Logan had been back for three weeks, and things were finally settling down. Taking "settling down" to mean that the fourteen year old girls weren't fainting from sheer lust at the sight of him anymore, at least.
Marie had to wave bare fingers at one of them, but the rest caught on after a glare and a few words she picked up from Logan's memories.
She was fine with that, though, because she had figured out a way to spend time with him that even Mr. Summers couldn't object to. She decided to earn herself a bit of respect, first, and let the rest of the school know her real name. After that, all it had taken was about thirty seconds of looking like a scared twelve year old, and mentioning that after what happened at the Statue of Liberty, it might be nice to know how to defend herself. Logan had been all over that, and consequently her, and these days she was eager for the end of classes each day for a whole new list of reasons. Who knew wearing a full body suit and getting tossed around a gym floor could be so worth it?
Her slightly younger roommates, Jubilee and Kitty, thought she was certifiable for actually thinking she had a chance with him. He was so much older than her, and flirting constantly with Dr. Grey to boot, but Marie had taken a page out of the Professor's book and decided that hope sprung eternal. Besides, she was an woman, and women had urges. And hers hadn't been anywhere close to met since David, so she figured she was allowed a few plans. Though the first part, involving the self-defense lessons, had been a complete success, so she was a bit lost as to what to do next. She figured it probably involved upping the affection, but physcial was out of the question, and verbal was... tricky. Back when Bobby was really flirting with her, before she realized she wasn't really interested, she had tried calling him "sugar" once, with all the benefits of her Southern drawl, and he had nearly melted. She figured it'd work on Logan, too, but it was harder to work into natural conversation with the taciturn Logan than it had been with Bobby.
Her first chance came at dinner. She generally managed to get them to have a semi-private meal together every couple of days, where they had their own table in the constantly crowded dining room. They were next to where she would normally sit, with her roommates and Bobby and John. Students and adults were wandering in and out at will, but eventually she managed to get Logan's whole attention by working the conversation around to the full story of how her mutation manifested. Him thinking of her as a girl guys wanted to kiss couldn't be bad, after all. The story finished, and while he was asking several genuinely concerned questions she gloried in his attention, but eventually the questions petered out and she decided it was time to switch tactics.
"I'm going to get some more juice, Logan, can I get anything for you while I'm up?" She let her drawl get a bit stronger as she stood, and bent from the waist to grab her glass.
"No thanks, Marie."
"All right, sug-" and damn if the whole room didn't go silent as the Professor entered with a tall woman in a denim jacket. Marie looked around, and dropped back into her seat, defeated, when he began to speak.
"If I could have your attention for a moment, I would like to introduce you all to Tess, also known as Guise, who has agreed to join us. She will be assisting in several classes and working on other projects while she stays with us. I am sure you will make her feel welcome here."
"Guys?" Bobby whispered to John, "but she's not a-"
"Not 'guys' like boys, Bobby, guise like disguise," Kitty corrected him. The Professor led Tess across the dining room to where Remy and Piotr sat as the dull roar of the room rose again.
"Not like she's all that feminine anyways," John grouched. Kitty smacked him in the arm, on principle, but that was the only response. The small population of students their age had them all wishing for some variety. Remy and Piotr, a few years older, sometimes spent time with them, but otherwise their clique didn't change much.
Logan broke Marie's attention on the next table. "Didn't you want juice, Marie?" She blinked and remembered her failed plan. Well, she was stuck now.
***
That night she dreamt of Logan, handcuffs, and a bathtub. She nearly threw her alarm clock through the window when she woke up.
***
The next time she saw Tess was the following day, when she approached Marie in a rush after biology. Up close, she was a tall, plain brunette who looked very sleepy. "Hi. It's Marie, right? I'm Tess."
Marie stared at her outstretched hand in surprise for a moment before she took it gingerly with her own gloved hand. "Hi, Tess."
"The Professor suggested I ask you for a tour."
Her brow furrowed at that, but it made a kind of sense. She was probably the girl closest to Tess's age in the school. Remy and Piotr would make a small social group, and the X-Women weren't likely to open up to someone so young. "Sure, I guess. Can I meet up with you after dinner?" She was not going to sacrifice Logan Touching Time for this woman.
"Fine. Thanks, Marie." Tess grinned at her and loped down the hall, clearly in a hurry.
That night at dinner Marie made sure that her usual group sat at a table meant for four, instead of one for six, so they were crowded enough Tess wouldn't try to join them. She might be nice enough, but there was no way to know that she wasn't another wet blanket like Mr. Summers, and Marie intended to enjoy the afterglow of her workout with Logan in relative peace. Tess wound up sitting with Remy and Piotr again, and as far as Marie could tell Remy didn't seem to be flirting with Tess, which was weird given his usual habits. He had stopped flirting with her recently too. That ws strange.
Remy wasn't the only one acting oddly. Logan was sitting across the room with the other X-Men, and right next to Dr. Grey, in fact, but was clearly keeping to himself and not flirting with her at all.
The meal ended, and Marie started showing Tess around right afterwards, hoping the tour could end before the Real World started at nine. Tess turned out to be a little boring, describing herself as a nerd, but she wasn't annoying. She had finished college the year before, and finding a lack of jobs available for mutants, had come to the school to work while she figured out what to do with her life. Marie kept her talking so she didn't have to go into her own story for the umpteenth time.
"So you don't want to be an X-Man?" Marie asked as they walked back towards Tess's room from the tennis courts.
"Not really. Well, maybe, but I don't know how useful I'd be, fighting. I don't have any experience with that, really, beyond ordinary bullies."
"A lot of mutant-haters where you're from?"
"Not really. I didn't manifest until I was 14, and I was homeschooled for the rest of highschool, so I never really dealt with it. I was just obnoxious, I guess." She grinned, like she was proud of it, and yawned hugely.
Marie smiled. "It's been a long couple of days for you."
Tess glanced at her watch. "Oh, this is normal. I always conk out about nine, and it's eight-thirty now." Marie's confusion must have shown, because she clarified, "A side effect of my mutation is that I'm a really crappy sleeper. I need twelve hours where most people only need eight."
"What is your mutation?"
Tess didn't seem to notice her bluntness, though. "Don't know that there's a name for it. I generally call it perfect self-control. I can change my body, or anything that stays with my body long enough, down to the atomic level. I also have self-awareness down to that level."
Marie stopped dead in her tracks for a moment. "Like Mystique?" She had had enough of one metamorph to last her a lifetime.
"Who?" After Marie's terse explanation, Tess continued, "No, I don't think so, at least. It takes me a lot of thought and concentration to change myself, and it's a bit more permanent than what it sounds like this Mystique does. I call myself Guise instead of Disguise because it isn't a costume or illusion, it's me, just in a different shape."
"So what do you really look like?"
"This is pretty much me, minus a couple of scars and one really ugly mole. I change my hair sometimes, but the rest of me stays pretty much the same."
"But if you can look however you want to..." That's it, keep talking. You don't want to ask me questions about Logan.
"Keeping myself clean, in shape, and looking the same all the time takes a certain amount of concentration, so I don't have much practice at anything else. That's why I sleep so badly; if I slip into really deep sleep for too long my dreams can change my body."
"Wow. How can you control that?"
"Mom has a friend who's a hypnotist. Not one of those showy idiots, this guy just helps people quit smoking, things like that. Anyways, he taught me a routine to go through before I go to bed, and it's worked for years. Good thing, too. I never want to wake up with a tail again." Tess grimaced and Marie had to hold back a laugh.
"It must be nice to have some control."
Tess glanced at her. "You don't?"
"They haven't told you about me?" Tess shook her head. "You, well no one, can touch my bare skin. People get hurt; I sort of suck the life out of them. I'm surprised no one told you."
Tess shrugged. "The Professor said that there wasn't anyone so dangerous that they couldn't tell me themselves. Besides, running through the list would have taken forever, and I never would have remembered it all."
That was surprising. Marie was used to thinking of herself as a "freak among freaks" and never thought that the Professor trusted her that much. "Well, it sounds like you're luckier than I am. So what can you do with your mutation, besides change your hair?"
"Not too much, yet. Since I don't have any involuntary muscle reactions, it takes a fair amount of my brain to just keep blood flowing, stuff like that. But once I figure out how to change my brain so it can handle more, I think I have a lot of great possibilities. I already don't have to shower or... other hygenic stuff. Eventually, with enough mass under my control, I should be able to design clothes out of it. If I can get enough detail, I might not need to eat or drink, or, possibly, sleep. But at this rate I'll probably be fifty before I can do most of that. It's slow going, but the Professor may be able to help."
Marie thought about that for a minute and tried to come up with a new question. "I get how you can change your own body, but how could you know how to make cloth and other stuff?"
Tess frowned. "I can extend my self-awareness just an inch or so past my own body to examine the make up of other things. A minute of it will usually knock me out for a couple hours, but that's enough to understand the basic framework of something as simple as cotton. I'm no good at it yet, school's been taking up a lot of time so far."
"Why did you have to be homeschooled?"
"Early on, getting distracted at the wrong moment really could have killed me. When I manifested, I wound up sitting still in a chair for a day and a half, just trying to get my body to keep functioning and ignoring everything else. So I did highschool and the first couple years of college at home on the internet, where I could concentrate when I had to. My parents have been great about it, but it was... kinda lonely." Tess frowned again. "What about you?"
Frustrated that she'd have to tell her story after all, she sketched out her parents, how she manifested, and consequently her eight months on the road quickly. Her description of how she met Logan was even shorter. She didn't need someone new to pity her for "being a little taken with him" like Dr. Grey did. She finished just as they reached Tess's door in the adult wing. "And I've been here since. Here you are."
"Thanks for the tour, Marie. I'll see you around?" Marie nodded, and fled to her room, hoping she wouldn't miss to much of Real World.
***
Marie's dreams that night involved Logan wandering up to her room at ten on a Friday night to play chess. She woke up confused and restless.
***
Life at the mansion continued as normal, as Tess's arrival didn't make a lot of waves. Marie didn't see her much anyways, as she was still trying to work calling Logan "sugar" into normal conversation but kept getting interrupted: one of the X-Men would barge in needing to talk to him, or a kid would knock into her and almost touch her skin, or Bobby would lose control and turn the hallway into an ice-skating rink. (Well, okay, that only happened once, but falling on ice hurt, damn it!) She even resorted to trying it during the defense lessons he was giving her, but he just used her distraction to throw her into the floor again.
Finally, about a week after Tess arrived, the Professor called Marie into his office, where he and Tess were waiting for her. "Marie, please have a seat. Tess and I think we may have some good news for you."
"What kind of good news, Professor?"
The Professor nodded at Tess, who looked very excited as she began to speak. "We've been talking about the nature of our mutations, Marie, and there's a possibility that I could understand how your skin works well enough, that I could help the Professor and Dr. Grey to help find you a way to control your skin."
Marie stared at her in shock as the Professor cut in. "Now Marie, you should know that the chance of this working is not very great. Although Tess has intimate knowledge of how her own body works, she has very little experience or education with the general anatomy and chemistry this involves. So even if she can understand it, which is not certain, and even if there is a way for you to conciously control it, which also is not certain, she might not be able to describe it accurately enough to help you."
"I can't believe it... you'd put that much work into just trying to help me? You barely know me. You told me what an effort that kind of thing is for you." Marie was in a daze at the surprise of it all.
The Professor began to answer, "I'm sure Tess is only too happy to help--"
"Actually, Professor, I wasn't strictly honest with you." Both Marie and the Professor snapped to attention. This sounded like a catch. "Marie, I'll try to help you no matter what, I promise. I can't promise that it'll do any good, but I can try, and I will. But there is something that you could do for me in return."
Marie looked at her in suspicion. "And what's that?"
"In order to protect myself and change myself, I need to be able to carry around as much matter as possible that's become a part of my body. But I'm already tall and I can only have so many muscles before I become a giant. The easiest way for me to carry around extra mass until I'm able to do so by changing it into clothing is to make it as dense as possible." Tess waited to see if Marie was getting her point. "The densest material we know of is adamantium, Marie. If Logan would be willing to let me examine his, like I'll examine your skin... it could save my life one day."
Marie thought about it. Logan was very touchy about his claws, or letting people examine him at all. But if she asked him and said Tess was willing to help her anyway... he might agree.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
An X1 fic with, I’ll admit, a blatant Mary Sue. But she isn’t perfect, I promise! She's named after the main character from the movie "Working Girl." There are several homages to my favorite fics in here, too.