanence. Safety. Promises he couldn’t deliver.
And then there were the other concerns. What if they thought he was going soft? What if he was going soft?
He worried.

But, still picturing Bobby in the morning’s session, he knew he wasn’t worrying enough. He kept finding a chuckle waiting around every bend of his thoughts. He hadn’t felt this close to contentment since--

here, Logan’s thoughts skipped, like a needle over scratched vinyl.


____________________________________________________________________


The bed was covered in her clothing. Dresses with matching accessories set on or beside them. Earrings--tasteful diamond, tasteful ruby, tasteful silver. Purses--tasteful black clutch, tasteful red clutch, tasteful white clutch. On the floor, a row of shoes--tasteful black, tasteful red, tasteful silver with straps. Not heels, because who knew how quickly they’d need to move tonight. He looked at them, noted that Jean was, as ever, prepared for something to go wrong.

She was leaving the bathroom now, steam spilling like fog across sunrise pavement. She had a towel wrapped around her hair, another around her body, long legs pink with heat. If he touched one of them, his hand would leave a print. He knew because he’d taken several showers with Jean. She liked them to burn. “Hey,” she said, with the kind of sweetness that made him go crazy for her--once.

“Are these for me?” He flicked a skirt, not hard enough to wrinkle it. He wouldn’t dare.

“Ha. Not one of those necklines would suit you.” She walked over to the wardrobe and drew out a plastic garment bag. “But I had this pressed.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know. I wanted to.” She kissed his cheek as he took the bag from her.
He put his nose down into her shoulder, breathing hot skin and expensive conditioner, and felt, not aroused, but a strange absence of reaction, as soft as sadness.
He leaned back. “You smell nice.”

“You don’t. Are you going to clean up before the mission?”
She wrinkled her nose as if she was teasing. She wasn’t.

“Yup.”

“I could help you. I don’t mind hopping back in.”

He kissed her. The press of his lips over and between hers, the light touch of her tongue. Nothing. He backed away. “That’s alright. I’m going to be quick.”

Later, he zipped up her dress (the red), and she knotted his tie. They were capable of doing both themselves but went through the motions of helping each other. The tie was red too. She’d chosen it to match her dress, unrolling it from a dresser drawer. He watched her make the loops, noting that she’d done it before, noting that she’d tied this tie before, noting a scent deep in the threads, a signature that wasn’t his.
“Did you get this for me?”
She straightened the ends, though they were already even. “Mm-hmm. I picked it up when I got the suit from the cleaner’s.” Up this close, the lie burned his nose.

“Jean.” He tried to think of a gentle way to say it. Couldn’t. “I don’t want Scott’s things.”

That brought her gaze up to his, defiant. “Well, nobody else does.” Her expression brought to mind smoking dynamite. But the little shudder and the promise of salt water behind her eyes quickly put it out. “I just thought it would look nice. You don’t have to wear it. I’m sorry.”

Logan wore the tie. It was tight.

____________________________________________________________________




Logan scanned the room, watching for liars. There were plenty of open seats, but he leaned against the left wall. Most faces stayed pointed at the speaker, except when a baby started crying in the second row. Then, a collective wave of tolerant smiles and rolled eyes washed through the crowd, like a breeze through stalks of corn. Behind the podium, the woman stammered, not yet comfortable with her speechmaking to break script and joke about the disturbance. He wondered who would bring their child to this. Maybe the baby was part of a distraction, the deliberate kind. He took slow breaths, seeking sweat, listening for a heart beating harder than it should. So far, there was little that didn’t come from the speaker. The second most distressed person in the room was the baby, diaper thickening by second. The third, from the man holding jiggling the child on his lap, but Logan thought that was just embarrassment.

Nothing else to alarm, so far. He was bored. The FOH had been targeting campaigns that diverged from their agenda. And a month ago, the woman stuttering into the microphone had gone on the record saying that she would oppose a bill requiring separate bathroom facilities for mutants. Logan doubted that she’d serve a day in Congress with that kind of decency, but the team had decided to try keeping her alive through the election.

After the candidate’s speech, and the Q&A session (nothing aggressive asked, nothing inflammatory answered), guests were encouraged to visit the open bar and the donation table, in that order. The aspiring representative moved through the crowd, shaking hands. She shook Logan’s, smiling with what seemed like a predetermined degree of teeth. She shook Hank’s, with only a little less. Guests moseyed around the hall, slandering the opposition and helping themselves to the fruit platter. He clocked Hank, hovering around the candidate’s family as unobtrusively as someone blue could manage, and Jean, laughing in a huddle of donors. This must have been the first event she’d attended like this, without Scott at her side. She was bearing it well.

Logan left them, trailing a group that wandered out of the lecture room, down a gallery of student artwork. Not for the first time, he reflected what a bad idea it was to hold an event like this at a college. Too many buildings, too many entrances, too many children within a blast radius. It would be easier to cover if Ororo was still with them. If Scott was still with them.

Two men who’d been ostentatiously examining the exhibits ahead of him ducked suddenly into a classroom. Logan thought, finally, and picked up speed. But listening at the door betrayed sounds of public trust rather than public threat. They’re having a better night than I will. He did a full loop of the gallery, watching people admire or pretend to admire the sculptures and paintings. By the time he passed the classroom, the couple was slipping back out--breathless and disheveled and proud of themselves. One of the men registered Logan’s stare, winked.

Far from what Hank might joke, Logan did have an appreciation for art. That didn’t mean he understood what a lot of this bullshit was. A splash of yellow on an otherwise blank canvas looked like piss in the snow to him, not--as he read on the placard--Raven’s Love. And he had no idea what the vase full of green teeth had to do with “Fear of my Father’s Failure.” But the rest weren’t too bad. He rather liked that one, of the two soldiers by the campfire. And the child, in the woods. And--
He didn’t know how long he stood, without moving, without blinking, before Jean joined him. “There you are. I thought I’d lost you.”

“Something happened?”

“No, nothing. Everything seems normal here. We think we should shadow her to the airport, though. Make sure she boards okay.”
“Right.” Speaking took effort, and he seemed to draw the words as one might scrape water from parched well.

“I thought I’d find you enjoying the bar, not the exhibits. What’s next, poetry nights?” He didn’t reply. It would have been too hard. Jean leaned against his arm, tipsy and affectionate with it. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone if you start carrying around a copy of Byron. Charles might, though.”

In the space where his snarky answer should come, the silence snagged her attention. She glanced up at his face and then turned. And she went very still, as together they looked at the painting, and the little placard that read, “View from Liberty Torch--mixed medium, acrylic, glass, metal.”

Gradually, like a needle sliding through his brain, stitching together his thoughts and reality, Logan became aware of two things in the woman beside him: the rising patter of her heart, and a smell of fear.

Reminisce: Chapter Six





BACK THEN



Marie waited for Logan in the corridor, chewing on her bottom lip. She wasn’t cold, but she wondered if she should have put her slippers on. Her bare toes on the carpet--did they look weird? Were they too bumpy? She held a bottle in front of her, one in each hand--but maybe that looked too earnest?--and instead dangled the beer by her hip. Casual. Then she realized how childish she was being. What kind of idiot worried about things like that, when on the other side of the door--the groans, the creaking bed, the sounds of her friend in distress. Bumpy toes. Jesus. She knocked again. “Logan?”

She pictured him, as vividly as if the walls were made of glass. She saw him flinching into the present, fists clenched, angry and ready to prove it. It took Logan awhile to wake up--to reconcile himself to now, to twisted bedsheets and lack of immediate danger. At least, if his nightmares were the same. If they were anything like hers.
The knob turned, and the door drew inward--just a few inches, enough for him to peer out. Shirtless, sweaty, and surprised to see her-- “Kid, you alright? Is everything alright?”--he checked the corridor in both directions, and then Marie, scanning her up and down.

“I’m fine. I just thought I’d check on you.”

His eyebrows shot up.
He started to speak, stopped. Grimaced.

She was not one of those people who thought the world owed herself something. She wasn’t angry when the things she hoped for didn’t turn out like she imagined. Having a family, having a boyfriend, having an adventure, having a mutation. She liked to think that she took her punches without too much sniffing.
That being said, Marie hadn’t ever expected Logan to look embarrassed to see her.

“Just...just give me a second Kid, okay?” He said, tightly, almost through his teeth.

“O-” He’d ducked back inside before she could reach “kay”. She was left waiting again with the empty hallway, air conditioning roaring in her ears like an underfed lion. This is ridiculous. What am I doing here? What did I want from this?

When the door reopened--just wide enough for him to squeeze through--Logan was wearing a wifebeater and the same decidedly tense expression. He closed the door behind his back and then checked to make sure it was shut, despite the hard click it made. It was the same bedroom they’d given Logan last time. Maybe he was thinking about what had happened in there, last time. Perhaps he didn’t want to remind her of the other nightmare, of his claws, of every disaster that had followed. Perhaps, one foot still in his nightmare, he wanted to but a barrier between himself and the phantoms he’d left on the pillow.

So she lifted the Molsons and gave them a little shake. That, finally, inspired a weak grin. He took one of them, knuckle brushing her pinkie finger--quick enough for a pulse to react, but not a mutation. “Didn’t know you drank.”
“Well, I didn’t, before.”
“Picked up one of my bad habits?”
“And a couple others.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head, blushed. “Please don’t be.”
He popped the cap off his beer and then did her’s. Again, that breath-second of contact. A millimeter of skin, yet she felt a tickling heat spread as if her arms were tinder.

“So you and Bobby, huh?” He said it with an overly hearty voice.

She took a sharp breath. “Excuse me?”

“I heard you two got pretty close.”

“Heard from who?”

He shrugged.

“Well we’re not. We’re not close. Not now.” Plenty of other people had asked about them, their relationship or lack thereof. She wasn’t sure why it hit the deadened nerve, coming from Logan.

He’d just brought the bottle to his lips but pulled it away without a drink. “Did something happen?” He wasn’t smirking now. The suddenness of the gesture, the jerk of his shoulder, painted images that made her worry for Bobby. “No,” she said emphatically and tried not to notice his nostrils flare. She tried to head him off, speaking quickly, the first words that would come off her tongue--“What happened? Up North? What did you find?”

It occurred to her--briefly--that Logan and she were both asking the questions most likely to push the other away.

Logan’s expression didn’t shutter up this time. He merely raised an eyebrow. Then, flicking another glance behind him, he stepped away from the bedroom door and took a careful seat against the wall. Watching him lower his weight to the floor, a predator presenting himself unthreatened and non-threatening--she was sitting beside him before she realized it. She left a careful foot of space, for the sake of their respective bare skin, but Logan sprawled, and hardly seemed aware that his knee was touching hers. She could feel the heat of his skin under the loose sweatpants, the tautly corded muscles. She found it impossible to relax, and she was the first one to shift away when her own leg started trembling.

“I found the place they put the adamantium in me. Where I got these,” he showed her his arm but didn’t let out the claws he was referring to. “It was ruins. And bones. Not a lot else.”

“What happened then?” She spoke softly as if rising above a whisper would cause him to draw the blinds against her.

Matching her, he kept his voice low, a gravel rumble. “Tried to follow some leads, figure out what sort of person I was, what I might have been doing to end up in a facility like that.”

“And? What were you doing?”

“Nothing good. I wasn’t doing anything good.”

“That doesn’t mean you deserved it. What they did to you.”

“I’m not sure what I deserve, Kid.”

You look so tired, Logan, she thought. But instead of saying that, she asked, “Do you know how long you’re going to stay this time?”

He sighed, scratched his nose with his thumb. “No.”

I don’t want you to go.

“I don’t know how long I’m going to stay here, either.” It was the first time she’d said that, the first time leaving had seemed such a real and near possibility. But Logan didn’t react as if this was something exceptional. He just grunted. “Why do you call me ‘kid’?” she blurted.

“Well, what kind of name is ‘Rogue’?” He gave either a short laugh or a sharp exhale, and smiled at her, a genuine smile, one that creased the corners of his eyes.

“But you know my other--”

He blinked, shifted, as if the floor was suddenly less comfortable, dropping the smile in exchange for another strange glance toward his room. “Others don’t. You got a right to share any part of yourself you choose. Or not. Not my place to give that away for you-,” he paused, “-Kid.”

Considering this, she felt a warmth so sudden and complete enough to make her wonder how long she’d felt cold. “But I’m not a kid, Logan.”

He drank his beer. “I know that.”

After a while, she realized that his knee has settled near hers again. This took so much of her attention that she couldn’t have said how long he was watching her. She looked up, heat bubbling under her cheeks. She’d always felt conflicted about having Logan’s eyes on her. On the one hand, she couldn’t hide anything from him. On the other, she didn’t need to. And Logan--Logan had a way of making a look feel like a touch. It seemed that he stared at her until her whole body became a tissue-thin shell around her thumping heart. Then, abruptly, lightly, he said, “So what’s the deal with this boy? Bobby?”

He’d caught her. He’d done it all deliberately, she realized--letting her ask questions so that she’d answer his, circling back to the subject he was interested in. She wanted to swear, or laugh, or kick him. And he knew all of that, too, or so said the quirk of his mouth. Marie shook her head, grinding her teeth together, and took the time to straighten her face and nightgown before she gave him a reply. She set her bottle down between them so that she could pick at her fingernails. “We were dating, I guess. My first year here. And I was working with the Professor, to see if there was any way I could get some control over it, over my skin.” She swallowed. She tore off a hangnail. “It didn’t work out.”

“Right,” he said, nodding. There was nothing in his face except attention, and that emboldened her--

“Actually, I just quit the sessions.”

She waited for him to ask why; everybody had asked why.

“So this boy was disappointed?”

Marie was startled into the truth. “The boy was mad.” Suddenly it all seemed hilarious, but Logan didn’t appear to find it so. And then--maybe because he hadn’t asked her why--she told him.

“The first time my mutation showed up, I was with a--um--boy. And, y’know, I remember, right before, wishing there was some way you could tell, to know for sure, if someone cared about you, or if they just wanted to touch you and then tell their friends they had.” She took a breath, speaking to her lap, to the little dot of blood in the corner of her thumb. “I liked Bobby. And I did want to be able to, y’know... But he just--”
She took a breath. Bobby had behaved as if once he was able to put his hands on her, he’d have the right to. As if it were a given. She felt control of her mutation would come at the cost of the right to her own flesh. Where she’d grown up, boys touching girls left an imprint, a stamp--both on their bodies and their reputation, both interchangeable. In church, in the locker rooms, at the breakfast table, a girl’s sex was a perishable good: something that could be soiled, damaged, taken, stolen, given too freely. Not being touched was its own stamp--she remembered the notes passed, from desk to desk in the classroom. Nicknames scrawled on lockers, the bathroom stalls. The Virgin Marie. But beside them, worse--Spreadlegs Sarah, Cum-in-me Christie. She’d hated that ultimatum. She’d hated that none of it applied to the boys, that nothing seemed to get taken from them.

And for such a long time, she’d been scared--what if this bottled-up indignation had something to do with her brewing mutation, that she’d summoned it, created it from a wish to be the one who took. Why else was this the gift evolution had given her? This curse that had made her horribly, perpetually protected--was it her fault?

She didn’t tell Logan all of this, obviously. She couldn’t have put it into words. But he listened quietly to what she was able to say. He didn’t ask questions, and he didn’t distract, and he didn’t clutter up her truth with his opinion. “What I can do makes me feel dangerous. But protected. But lonely. But strong. I don’t like it. But I just don’t always hate it,” she said to him.

She might have been reading too much empathy into his silence, the way a deer might see kindness in a tiger’s flat gold gaze. But she didn’t think so. She was looking at him; she was working up her nerve to add that there was someone she wished could touch her, would touch her--
when, from the other side of the bedroom door, there came a delicate, distinctly female cough.

Someone else was in his room.

Logan winced and looked abashed, and Marie remembered something: that Scott was away for the night., having taken the Professor to visit Magneto in prison. All of a sudden, she reevaluated why they were sitting here in the hallway. The odd grimace he’d made before he’d come out to speak with her. How long it had taken him to answer her knocks. The groaning sounds, the creaking of the bed.

Her knee jerked as it had touched an electric wire, or a doctor’s reflex hammer, causing her to knock over her (mostly full) beer. Liquid pumped onto the carpet, the stain spreading like blood from a vital artery.
“Anyway, I didn’t mean--”
“Kid--”
“--to bother you--”
“Hold on a second.”
“Thanks for letting me ramble on--
“You don’t have to--”
“I’ll let you get back to--”
“Rogue, just wait--”
“--sleep. I know how much you need it.”
They were both scrambling up. He reached out a hand to her shoulder, but didn’t grab hold--the nightgown was sleeveless. She picked up the bottle, clumsily spilling even more of the beer. The rug was going to smell like Molson. It was going to stain. “We’ve ruined it,” she said, with a frantic laugh. Her cheeks burned. Her throat burned.
“Kid--”
“I’m not a kid.”
She moved past him. It was easy to walk away as if she wasn’t bothered because she wasn’t. As a matter of fact, Marie didn’t feel anything at all. There was a sense of cottony absence in her chest, of waiting, as if standing alone on a subway platform or sitting in a dentist’s chair. She forced herself to walk down the middle of the carpet, keeping her eyes on the fleur-de-lis pattern. Halfway down the hall, she heard Logan’s footfalls, felt him reaching for her again. She turned around to tell him--she didn’t know what she was going to tell him--but found herself mistaken, again. Logan wasn’t following. He wasn’t even where she’d left him--he’d already gone back to bed.



_____________________________________________________________________







Marie took a shower. No particular reason, she’d just remembered that she hadn’t conditioned her hair this morning. She didn’t think about what had happened. It had been a little embarrassing, but no big deal. She’d shrugged it off. Completely. She scrubbed herself with some of Jubilee’s mango exfoliating wash, shaved her legs, moisturized.

It was one in the morning by the time she finished drying off. Marie had an exam she needed to study for, so she stacked textbooks on her bedside table and set her alarm for 5:30 so that she’d have time before breakfast. Then she changed her mind and read a few chapters, highlighting paragraphs and scribbling comments in the margins. The thing was, she thought, finally flicking off her booklight as her roommates began to stir--the thing was, nothing Logan or Jean did was any of her business. Marie had no right to feel one way or the other about it. Simple as that.

She didn’t judge them. Anyway, she’d had Logan inside her mind. She knew what he was like. She knew that he was lonely. She knew that he was attracted to Dr. Grey. Hell, after Liberty Island she’d been attracted to Jean. And who wouldn’t be? Serene, intelligent, beautiful, with that suggestion of power tugging at its harness. And if it pissed off Scott (Scott! she thought, with a pang), then all the better. She wanted Logan to be happy. Nothing else really mattered.

That settled, she plumped her pillow, curled up on her side with the blanket tugged to her neck. Her eyes stung--not with tears, but tiredness. She closed them, focused on the coolness of the pillow on her cheek. She exhaled, felt the muscles in her neck uncoil.

Her eyes jumped back open. Did she really think Jean was going to make Logan happy? Maybe for a little while. And happiness even in its smallest dose was something her friend deserved. Besides, again, it was none of her business. It wasn’t as if she had any claim to Logan.

That idea was ridiculous. Stupid. And she wasn’t stupid. So what did she expect from him? Nothing! But this protest was a little too loud, even in her own mind. Because it wasn’t quite true, was it? She and Logan---what? What, exactly, did Logan and she have? One unwilling hitchhike, two days, and a mission for the Xmen?

He almost died for me, she reminded herself. A different, colder voice responded--He would die for just about anyone. He wants to. That hurt, not least because she could feel the dregs of Wolverine in her agree. Still, it didn’t hurt as much as the next--if Logan wasn’t, in some way, hers, then what did she have here? Or anywhere?

The clock beside her said 3:00, in blurry digital numbers.

Okay. Okay. Let’s say you two actually have a connection, something special. What would that even look like?
This was more to her liking. Marie took awhile picturing that, in detail. It was the first time she’d let herself do so. When she finally resurfaced from the fantasy, body flushed and brain swimming, the cold voice was waiting for her.

Great. Now. Assuming you’re somehow right, assuming you’re not this obsessive lunatic, assuming everything you dream comes true...knowing yourself, knowing Logan, knowing this place. How would something like that end?

Her alarm went off.


____________________________________________________________________




She noticed it now, the way that the doctor would enter a room, her normally impeccable hair disheveled. The way she held Scott’s hand and smiled sardonically. Scott, paused in the middle of grading papers so long the nib of his pen would go dry. Ororo’s pursed lips. It felt as if the mansion were a tinderbox, and everyone around her was juggling lit matches.

Unable to resolve the problem, Marie decided that the most mature thing to do would be to ignore it entirely. That meant avoiding Jean, who she couldn’t look at without stomach pains. It meant avoiding Jubilee, who could pry out gossip with all the tactical ruthlessness of a hardened marine. It also meant avoiding Scott, who even in her weakest moments she knew possessed a deeper and more justifiable stake in the pain of the circumstances. She’d been able to talk through things that bothered her with him before, but this was not one of them. But she was surprised to discover how much she missed her friend.



Most of all, she was forced to avoid Logan.

He didn’t make it easy.

____________


“Hey, Ki-Rogue.” He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, arms crossed, leaning against one of the posts. Others in such a stance might seem to be waiting for something or someone, but the Wolverine could make it look restful, as at home as a person on a couch, feet on the coffee table, nothing to do and no urge to do it.

“Hi,” she said back. She almost tripped on the bottom step, the silver lining of which was the uptick it gave her voice, making her sound nearly perky. “On my way to the library!” She hoped the breathless way that she said it would indicate a terrible urgency to the trip, and forestall conversation.

“Need a ride?”

“Do you have a ride?”

“I could get us one.”

There was a joke, on the tip of her tongue, about stealing things from Scott. It seemed funny for a second, and then it didn’t. So, instead--”That’s alright, Ororo said I could borrow a car.”

“You learned how to drive?”

“Mm-hm.” She looked him in the eye. “Mr. Summers taught me. I’ll see you, Logan.”


________

He was on the porch, smoking the last viable leaves of a cigar. That and the glow of the electric lantern above the door, around which moths flitted like planes over a battlefield, made the only light.

Those, and the tight, bright gleam in his eyes. “Everything alright?”

“I’m just fine, Logan. How are you?”

“Hot date?”

“What? I mean--no, just, y’know, schoolwork.” Too late, she realized that he’d been teasing.

“This late at night?”

“Yeah, well, my instructor lets me use the lab as long as I want. I’m working on a--on a project.”

He rolled the end of the cigar between his fingers. “Haven’t seen much of you lately. I thought we could get out of the mansion and do something, maybe go get--” Logan paused, seeming to struggle to think of a nonalcoholic pursuit. “--ice cream?”

“Maybe. I’m pretty busy with--with--”

“Your project.”

“Right. My project.” She couldn’t really see his face, but she could sense a certain unhappiness emanating from him. She swallowed. “Anyway. Better go get some rest. I’m pretty tired.”

“Right.”

She pulled open the heavy oak door.

“Hey--are we okay?”

She thought about it. “Of course.”

“Goodnight, Marie.”

A warm flush worked its way all through her body. “Goodnight, Logan.”

She went inside.


_____________________________________________________________________



“He could be fine for years. For years. That’s what the oncologist--”

“She also said that we should have a plan for--”

“So what are you suggesting? That we just put him away? Is that what you’d do to me if I were sick?”

“I’m not saying that. But have you considered how serious the consequences could be, not if but when his conditions worsens? He would want us to think of the students, Jean.”

“Would want? For God’s sake. He’s not dead, Scott. He’s upstairs, teaching British Literature. Why don’t you go--why don’t you go ask him, you ask him if he wants to leave his school, his home, us--”

“I know he doesn’t. You think I want to imagine this place without him? But these--these degenerative--we have no way of predicting how it’s going to affect his abilities.”

“The medication--”

“--is a band-aid. We have to consider long-term care. And not when it’s too late.”

“I can’t believe you’re lecturing me as if you’re the one who crossed that stage with a Ph.D. I’m a doctor, Scott. And you think I can’t take care of him? You think I wouldn’t?”

“Don’t make me the bad guy here.”

“You’re just--”

“You think I like this? He’s like--he’s like a father to me, Jean. He’s--”

Here, Scott’s voice scratched like a bike veering off a road, tires scrabbling for purchase on the gravel. Marie couldn’t help it. She peered over the top of the Buick. She’d been sponging the remains of her morning coffee off the passenger seat when the two of them came through. The sound of their voices froze her; she’d hardly heard any of them shout, and neither at each other. There’d been no excuse for not announcing herself; except knowing that they would have been horrified to discover a witness to their fight.

But now she saw Scott’s head on Jean’s shoulder, tears leaking out from under his visor. She was holding him. When she spoke, it was with the simplicity of a mother to a child. “Xavier has been a father to many of the kids here. And we’re going to have to think about how we’d like them to remember him. But not yet.”

He sighed, choked. “Not yet,” he acquiesced. Not because he agreed, but because he didn’t have the strength to do otherwise.

She touched the back of his head. For a moment, they simply looked like a couple who had been at each other’s side since childhood, a relationship so old that no wall of restraint stood between them unbroken.

Then Jean looked up. The warmth in her gaze turned into something blistering as it met Marie’s. Very slowly, very slightly, she shook her head. She put her hand on Scott’s cheek, tucking his face into her neck and holding it there, protectively, until Marie crept out of the garage.





_____________________________________________________________________



If there was a silver lining to a silver lining that kept her skin covered--besides sparing her the inconvenience of shaving--it was that in the autumn months, she hardly seemed stranger than anyone else. But today was one of those freak spikes on the weather map, buffered by weeks of clouds and runny noses. Students carried out soccer balls and picnic baskets; taking more advantage of this one sunny afternoon than they ever did in the summer--following the unwritten law that happiness needs brevity. Marie was sitting on a bench beneath one of the oaks, her head tilted back, letting the heat press against her eyelids and cheeks and shoulders.

That’s how Jean found her. The doctor had to cross the grass in five-inch stilettos, but she still behaved as if meeting Marie was a pleasant coincidence. It was this cheer that caused her to sit up straight, heart drumming.

“What’s that you’re reading, Rogue? Oh, Persuasion. I just love Austen.”

“Me too.”

“Do you? I had no idea. Gosh, I feel it’s been so long since you and I caught up.”

Unable to remember conversing with the other woman beyond her yearly flu shot, Marie could only smile politely at first. But southern etiquette rose to the challenge--”Would you like to sit down?”

“I’d be delighted--oh.” Her pause was delicate, as was the glance she gave to Marie’s bare arms. She took the hint, picking her cardigan off the bench and pulling it on. She was sweating in moments. Jean took a perch on the far end of the seat, with a good two feet between them.

“Mm. I’ve always adored this spot, ever since I was a child even younger than you. It’s just lovely.” She breathed deep. “I’ve been doling out band-aids and sunscreen all day. Nice to have a break. Little 'me' time.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Of course, you get plenty of that, don’t you? I’m a little jealous.” She said it in a joking way, and her eyes matched her smile--crinkled and bright. “You get so much time to yourself. You’re not at anybody’s beck and call; nobody really needs you for anything. It must feel so restful.”

“Well, I am in college.”

“That’s true,” Jean conceded. “What was your major again?”

“Art history.”

“Right.” She drew out the word, and as she finally clipped it off with her teeth, a silenced spread between them that she seemed in no rush to end. Then, “Got big weekend plans?”

“Not really.”

“Well, you should. You’re young, you should get out with your friends. Maybe see if Logan will take you to lunch or something.”

She registered Marie’s surprise and told her, in a tone anyone would call affectionate, “I think it’s sweet how he dotes on you. It’s good for him to feel like he’s got a little sister. Takes the edge off those claws, yeah?”

“You think that’s how he sees me? Like a sister?”

“Oh yes. We all do--if not a daughter or niece. Why that look?”

Marie hadn’t been aware that her expression had changed, but Jean went on in a way that made it moot. “Except you don’t really see him as a brother, do you?”

“I’ve never--I’ve never--”

“You’re adorable. It’s okay, it’s just between us. Not that there are any secrets in this school.”

“People talk about--”

“People will talk about anything and everything. One of the things I’ve always found difficult about living here is the lack of division between personal and private. There’s always an audience...ears at the door, so to speak. Don’t worry. The general consensus is that it’s cute.”

“But--”

“But--” with the utmost care, Jean patted Marie’s gloved hand. “We’ve got to be careful, don’t we? Take a crush too far, and it starts to look...well. Obsessive.”

“I never--”

“Of course you haven’t. You’re a reasonable young lady; you’ve had to be more rational than most girls about your romantic options.” The doctor looked at her with a sympathy that took the sting from her words. At least, the immediate sting--pain would come later, like a sunburn. “I’m sorry. Am I being too blunt?”

Marie shook her head. And pulled her hand away.

“But like I said, don’t worry! Logan doesn’t suspect a thing. He cares for you. A man like him, used to real women--you’re a breath of fresh air.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“No! Are you crazy? What kind of friend would I be? I’m not the sort of woman to spread rumors I know would embarrass someone I care about. I hope you’re not, either. I don’t want anyone to be hurt.”

She took her gaze off of her knees and looked Jean in the eye. “Are you talking about the Professor, Scott, or Logan?”

Nothing changed in the woman’s expression. It was gentle. “All of the above, I suppose.”

Reminisce: Chapter Seven

The Not So Distant Future:



He chased after her, moving down the mansion’s half-lit hall. The girl in her dark, dresslike nightgown was just ahead of him, but though Logan was all but panting with the effort to hurry he couldn’t close the distance between them. Never had his legs felt so heavy; not since his last encounter with Magneto had his body seemed so unwilling to obey their owner’s will. The carpet sucked at his feet and with each step they seemed more unwilling to let go.

She had turned had turned to look at him while he’d had his eyes on the floor. He’d just missed it--catching the curve of her cheek, an ear. Curls of brown hair shifted between her shoulder blades like a wind-ruffled curtain. The nightgown she had on was almost long enough to be considered unfashionable, but her feet were bare. Her heel was a soft pink, her ankle trim. The rugs didn’t hold her at all; she almost seemed to glide.

He watched her turned a corner. It took him years to do the same. Losing sight of her, even briefly, made him want to shout, but his tongue lay stubbornly against his lower teeth. He had to reach her. He needed to reach her. He had to tell her how incredibly wrong he had been, how very, very sorry he was.

He tried using the wall to pull himself forward, but succeeded only in yanking a painting off its hook. Its frame cracked with the kind of heavy sound that spoke of expense. Cement-footed, he rounded the corner, and was shocked to find the girl closer. She’d stopped at a door. One of the student bedrooms. She opened it and went inside without sparing a glance for her persuer. The wrenching sensation under his rib cage from not being able to see her was compensated with the triumph of knowing that these rooms had only one exit. By the time his fingers closed over the knob, he was breathing harshly, feeling sweat crawl down his back. Logan flung the door open--he’d expected it to be heavier; it crashed against the wall. The room was windowless, filled with nighttime shapes--beds and blanketed bodies. None of them hers. He stumbled into something, a desk, and heard a stack of books tumble to the floor, and the tinkle of glass. Where was she? Where was she? Where was--

“Where is she?”

“Who?” cried one of the figures from their bed.

They had taken her away. They’d hidden her. They had done something to her. Anger shook its way up his chest, his throat, rattling between his clenched teeth. “You’re gonna tell me.”

“I don’t know! Oh my god--I don’t know!”

“Logan!”

”Logan! Wake up, you’re scaring them-”

And suddenly, there was another woman there. A redhead. She was holding his arm with both hands, trying to keep it at his side. A burning sensation in his knuckles let him know that his claws were out--they twitched against his hip, sliced through his sweatpants.

Somebody had turned on the light. In the sudden glaring brightness, Logan turned from the little figure, cowering against the headboard, to the woman. “Where is she? What did you do?”

“There isn’t anybody. She’s not real. You’re having a dream.” Abruptly, she dropped his arm--a tiny part of Logan registered that her nails must have been digging into the muscle, at least half an inch deep--before little moons of blood healed and she was using the same hands to take hold of his face. Gently but firmly, those fingernails pressing against his temples. “You have to stop this, Logan. Wake up.”

Makeupless, puffy-eyed, in a bathrobe tied in a careless knot, Jean looked like a stranger. He jerked his head out of her grip, turned to look at the room--at the floor, strewn with bottles of nail polish, books, a lamp with a smashed bulb. At Kitty, hugging a pillow to her stomach--Jubilee was peering around the side of the wardrobe, hands raised in the defensive posture he had taught her. What the hell?

“Ju--are you two alright?

After a long time, they gave timid nods, one after the other.

“Are--are you? Alright?” asked Jubilee. She hadn’t lowered her arms.

“I’m--”

“Go,” said Jean, drawing his attention back to her. “I’ll settle the girls, and then we will discuss what happened here.”

Not knowing what else to do, worried that he would make the girls more afraid by staying, he did what she said. As he left, Jean was moving her hands--the objects on the floor were lifting into the air, moving back to their tables, arranged perhaps a little more neatly than they’d been before.


_________________________________________________________________


“I don’t know what’s happening to me, Jean.”

“Sleepwalking happens to a lot of people.”

“I was trying to find--”

“You were asleep, Logan.”

“I’ve never had a dream like this.”

“You’re having dreams like the rest of us, dreams that don’t make sense, dreams your brain just cobbled together.”

“There was someone there. I’ve seen her--”

“You didn’t. Listen, you have to pull yourself together, Logan. I need you. The students need you.”

“Christ, Jean. The kids--”

“The girls understand. They’re not going to tell anyone, I made sure.”

“You think that matters? You think I care what they tell people? I could have hurt them, Jean.”

“You’d never do that. You’ve had nightmares--”

“But sleepwalking? I mean, what the fuck? What kind of shit could I get into if I’m--”

“You’ve been under so much stress. If you’d just--”

“It can’t happen here, Jean. Not at the school. I can’t just--”

“You’re not--you’re not thinking of leaving. Logan, you said you were going to stick around. You promised. You promised me.”

“I need to talk to the professor. This can’t happen again. The risk--”

“You can’t leave.”

“I can’t risk--”

“Logan, stop. Stop. Stop. Just wait. Come here. It’s going to be okay. We can fix this. I can fix this.”

“Jean, what are you doing?”

“I can fix this. You don’t want to leave.”

“What are you doing?”

“Shhh.”


____________________________________________________________________




A person could get to the roof six ways: by the stairwells, which were located in the old servant’s quarters, now more sensitively called the lower attics; by the fire escapes; by the ivy-wound trellis; or, for the especially desperate or especially weird, the chimneys. Officially, the roof was off-limits. Too high, too uneven, too old. This made it very popular among the students. They had a place between the chimneys, a nook crowded with weather-battered cushions and old towels monogrammed with an ‘R’ and something that may have been a bird, though half the thread had been picked out. It smelled like a barn. Novels, magazines, comic books lay in such a way as to suggest that they may at one time have been stacked, and there was a pizza box from a company that had gone out of business either last month or the one before that.

They must’ve heard Logan coming--swearing, sliding on the crumbling stone, cracking tiles unmeant to support weight like his. (Even as he cursed, he was considering a training session for the terrain). When he reached them, Kitty was frozen in the process of smearing sunscreen between Jubilee’s shoulders. Jubilee, meanwhile, was sitting cross-legged, slapping the lid shut on an old tin cookie jar. She made an odd jerking motion, as if to stow it out of sight, but then reconsidered.
“Logan!” The younger girl exclaimed, almost like a sneeze. She squeezed the bottle of lotion; an arc of white shot out. It got in Jubilee’s hair, but so eager was she to feign normalcy she didn’t acknowledge it.
“Hi, Wolvie. Hey. Hello! Climb here often? We’re just soaking up some healthy vitamins. Do you like my swimsuit? I found it on Ebay. Had to safety pin the strap but I say it’s worth it. Does it make you think of the song? It makes me think of the song. She wore an itsy bitsy teeny--”

He held his hands up in a firm desist gesture.

“I’ve been looking for you two--”

“We’re not doing anything,” Kitty interrupted. Jubilee reached back and swatted her knee.

“Didn’t say you did. Look, I just wanted--”

“Are you going to yell at us?”

“No, I--no. I just wanted to come check. That you’re both--alright.”

“Well, yeah. I think we are.”

“Are you sure?”

“Ye-es?” Jubilee cocked her head. Kitty shook hers at Logan and then began to surreptitiously scrape lotion off her friend’s shoulder.

He wondered if that was really all the apology he’d need to make. It felt inadequate. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Oh, that’s okay, Wolvie. We heard you clomping all over the roof. We just thought you were gonna bust us. Kitty bout nearly phased herself--”

“That is not what I’m saying. I’m talking about last night.”

“We weren’t up here last night.”

“No--I mean, what happened. I’m sorry for what happened last night.” Something about the words as he spoke them reverberated like fingers drummed across his mind. He’d said them before. He was sure he had. “Waking you up like that, it wasn’t right. I was just--”

You didn’t wake me up.” Jubilee gaped at him, then looked over her shoulder at Kitty. “Did--?”

Kitty shook her head, shrugged.

“You don’t remember?” he said, bewildered. Then he found himself asking again, in a harder tone than he’d intended, one which made them sit up with the same shock they’d exhibited at his first approach. “You don’t remember?”

They didn’t answer aloud, just shook their heads. Kitty seemed worried for him. He grimaced. “Nevermind. I was wrong. Just--” With effort, he kept himself from saying forget about it. “--don’t worry about it.”

“Sure, Logan,” said Jubilee. She smiled encouragingly. Not someone inclined to worry about anything for long, the use of his name was the only indication that she was giving this an above-average amount of thought. He thought at best he’d have until dinner before the rest of the school body was giving it an above-average amount of thought too.

“I’ll leave ya to it, then.”

“Okay, Logan.”

“Bye, Logan.”

“Bye, Kitty.” He turned to go, paused, turned back. “By the way, what’s in the box?”

“What box?”

“That box.”

“Oh, this box?”

“That box.”

Jubilee laughed, a little too breathlessly, clutching the tin cookie container to her stomach. “Do you know that movie Seven? With Brad Pitt? What’s in the box? What’s in the box?”

“How bout you let me see it?” He took a few crunching steps across their nest of debris.

“See what?”

“The box.”

“Oh, this--”

“I swear to God.”

She handed it over. Kitty had buried her bright-pink cheeks in her hands, and was refusing to look at either of them. He thought she might literally sink through the floor. Bemused, he ran a thumbnail under the lid, pried it off.

“At least it’s not a severed head,” Jubilee said bracingly.

A pack of cigarettes, two lighters, and a handful of airplane-sized bottles of Maker’s Mark.

“Are we in trouble?”

He looked up. Kitty was staring at him through lotion-sticky fingers. “This is serious,” he growled. He stared at them both, for a long time. They were very still, hardly breathing. He snorted. He stuffed all but two of the cigarettes and a lighter into his pockets, then closed the lid and tossed it back towards the girls.

“So we’re not in trouble?” she asked.

“At least it’s not a severed head.”

Lips quirked, he was leaving for real this time when he stepped on something. He may never have noticed it if his eyes hadn’t been on his feet, if he hadn’t been worried about breaking more of the roof tiles. A sketchbook, water-warped and dirty, half the cover ripped or disintegrated away. He took his shoe off of it, bent down slowly to pick it up. The pages were brown. He turned them.

“This belong to either of you?” He asked lightly, not bothering to look up, not bothering to listen to their answers because he knew they would be no. He left without another word. And took the sketchbook with him.



____________________________________________________________________



“Well this is a surprise. You never visit me down here.” Taking off her glasses, Jean smiled at Logan. Surrounded by bandages and bottles of hydrogen peroxide as small as the airplane whiskeys, she’d been sorting supplies for the first aid kits. She told him she planned to leave them around the school. “Our kids have more accidents than most. Some are too shy to come all the way down here for a little scrape, or afraid to admit they were doing something that would get them in trouble. I’m hoping this will keep those cuts from getting infected.”

“Great idea.” He set the cup of coffee he’d made for her--almond milk, no sugar--on the medical table. He kissed her, lightly, but she leaned up into it, opened her mouth, and so it was a while before he broke away. He’d planned for small-talk, had prepared a reasonable list of topics. But something about the doctor blunted his suspicion--perhaps those puffy bags under her eyes, a sweet human flaw in an otherwise magazine-ready face, or the genuine pleasure she showed at seeing him. It reminded him how long he’d known her, his friend and teammate and lover. He’d seen her the agent of a thousand kindnesses, and knew her, soul-deep, to be incapable of inkindness.

So he asked. Outright.

“Jean, can you tell me what you did to them?”

She jerked away, stepped out of arm’s reach, so immediately, so hard, that he knew was going to have to reevaluate some things he’d known. “What?” she breathed, fear in her eyes but no bewilderment, and perhaps even a little relief, as if she’d been waiting for this precisely terrible question.

“The girls. Kitty and Jubilee. They don’t remember me sleepwalking into their room.”

“Oh. That.” Jean’s expression dulled. Most of the alarm went away and so, strangely, did the relief. “Well, I didn’t like it but it was really for the best, you know.”

“You stole memories from them?”

“Don’t say it like that. They were upset. It was upsetting. I just...encouraged them to forget.”

“How could you do that?” He meant the question in two ways. The first, a genuine how, because she’d ever given any indication, any at all, that her telekinesis had come so far. But he’d also thought her incapable of something like this in a completely different way. “Does the Professor know about this?”

She bit her lip, met his gaze and deliberately raised her chin. There was something petulant in it. “Why should he? This was damage control.”

“Jean, you--”

“I’m not the one who went snarling, claws-out into the bedrooms of bedrooms of two young, innocent girls. That was you. So don’t look at me like I did anything but clean up after your mess.”

“You’re telling me--you’re telling me, of all the fucking--”

“Don’t you swear at me--”

“--people in this school, that you went inside the minds of two students and played with their memories? Their thoughts? As if it doesn’t matter?”

“Of course it matters,” she cried. She stepped forward and seized his hand, looked up at him imploringly. “I didn’t want to. But I thought it would be better. I just wanted to help. I just wanted to help you.”

Gently, he pulled his hand out of hers.

“I just wanted to help,” she said again, but this time in a snap. She slapped the medical table. Bandages fluttered off the side, onto the floor. “And nobody helps me, do they? I have to do everything here. Everyone is gone, and Charles is sick, and you’re drunk and terrifying our students every time I turn around and--”
Jean covered her mouth with her fingers, spoke through them with her eyes closed. “And I made a decision. And it was wrong, okay. It was wrong. But I did the best I could with what I had."

Pretty tears tumbled over her cheeks, over her fingers. She was bending forward, like a reed under a descending boot. Slowly, he put his hand behind her neck and pulled her head to his shoulder.

“Is there anything else?”

She was shaking, snuffling. “How could there be anything else?’

In the inside pocket of his jacket, it’s edges pressed against both of their chests, was the sketchbook he’d taken from the roof.



____________________________________________________________________



He tried discretion. He asked about the sketchbook as if he’d found it laying around and had but a lazy interest in returning it to its owner. This worked for, perhaps, a week. By the second, he’d gone from pulling aside kids in the art class to the more general student body and word got around (as it tended to do) that The Wolverine was carrying a notepad in his pocket, interrogating students about some doodle he’d found of himself. The rumor devolved (as they tended to do) until people swore it was a dirty drawing, and that he was planning to shishkabob the artist.

They whispered this rumor, of course, because it was The Wolverine but it was loud enough that Bobby Garfield was fighting to keep a straight face when Logan held him back after training.

As he flicked through the dirty pages, the older man gruffly asked, “Have you seen these before? Do you know who did them?”

Bobby’s first, disappointed thought, was that this was a lot more boring than he’d expected. These were just ordinary sketches, good he supposed, what did he know about art? They were smeared with moisture and age, but he recognized still lifes, sculptures, cashiers, kids in desks. About a dozen pictures of the Statue of Liberty, from different points of view, some scribbled out. And four pages of his teacher, not naked, nothing to make fun of later with John. There was one of him behind the wheel of a vehicle, one of him in the garage, one of him, just standing, no sort of background at all. And one of just part of the man’s face, his eyes, so sharply drawn that they seemed to look up at him with a frightening discernment.

Bobby’s smirk wobbled and slipped off his mouth. Were the pictures just a little bit familiar?

To Logan, the boy seemed tied up in an idea more complicated than he’d ever entertained before. He watched him struggle with it for a time and then said, “Well?”

When Bobby turned to him, it was without the daft, mildly alarmed manner with which he tended to face Logan. Instead, there was something shifty, something sly, something bizarrely like jealousy in his expression.

“What is it? You know who this belongs to? C’mon, Iceboy.”

“Nope. Sorry.” Bobby shoved the sketchbook back at him. It was covered in frost.


____________________________________________________________________

Reminisce: Chapter Eight

The Not So Distant Future:

“What’s happened? What’s wrong? Is it The Professor?”

“No, Charles is alright. The same. We’re--”

“Is it Magneto? What has he done now?”

Against the serrated edge of Ororo’s worry, Logan felt embarrassed to have no crisis to hold up. Still, it was good to hear her voice. He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed her accent. “We’re alright,” he told her. “Things are quiet. Y’know, as much as they ever are.”

“You are not to scare me like that, Wolverine.”

“Don’t mean we couldn’t use you here. The kids miss you. Had to hire a bunch of substitute teachers. Jean’s juggling a lot.”

“Well, I am sorry to hear that.”

He could hear Storm breathing through the phone, the sound as clear as if her cheek were pressed to his. “I still don’t get why you left. Especially after Scott had just--”

The breaths stopped briefly and returned in a more uneven pattern. “There are other places to save the world from than Westchester, Logan. My work in Wakanda--”

“You seemed real upset when you went. That’s all.”

“Look, Logan, I left this number for emergencies, and if there is nothing--”

“No, hold on--”

“I really must return to--”

“I need to ask you something. Please, Storm.” She’d hung up. That’s what he thought. But then Logan realized that she was just holding her breath. “Liberty Island,” he managed to say and heard something clatter on the other end of the line.

“What about Liberty Island?”

“Who else was there with us?”

“Excuse me?”

“There was me an’ Magneto, up with the machine. And there was you with Scott and Jean. And Toad and Sabertooth and Mystique. Right? But who else? Help me, Storm. Who was on the torch?”

He waited, his free hand balled into a fist.

“I am very sorry,” she said, slowly, each word distinct. Silence fell again, but this time it was legitimate, solid all the way through. He swore, tapped in the number again, and listened until the rings became a dial tone. Somehow he knew that she wasn’t going to answer--not only not soon, but ever again.


______________________________________________________________________


It was probably for the best that Logan stuffed the phone into his back pocket instead of throwing it; he’d already cursed, several times and colorfully. Passerby ducked shoulders and gaze; a freshman skirted Logan with her keys between her fingers. The tips poked out from her knuckles, inch-long parodies of adamantium. He let her get a generous distance before making his own way out of the parking garage, not wanting to threaten her but aware that he couldn’t help looking threatening. Not now, with this baking anger, as if something set close to heat had begun to blacken.

He walked across the campus, keeping half a mind on his fingers because they wanted to curl. Back on the night of the campaign event, the fine arts center had seemed regal, trimmed in lights, an expectation of free champagne and everyone’s best or second-best dinner jacket. It looked different on a school-day. Young men and women tramped in and out, eating on the steps, lugging satchels, talking to and over each other, scrolling through their phones, doodling in notebooks and on their own skin. The elegant architecture, glass, and brick, didn’t impress them--he liked them better for it. Up the steps and inside, Logan moved past the guard station and the information desk with such assurance that neither attendant looked up.

He took strides that knocked on the marble floor, found his pace quickening as he passed the seminar room and went through the gallery. He worried that it wouldn’t be there. He worried that he would lose his mind if it wasn’t. Even when that turned out not to be the case, even when the painting was right in front of him as it had been those weeks ago, he would not have called its disappearance an altogether foolish idea.

It felt just like last time--a boulder had rolled atop him, pressing the air from Logan’s lungs and pinning him in place. At the same time, something unfixable seemed cut free, seemed to take its first breath, the emotions such a contrast it was hard to trap the sensation and tag it. He thought that he’d felt that way before, and without any evidence to suppose so, that it might have something to do with looking in a woman’s eyes.

It was, he thought, a painting anybody else would consider subjective--what that the right word? Subjective? When had he learned that?-- if hadn’t been on Statue of Liberty on the night Magneto tried to mutate the leaders of the world. But, if they had been on the torch--the torch, not the crown--they might have seen something like this, something like this electric, incandescent light crawling across the water. It concentrated at the base of the painting, exploding from it. As if it came from whoever stood before the frame. He compared that to his memories of the night on the torch. They were choppy, slivered in pain. It had been so long ago, and he’d been injured by the device, the one Magneto had built and used him to power.
Sectioning the view of the light on the water were broken strips of tin and copper as if they were falling away. And there was a darker patch, almost a shadow, human-like only if one had a flexible sense of the human. He squinted and supposed that those were arms, reaching for the viewer. Logan frowned. It didn’t fit. The light, the water, the city distant had lain in his peripheral. He hadn’t seen it like this. (But why hadn’t he?) Had he been preoccupied with the pain?

Loath though he was to close his eyes on the painting, looking made him dizzy, as if it were a reflection upside down. So he did and ignored the relief because he didn’t want to ask why they’d been burning.

He hailed the first person to walk by, an adjunct in an oversized sweater. With wide eyes and exaggerated courtesy, he pulled the mechanical cigarette from his mouth and stepped back. “Can I help you, sir?”

“Yeah. I wanna buy a painting.”

“Painting?” Slack-mouthed, he looked from Logan to the wall.

“Who do I talk to?”

“I guess the instructor?” He shrugged. “I don’t really know. The department head?”

“Right, and where’s he?”

“She is on the second floor. Dr. Hallemeier? Her office is up there. But--”

Logan was already striding away.

“--I don’t think you can buy this stuff. It’s homework, you know? It belongs to someone. You have to find them. Sir? I said you have to find them.”



____________________________________________________________________________



It was her.

“Dr. Hallemeier?”

“That’s me. Lowes?”

“What?”

“Are you from the hardware store?”

“I’m not with Lowes. We’ve actually--

“I thought you were delivering our new lathe. So sorry. How can I help you?”

“Do you know who I am?”

The instructor cringed. “Have we met? Are you a parent? This time of the semester, I’m hopeless.”

“You came to my school. Xavier’s. Couple ‘months back?”

The woman wrinkled her nose, tilting her head. “I don’t think--”

He felt as if he’d found something--not an answer, but something solid, something he could point to and say, This is wrong. I remember. This is wrong. “You were looking for somebody.” The words came too rough, too fast. “You knew me. You asked about a girl. In your class? You called said she lived at Xavier’s. You called her--”

“Sir, are you okay?”

“What did you call her?”

“I think you may have mistaken me--”

“I haven’t.”

She started shuffling papers nervously. “Well--I’m not sure what to say. I just, well, I have a class starting in a few minutes. Perhaps you could come back some--”

He uncurled his fists.“No, actually, I came about one of the paintings you’ve got downstairs.”

“Which one?” She handled the shift in gears with grace and only the faintest sound of grinding teeth. She still glanced from him to the clock, the reminder that there were people expecting her held up like a shield.

“View from Liberty Torch.”

“Oh. One of my favorites. So imaginative.”

“I’d like to buy it off you..”

“We’re not a commercial gallery. Those were the final projects from my 3000 level workshops.”

“But I could purchase it from the artist?”

“Ye-es. But--”

“Can you tell me where to find her?” Find her. It just slipped out of his mouth. Comfortably, as if it had always been there.

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

Her eyes had gone hard as if the conversation had tripped over a thin, protective wire she’d laid down. “I’m sorry, I can’t divulge that. FERPA, you know? If you work in a school--did you say you work for a school?--then you must. The policy is to protect student privacy.”

“So she’s still a student here?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Well, you could check the system, couldn’t you? Contact her, let her know she has a buyer?”

“I suppose so. Yes. The artist can decide whether or not to respond. If you leave your name and--”

“Can you do it now?”

“I--yes, alright. Please, just--sit down. I can send an email. But there’s no guarantee when they’ll respond. This is a little unorthodox.”

“Thank you, Dr. Hallemeier.” He watched her wake up her computer monitor with an impatient shake of the mouse, click across a succession of screens and freeze, fingers hovered above her keyboard and a furrowed brow. Before, it had been him, throwing her off, making her nervous with his urgency. But now she seemed side swept by some fresh peculiarity. “What’s wrong?”

“Honestly, I can’t think which artist created that piece.”

“You said it was one of your favorites.”

“I know. It’s just the damn--excuse me, the darndest thing. I forget my own nephew’s name all the time, but I always know my students. The good ones, anyway. It’s...it’s on the tip of my tongue. Maybe if I have a good think, look through my notes, my gradebook--”

“Was it ‘Rogue’?” What kind of name is Rogue, anyway?

“Beg your pardon?”

“Someone calling herself ‘Rogue’? That’s who you asked for when you came to Westchester.”

“I wasn’t in Westchester.”

“Goddamnit--”

“Now look here--Sir, please keep behind the desk.”

“To Westchester. You came to the school. To Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.”

“I did not--”

“Just listen. We spoke. You were looking for a student. You said her name was Rogue. I remember you saying that.”

“I don’t--”

“What happened when you went inside? Who did you talk to? Did you talk to a woman? Redhead?”

“I have no idea what you’re saying and I’d like you to leave. Now. You’re making me uncomfortable. I have a class--”

He pulled the dirty sketchbook out of his jacket pocket, which he’d brought to compare to the work downstairs--he hadn’t needed to then. The sketches of the Statue had seemed too great a coincidence. Crumbs of the old paper shed over the desk as he held it out. His arm was shaking. “Just tell me what happened with the student you were looking for. Did you find her? Was she the same person who did the painting? Did she draw these?”

The teacher, who’d flinched when he’d reached inside his jacket, barely looked at the pages. “I don’t remember, I don’t know, I don’t think I can help you. Please, will you just--”

He took a deep breath. And another. “You’re telling the truth.”

She was half standing in her chair, edging away, cheeks flushed.

He took several steps back, lifting his hands--one of which still gripped the sketchbook. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m gonna go. I won’t bother you again.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t do more,” she said tersely.

“It’s not your fault.”

____________________________________________________________________________

The way Logan saw it, he could make one of two terrible decisions.
He could return to the mansion. It would be the simple to drive home. Wake up tomorrow next to a beautiful woman. Fight bad guys. Yell at the students. Protect them. Watch the baby fat fall from their cheeks. Watch the news, track the mention of mutants, analyze the times when it was shouted and those when it was whispered, or absent. Listen to the radio. Warm bed and blankets. Full belly. Clocks. Charles’ optimism and clean hands. His family. The clinging certainty of being lied to, like walking through a tarpit.

Or he could, for no reason at all and less reward, keep pulling on this thread and unravel his life. Standing in outside the fine arts center, feeling dizzy, feeling old, Logan drew a hand over his face. He needed to shave. Jean didn’t like it when his beard grew too thick. He put his palms against his eyes and pressed until he saw blooms of color, like a kaleidoscope. What was that name again? Rogue? It didn’t sound quite right. But it didn’t sound completely wrong.

Rogue, he thought, fingering the thread. Rogue. Rogue. Rogue.

____________________________________________________________________________


He reached the mansion in time for supper.

Rolling the bike into the garage, parking it where its former owner had, toeing down the kickstand, he considered what Scott’s face might have looked like if he knew Logan was riding it every day. Not to mention if he knew what else Logan had been doing in his stead. He let the image steep until a ghost almost seemed to stand before him on the oil-spotted floor. He would have kept it pristine. Arms folded, back inflexible, and that muscle that always jumped in his cheek when the two of them were in a room together. Logan had imagined this before--mostly for the fun of it--but it had been an incomplete vision. Now, he let himself see the creases in the man’s forehead, the paleness, the little indications of sadness that had been there.

The concrete beneath his boots became oak and rug. He took his time. Past the discretely-paneled elevators. The computer room, where a couple of over-achievers bent over their homework or possibly porn. The offices, meant for persuading investors that this was a legitimate academy. The living room, for persuading parents that this was a legitimate home. Classrooms, some with blackboards that nobody erased in order to preserved Ororo and Scott’s handwriting.

He went up the stairs, past the conservatory, past the branching hallways leading to the dorms, all the way to the second kitchen and the second dining area. The tables were filled and clamorous--Jubilee waved a bread roll at him; he nodded back. They were having that weird French soup again. At the far end of the room, Jean was bending towards Charles, murmuring something urgent about research on memory-strengthening games. The Professor listened indulgently while he scraped butter on a quarter of a dinner roll. “My dear, you don’t really expect--ah, good evening, Logan. We saved you a seat.”

“Hey there, Chuck. Jean.”

“Our Dr. Grey has just prescribed crossword puzzles and flashcards. To enhance my memory.” His eyes twinkled.

“Not the worst thing a doctor could force on you.”

Jean missed her bowl and struck the table with her spoon. A murky red blot appeared on the white cloth. “What is that?”

Logan raised an eyebrow. “I was thinking adamantium. Just a little morbid humor, Jeannie.”

“No,” she said. “What is that?” She nodded at the object under his arm, the one he’d carried in from the garage.

“Well, it’s a gift. I realized I forgot Charles’ birthday.”

The Professor swallowed his bite of bread and coughed. “And you bought me a piece of artwork? How completely generous and how unlikely of you.”


“Well, to be exactly honest I didn’t buy it.” Logan kicked aside one of the chairs. Carefully--some of the metal strips had already fallen off on the drive; strapping it to the bike had been a real bitch--he set the frame's base on the table where the two of them could get a good look. He’d gone back inside the art gallery and plucked the painting off the wall. It wasn’t exactly the Louvre; there’d been alarms, no bullet-proof glass. No screams. True, a few students and teachers had stopped to ask questions. But neither the security guard with that pathetically low-volt taser or anyone else followed Logan off campus. He was sure that university security had been called, if not the real police, and maybe that would have been a problem, but he had bigger ones.

“I hope you’re about to claim you painted it. I could use some comic relief today,” Xavier was saying, buttering a second piece of roll.

“No, actually, this comes from a former student of yours. You like it?”

“Hm. It’s striking. Someone discovered post-impressionism and applique all at once.”

“I don’t like it,” Jean said.

“Does it remind you of something, Jeannie? Something upsetting?”

Xavier was leaning forwards to get a better look, bemused. (Conversely, Jean had leaned back. He heard her chair legs scrunch on the carpet). “Did you say a former student, Logan?”

He spoke without looking at his mentor. “Yes I did, Charles.” Jean’s eyes were wet and angry, and growing more of both. He watched as she spun a glance over the room, noted that she was noting which students seemed curious and which continued to eat and chatter. “Have you ever taught a ‘Rogue’?”

“Is this really all that important right now?”

“It’s just a question, Jean.”


“You drag this dirty painting in here when we’re trying to eat, see, look, you’re getting paint chips on the table.”

“I was asking if Charles knew the artist. Or you? This one seems like the type to leave an impression.

“No.”

“No? I think you know.”

“Logan, please--”

He could hardly hear over the pounding in his chest. He wasn’t sure if that was his heart; it felt like an animal had woken to find itself caged behind his ribs. His vision blurred and pulsed; the frame was splintering in his hands but he couldn’t gentle his grip. He didn’t care about the rest of the room; everyone else had melted out of his regard, like tissues soaked in water. There was nothing but the Jean and the things he needed to ask her. The way she was looking back at him was almost an answer.

But then her head snapped to the side, in a distracted jerk.
She twisted, half-stood in her seat. “Professor?”

She wasn’t the only one saying it. The noise in the room had transformed. Kids were calling out--not in exuberance, but fear, not to their friends, but to Xavier, who, open-mouthed, eyes glossy, twin bubbles of blood popping in his nostrils, had begun to shake.












.

Reminisce: Chapter Nine

BACK THEN



If it weren’t for the gloves, Marie might have had some explaining to do--they kept her from answering questions and leaving red fingerprints everywhere she went. From the tip to the knuckle of every finger little gashes bled and closed and reopened all day long. For weeks now, her hands looked as though they’d been the favorite nightly dish of every rat the X-mansion pretended not to have. Nobody noticed.
Of course, Marie could have worn her gloves in the first place to save herself from explanations and cuts both, but she didn’t. Gathering the bottles from the mansion’s recycling bin, she smashed them with the rolling pin and then combed through the shards. Each maybe-right piece was held to the light--sunlight, fluorescent, flashlight, a practice she’d found pretentious at first and then too necessary to be embarrassed over. She fit the edges against each other, wove them around the strips of metal someone in the shop class had sliced for her, planting both in viscous layers of paint and polymer clay. She felt like a witch engaged in some elaborate ritual, though never very sure what spell she was attempting to cast.

Often, she slapped paint down carelessly, just to see how it would come off the brush. She mixed colors, leaving the room with skin and clothes and hair dabbed by the new shades. Dr. Hallemeier had given her the loan of a couple of privacy screens--filched from the theater department a few years back, and let her print out so many photographs of the New York skyline that an admin called to remind them about the department budget. “I told them to go dig through the couch cushions in Coach Brant’s office,” she confided to Marie.

Sometimes, Marie would sit in the art lab looking at her work, sucking a bleeding finger and thinking about tossing it all back into the trash. And sometimes even that seemed like too much effort. This had been a delusion, not ambition. In these periods of lucidity, she’d bury herself in the homework of other classes, visit the campus gym, volunteer, always hearing the project cry like an animal abandoned by the side of the road. Thankfully, that didn’t last.
On the other end of the spectrum were the days when she was too busy to even recognize her own happiness. It seemed as if she wasn’t imagining what her piece needed, but knowing it, and her hands consulted neither sketchbook or brain. She was a marionette, something moving the brush, images constructing themselves exactly how they wanted. On other days, Dr. Hallemeier would stop by her corner to question, suggest, commiserate. But on these, she just watched, advice stifled into silent contemplation.

That afternoon, it was raining and she was not lucky enough to be unaware of the work she was putting into the painting. As was often the case for the departments not bolstered by a sports team, the heater in the art lab was on the fritz. The walls glistened and Dr. Hallemeier blew on her fingertips between phone calls to Maintenance. Marie’s classmates were cranky, every few minutes worrying aloud about what the temperature would do to their projects.
To her right, a boy named Trevor, in the middle of building something with nooses that Dr. Hallemeier had called “cause for celebration and concern” shoved aside his work and took a nap on his arms. To her left, a classmate was listening to music so loudly that the headphones he wore could only have been for decoration. She liked the country song he picked the first seven replays, but not the eighth, finding it hard to believe that anyone could care about a tractor for such an extended period of time.

By the door opened--rubber sweep squelching against the linoleum, she’d pricked her thumb four times on the same slippery piece of glass, spent five minutes mixing the wrong pigments, and dropped her palette knife into her coffee cup. She wiped it on her knee and peeked through one of the rips in the privacy screen. She thought it might be the custodian, come to empty trash bins and remind them that the sooner they left, the sooner he’d get home to see the new episode of LOST. The first clue that it wasn’t Mr. Veech (with whom they all had a strained relationship due to the spilled paint) was the lack of sarcasm in the instructor’s voice. This was followed by deeper, graveled tones. Marie drew a quick breath between her teeth and despite the cold room felt a flush of warmth through her belly--
“Oh, certainly. You’ll find her right over there.”
--followed by a lurch.
She spasmed towards the privacy screen, to her easel, to her acrylic’d forearms. Her hands fluttered over the tray of shards and then her hair. “Shit. Shit. Shit,” she mouthed. In the end, she threw her paintbrush into the coffee mug and snatched up her gloves, jerking them on despite the moist gristle of blood and grain-sized glass.

“He-ey,” she ducked around the side of the screens, moments before Logan could do the same.

He raised eyebrows at her breathlessness. “You didn’t take a car today,” he said calmly, by way of greeting. “I thought you might want a ride. With--” he shrugged a shoulder toward the streaming window, in the process dislodging droplets of rain from his own jacket.

“Oh, Ororo actually--”

“Had some stuff to do. She asked me.” Logan’s gaze dropped to his feet, but he picked it right back up. Along the way it touched the splotches of paint and coffee on her jeans, the places she had torn and restitched her sweater, the simple chain crossing her collarbone. There was nothing critical in it, just short rests his eyes took before coming back to meet hers.

“Right. Okay.”

“You seem like you’re disappointed.”

“I’m not, I’m--” the response fumbled in her throat and then dropped back into her chest, like stones in a well.

Logan let it pass. “This is nice,” he mused, turning slowly around to take in the room, the students, the art on display and in progress. She didn’t miss the curious flick towards her corner.

“It’s my favorite place,” she told him. “To work, at least.”

“Yeah? And what is it you’re working on?”

“Don’t--” She stepped in front of him. Her hands went to his chest. Under his denim shirt, there was a warm edge of muscle and his pumping heart. She could smell his breath, not unpleasant, and see the individual hairs along his jaw. She must have surprised both of them, because Logan’s eyes were wide and he seemed now the one with frozen speech. Over his shoulder and across the room, Dr. Hallemeier caught her glance and made a show of turning away. Marie swallowed. “I mean, I’m just not ready.” Shrugging, smiling shyly. A beat too late, she remembered to take her hands off of him.

The kind of light that was in Logan’s eyes, she thought that he would tease her. But all he said was, “So how ‘bout that ride?”

“That’s--” It would be hard to put away her materials with him in the room. “Actually, I still had some things I needed to do.”

“I’ll wait on you.” He backed up.

“Okay.”

“Downstairs?”

“Alright.”

“No rush.”

He quirked his lips at her, but as he walked away she felt another irrational lurch, a sense that she wouldn’t see him again. Hardly thinking, she took a quick step behind the partition and one just as quickly back out, and in between snatched up the sketchbook from her table. She rushed between the tables of her classmates, some of whom were starting to pack up as well, and caught Logan’s elbow at the door. He turned around.

“You could take a look at these if you wanted. While you’re waiting.”

He took the book from her hands, that light in his eyes.

“They’re not much,” she said, suddenly wanting it back.

“I’ll see you downstairs, Kid.”


__________________________

He had picked out a sketch. It was not one of those she might have expected him to (they’d done a session with nude models last month), but a clumsy watercolor she’d shoved among the pages, a procrastination of its journey to the recycling bin.
“Camelback Mountain,” she said shyly, stopping just short behind the hallway bench where he sat, legs crossed.
“Arizona?”
“I spent a week there. It’s a nice spot to be alone, but I always wanted to see the snow, Alaska.” She paused, with the upward, interested flick of his gaze. Then she shrugged. “And nobody stared at me for wearing gloves.”
“Plus, better rides.”
“Yeah. There’s that.”
“Ready to go?”

A security officer was waiting for them beside the car, scribbling into a pad of blue paper. She was short enough to need to stand on her toes to pin it to the glass. This, perhaps, as well as the rain she had to blink from her eyes, had obviously not inclined her towards pleasantries. “Is this your vehicle?” she demanded.

“Yep,” he replied, cheerfully enough.

“What’s your name?”

“Scott Summers.”

“Mr. Summers, you can’t park here. This is reserved for faculty. If you’re a student, you have to buy a permit and I didn’t see a permit, so if you’re a visitor, you’re going to have to park in the garage, over by--”

Logan interrupted her. “I’ll remember that, next time.” Stepping around the officer, he plucked the ticket from the glass, nodding Marie to the passenger side. She avoided the woman’s still-vexed expression, following them as they pulled away.

Logan leaned over her to shove the ticket into the glove compartment.

“Did you know?”

“What’s that?” His eyes twinkled.

She shook her head, refusing to laugh, and ashamed at how much she wanted to.

She had avoided him for over a week. Now, with no escape from his presence except for a skin-grating roll on pavement and tar, she felt not entrapped but released. Sitting next to Logan was like a return to some natural state of being, like a circus animal whose harness had been removed. Marie took deep, easy breaths. At Logan’s encouragement, she told him about her other classes, sharing a few of the funnier stories she’d shored up over his absence. She noted that he took side roads rather than the interstate, letting other vehicles pass, driving at least five miles beneath the posted speed limits. The commute should have taken an hour, but he was clearly stretching it out, and it was impossible not to feel as if this moment was a bubble, floating carefully among the subjects that might burst their peace.
But the minutes drained away regardless of their efforts to preserve them, and any careless remark scraped the bubble’s edge. The Professor’s health. Bobby. Jean. She was surprised to see his eyes slash sideways when she said, “Scott suggested the art class, actually. All the people in my head--he thought developing a hobby that interested just me would help me separate myself from them.”

“How nice of him,” Logan said. Then his voice softened. “And you’re happier?”

She shrugged. What was happier? “It’s a nice feeling, that there’s more to me than being just another mutant in the room.”

“You’re not just anything in any room, Kid.”

“Unless Jean is in it.” She bit her tongue, hearing a distinct pop echo in the back of her mind. A beat late and off-key, she laughed. It was just a bad impression of levity that she couldn’t blame him for the look he gave her after.

Logan took his hand off the wheel and scraped it through his hair until the locks looked even messier than usual. With the air of someone choosing words like he might vegetables--from a limited and rotten stock--he said, “I know we’ve needed to talk about this.”

“No we don’t,” she told him, mortified. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“I upset you--”

“You didn’t.”

“Marie,” he said, gently. He’d taken his eyes off of the road to catch hers. “Look, Jean and I are--”

“Logan.” She was close to tears. “It’s none of my business. It really isn’t. Whatever you are--whatever you and Jean are, um, figuring out, it’s up to you. Don’t worry that I’m--just don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”

In his pained expression, she could see that he was tempted to leave it there. He didn’t believe her, but this, she thought, was a kind of discomfort that even the Wolverine was unacclimated to, and he wanted it to end.

“I’m fine,” she repeated.

“And we’re fine?”

She nodded. He exhaled. Discomfort had won out. They finished the drive in silence or with unimportant remarks. Marie held her hands carefully in her lap so that the crumbles of glass wouldn’t dig any deeper.

Strangely, she felt older than him.
__________________________________________________________________________


Shortly after that after, Marie decided to take what she had told Logan and make it true. It was wrong, forcing him to worry about her opinion of an affair that shouldn’t affect her in the first place. Neither, she thought, was the way she’d been living in the mansion--watching everyone else as if from the rafters. Placidly sitting while her friends take risks, formed bonds, helped. Jean had been right all along. She thought about running. But leaving everything behind would confirm that she’d never had a reason to stay.


It was time, finally, to grow up.


__________________________________________________________________________


“Fancy seeing you here,” Scott slid the carafe back onto the burner. He’d left enough in the pot for Marie. The coffee diluted without quite obliterating the scent of bourbon coming from his mug. She thought about warning him to hide his stash with Logan around but she bit her tongue, as if she could bite the unspoken idea in half. Scott didn’t need to be reminded about Logan if he was drinking at ten o'clock in the morning. “Feel like we’ve been ships in the night,” he smiled at her, took a larger drink than was probably safe, winced at the heat, and continued, “since your friend came back.”

“Yeah. Just, you know, busy.”

“Of course,” he said. Too understandingly.

“With my art project,” she hastened.

“Oh. Right. It’s coming along?”

“I--it’s good. It’s fine. How--how are you?”

“I’m good. I’m fine.”

Marie opened her mouth. It was time to say something. It was time to choose something. Even the wrong thing. “Scott?”

He blew gently on the surface of his coffee. “Hm?”

“I’ve got to talk to you.” She could sense, even if she couldn’t see, the sharp, sudden glance he gave her from behind the garnet glasses. He cocked his head and tightened his jaw; his whole body subtly realigned itself. He looked like a soldier, bracing for an assault. Marie held her coffee cup tighter so her sweaty hands wouldn’t drop it.
“I think I want to join the team.”

______________________________________________________________________________