His lips had barely brushed hers for the merest of seconds, when a pounding at her door startled them away from each other. “Rogue? You in there? I need to talk to you about Kitty.”
Marie, cheeks flushed high with embarassment and adrenaline, bit her bottom lip as Logan stiffly pulled away from her. “One second, Bobby.” She cast a glance at Logan from beneath her eyelashes, opened her mouth as if to say something, but then thought better of it and crossed to her door. She had pulled it open just the barest inch when Bobby barrelled into her room.
“I don’t know what to do anymore, Rogue,” he ranted, blue eyes wild as he paced in her room. “One minute she’s telling me I’m all she’ll ever need, and looks up at me all cute and innocent, and the next minute she’s off flirting with Gambit.” He threw his hands up in the air and looked at her pleadingly. “What do I do?”
“Comin’ back another time would be good,” Logan inserted gruffly, startling Bobby. The boy had apparently not even noticed the older man’s presence in the room, and jumped when he heard the low, rumbling tones.
The fair haired boy shot a glance between Rogue and Logan, raising an eyebrow. “Uh, Rogue…”
She shook herself out of her reverie, the flush fading from her cheeks and, extending her hand, she waved it between the two of them as she said, “Logan, this is Bobby. Bobby, this is Logan. Logan’s my History teacher, he’s helping to tutor me while I’m recovering. Logan, this is Bobby, my best friend.”
The teenager swelled with pride as he gazed down at the beautiful girl, and stood to his full height when he noticed Logan’s glowering. He stuck out a hand and said, as smoothly as he possibly could, “They call me Iceman.”
Logan stared at the hand for a few moments, before making the decision to stand up himself. He drew himself to full height, around 6’2”, towering four and a half inches above Bobby. He gripped the chilly hand in his own, and soon felt his claws rattle painfully in his forearms as Bobby’s mutation, accompanied by the boy’s determined look, kicked in and frosted Logan’s arm.
“Bobby.”
Both men were broken out of the staring contest they had unknowingly engaged in at the sound of Marie’s warning tone. “Can we talk about this another time?”
Bobby nodded, and with one last glance at Logan, he left her rooms.
Marie shot a look at her teacher, and mumbled an apology as she went to sit on her bed again.
Logan suppressed a sigh and the urge to run a hand over his face, and simply pulled up a chair and extracted some notecards from his pocket. “Now, what can you tell me about Sumner’s Caning?”
000
It happened like this:
Logan had been piling notecard after notecard in a precarious pile on Marie’s bedside table as she flew through the terms, the stack mounting dangerously until it tipped over and spilled 107 pieces of paper across the floor. Cursing, Logan slid off his chair to pick them up, and Marie did likewise. At first he didn’t realize that she was helping him, but when their hands touched as they reached for the same card, he lifted his head to meet her gaze.
“Marie, what do you think you’re doin’?” he demanded, tossing the cards onto his chair. “You know you shouldn’t be movin’ around like this. Get back into bed before you pull a stitch or something like that.”
She rolled her eyes, and continued to pick up the fallen cards. “Logan, I’m fine. It barely hurts anymore, and-“
“Barely hurts?” he interrupted in disbelief. “Marie, you just got put back together like Humpty fuckin’ Dumpty hardly two weeks ago.” He grasped the hem of her jersey in both hands, lifting it slowly. “Let me have a look at it. I ain’t a doctor, but-” His sentence broke off as he looked down at her side, the one he’d sworn was hurt.
The skin was, save for a few freckles, flawless.
His brow furrowed in confusion, and he lifted her jersey even farther despite her attempts to lower it again. Her whispered, “Logan, no” was basically ignored as he turned her to inspect her other side. The skin was completely intact, without any sort of blemish.
His large hands traced over her sides, and he stared up at her, a sinking feeling settling into his stomach. “What the hell?”
She pulled her shirt from out of his grasp and tugged it over her sweatpants once more. Crossing her arms over her chest, she backed away from him and sat down on her bed. They shared a few moments of silent staring before she darted her eyes towards her comforter. Picking at the stray feathers, she whispered, “If I allow myself to touch people for too long…they die.”
“What?” he croaked out hoarsely. She could not be saying what he thought she was.
“With mutants, though,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “I don’t kill them…initially. I just…borrow their powers for a while. I absorb their memories, their thoughts at that moment, their dreams…” She shivered and rubbed her hands over her arms. “I’m deadly.”
Logan thought back to less than an hour ago, when pain had radiated through his body, and dissipated as quickly as it had come. So that’s what it had been. She had opened up her mutation and absorbed his healing abilities, and had absorbed his—
“My memories?” he said quietly, his tone bordering on dangerous as he stood and looked down at her. “You knowingly took my memories?” At her meek nod, anger flooded his system and he kicked the chair he had been sitting in, and sent the notecards flying all over the room once more. “Damn it, Marie!”
She shrank back from him at his palpable rage, not understanding why it was so devastating to him that she had knowingly absorbed a few of his memories. His nostrils were flaring with the effort of calming himself down. He seemed to be losing that battle quickly, and, before he could do any real damage to her, grabbed his jacket and strode out of the room, shutting the door with a loud bang.
Marie stared at the door for a minute or two, before she dissolved into tears.
000
Logan thundered down the hallway, strides long and fast paced as he hastened to get the hell out of there. She was a mutant, a mutant, someone like him, and nobody had fucking bothered to tell him one damn thing about it all.
“Where are you going?”
Logan paused, drawing back his shoulders and turning to see Scott standing a few feet down the hall from where he was. “What’s it to you?”
“Your session with Rogue isn’t over for another half an hour. You’re certainly leaving in a hurry, and I demand to be informed as to where you’re going.”
Logan’s losing battle with his rage was growing weaker with every second he was talking to the one-eyed wonder, and against his better judgment, he spat out, “She’s a mutant.”
The look of hatred that Scott sent his way was impressive, and Logan could see the boy’s hand itching to reach for the safety visor perched on his face, tempted to lift the screen that shielded the world from the optic blasts he produced. “Get the fuck out of here.”
Logan raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “Excuse me, Eagle Scout?”
“I said, get the fuck out of here.” Cyclops was seething, face flushed in anger and resentment towards the haggard man who had come in and so easily swept the outcast of the mansion off her feet. “You, a mutant yourself, had no problem with that girl before you found out she was one of us, too, and now you can’t be bothered with her?” He was getting more and more in Logan’s face with every heated step that he took, a fact that Logan was not enjoying whatsoever. “That poor girl has been through more unnecessary shit in the past two years, than you have in however long you’ve been alive. She is a special young woman, not just some…” he sputtered, searching for the right term. “Mutant trash that you can discard at any moment!”
Within the blink of an eye, Logan had him pinned against a wall, claws positioned threateningly against his throat. “Don’t you ever,” he said quietly, “speak that way about her again. You hear me?”
Scott swallowed, but still managed to retain some of his bravado. “You know,” he choked out. “You aren’t the only mutant here who’s been tortured by Stryker.”
Logan’s grip on him grew even tighter. “What the fuck do you mean?”
“Why don’t you ask Rogue?”
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000
Author's Chapter Notes:
umm...hello...
i'm really sorry that this has only taken me forever to update. i recently had to let go of my dog, Goldie, when we had to put her down. i had had her for a long time, and it's been rough these past few weeks adjusting to a home without her.
i'm really sorry that this has only taken me forever to update. i recently had to let go of my dog, Goldie, when we had to put her down. i had had her for a long time, and it's been rough these past few weeks adjusting to a home without her.