Today marks thirty years since I met him. I was young, so very young, something he would say he never was. But all men are young once, aren’t they? Maybe he’s right, though; maybe he wasn’t.
He has aged since then, in subtle ways that are obvious only to me and a few close friends. There are patches of gray, barely visible, at his temples now, and they lend him quite a distinguished air. My gray hairs are much more pronounced, even beyond the streaks of white that have been there for almost the entire time he has known me. At times, I could almost be mistaken for his senior. Funny how that works out – when we got married, everyone teased him about “robbing the cradle.” I guess they all forgot how much kinder the years would be to him than to his then twenty-two-year-old bride.
Not that the years have been cruel to me; while aging has had its effect, yes, I would not give up one moment I’ve spent with him to erase all the lines on my face. The silver thread of his presence in my life stretches across three decades and colors everything around me. From here, I can see all the lights of the city reflected on the water, dancing in my mind like half-formed images of us together. The mournful cry of a tugboat searching for the harbor’s breast echoes through the light fog, and I can almost hear the sound of his voice inside my head, smoke on the water of my mind, jumbled with all the tones of joy, love, bitterness and anguish I have heard him use.
The harbor patrol below me carries on as faithfully as it ever has, unaware of me perched on the restored torch in Lady Liberty’s hand. There are many, many advantages to being able to fly, not the least of which is the ability to sneak past heightened security. I come here to think when I need a clear perspective. It’s not something anyone would suspect of me, except maybe Logan himself. Most people think I would avoid this place and the memories associated with it. Only Logan understands that I cherish those memories in my own way – not many people are gifted with the ability to visit the place they were born and remember it as clearly as though it had only happened moments before.
And that is how I think of that night, as the night I was born. Oh, I was already seventeen years old, I know, but that night I was born of another’s blood, another’s pain, and the same water that still shimmers below me. I come here when I miss him, as I do now. He has been gone for nearly four months, on an emergency undercover assignment, the details of which even I do not know. I woke up the morning after Ben and Ari’s wedding to find him gone, and minutes later was summoned into the Professor’s office to be informed that Logan was on assignment and would not be able to contact me for some time, but that he had promised to be back in time for our anniversary, which, come to think of it, is in just two weeks. He should be home any day now.
At least Charles learned his lesson – the first time Logan went on a dangerous undercover assignment without me was ten years ago, and someone had the bright idea of not telling me what was going on. He simply disappeared one evening and served me with divorce papers two days later. If it hadn’t been for the timing and a few other details, the plan might have worked. But the papers arrived on Ben’s birthday, and the lawyer could give me no reason beyond what was printed on them: “Irreparable harm.” Irreparable harm, my ass, I’d thought at the time. I almost made it a prophecy.
It turned into a terrible fiasco, what with me leaving my ten-year-old son with Kitty and Piotr and chasing my husband to Eritrea where I almost blew his cover and nearly got us both killed, not to mention all the illegal mutant slaves he was there trying to free. After it was all over and both of us were well enough to leave our ICU chambers in the Medi Lab, we sat down and had a long talk. The divorce papers hadn’t been his idea, but he’d gone along with it when someone – he never would say who, and I could never narrow my choices down enough to confidently pin it to anyone – had convinced him that it was the only way to keep me from following him: to hurt me so much and make me so mad I would be glad to not have any contact with him. It was a stupid idea, but a testament to how much he wanted me alive that he had actually gone along with it. I was half touched, half pissed.
But they know better now, and at least they tell me when he is gone. I will respect the nature of this assignment and will not follow him yet, but if he isn’t back by midnight on our anniversary, I hope they all know that I will track him down. And after I have him back in my arms and I’m sure he is alive and well, not hanging on a cross in Australia or something, I will bust his ass for making me endure our anniversary party alone.
It’s our twenty-fifth, and friends and family from all over are making the trip to celebrate. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost say he made up the assignment just to get out of the shindig. But if he’d done that, he would have taken me with him. He might try to escape the gala, but he would never leave me behind if he had a choice. He’s already taken me into too many places against X-Men advice to start ditching me now, although I think the final straw came for him when Ben was born.
We were on an extended deep cover assignment when I got pregnant, actually. We couldn’t exactly send me home without raising suspicions and putting our lives in danger, so we made the best of it for nine months and I gave birth in a dirty little cabin somewhere north of Memphis, Tennessee with Logan watching out the window between contractions for any approaching FOH members. After that, we never went on missions together, and I didn’t go on any at all until after Ben turned seven.
But now that Ben is all grown up, with a codename, a wife, and a New York City apartment of his own, I think I might ask to be reassigned as Logan’s partner. It’s been too long since Wolverine and Rogue struck fear into the hearts of bad guys everywhere. We’re each menacing enough on our own, but nothing like the danger we present together. Six rounds in the hands of a killer – I am dangerous in his arms. We are the midnight city sirens on the back of wisdom, ominous to the forces of evil.
Nobody – and I mean *nobody* – does undercover like we do. No one is as well suited to it as Logan; I think he prefers the “infiltrate, eliminate” method to dressing up in uniform and following a lot of Boy Scout rules. In undercover assignments, he gets to follow his instincts without a constant ‘babysitter.’ It suits him. It suits *us.*
The X-Men team has always been the strongest when mates were paired, drawing from an ancient philosophy: Put lovers side-by-side in danger; they fight harder to survive. It has served us well: Cyclops and Phoenix, Colossus and Shadowcat, Beast and Storm, Rogue and Wolverine have all proven the wisdom of this advice. Now Echo and Ghost join the tradition, and even I will admit to a strong curiosity as to how my son and Kitty’s daughter will work together. Arina has been in love with Ben at least since she was six.
I can still remember my seven-year-old son running to me, scrubbing at his dirty face furiously, and begging me to “Get ‘em off, get ‘em off!”
“Get what off?” I asked, momentarily panicked. Logan walked in from the bathroom, patting his own freshly-shaven face with a towel, his eyebrows slightly raised in concern.
“The cooties!” Ben wailed in despair, and I saw the beginnings of a wicked grin on my husband’s countenance before it disappeared behind the towel. “Ari kissed me an’ now I got cooties!”
Fighting hard to keep a somewhat straight face, I pulled Ben into my lap and assured him, “One day you won’t mind so much.”
“Da-ad!” he cried out as he squirmed to escape my embrace now that I’d betrayed him, begging for a little male support. He didn’t get any.
“Don’t look at me, Kid,” Logan laughed. “I *like* cooties.”
“Eeewwww!” Ben protested, his little nose twisting in disgust before he stomped out of the room to go find some sympathy for his plight in the company of Jules McCoy and Nate Summers.
It is strange to think of my little Benjamin as Echo, widely considered one of the most formidable new members of the team. He inherited twisted forms of his parents’ mutations, and it has made him quite the valuable super-hero. At first we thought he had gained Logan’s acute hearing, but found out that it is actually more than that.
Although Hank and Jean are still not entirely sure of the details, we think he has some form of ability to visualize three-dimensional objects from the way sound bounces off them. Aside from his echolocation, he also became heir to the ability to “echo” another mutant’s gift through skin-to-skin contact, although, unlike me, he does not affect the mutant he touches.
He and Ari are coming back from their trip to Russia for the anniversary party. I will be glad to see them both, and I know Kitty will be overjoyed to see her own child. Ghost joined the team the year after Echo did, also having inherited a modified form of her parents’ gifts. As her chosen codename suggests, she is able to make her body insubstantial, similar to her mother’s power of “phasing,” but Ari becomes a shimmering silver-white image of herself, reminiscent of Piotr’s shining metal skin. Sometimes seeing her do it is just as startling as seeing a real specter.
The night wind is turning chilled and damp, however, and I am afraid my statue-top musings must come to an end for now. It must be close to midnight, and this Cinderella is going home barefoot. If I had glass slippers, they would both be with my husband, wherever he is, to remind him of me. I still wear the tag, the one he gave back to me after that terrible mission at Alkali Lake where we thought we lost Jean and he almost threw the bit of metal in the face of the man who had made it.
He told me later, when he gave it back to me, that he had only held onto it for one reason. If he’d thrown the tag and chain back at Stryker, it would have meant that they were cheap and meaningless, just symbols of memories he’d rather forget. But he’d given them to me when he’d left me the first time, and they’d meant something good then. He didn’t want me to ever think he’d left me with something that he was just going to throw away later anyway.
There is snow on the ground tonight, and I can almost see his face in the shadows of the drifts as I soar over them. *Hurry home,* I silently beg, wondering if he knows how much I am missing him now. There are times when I don’t mind him being gone. As much as we are hopelessly intertwined, we are both independent creatures at heart, and a little time alone is sometimes necessary. But I haven’t seen him in three months, three weeks, four days, and sixteen hours, and I am beginning to feel stretched and strained over the distance.
It isn’t far at all from Liberty Island to the mansion, at least not when I’m flying, although I have to walk the last little while to keep anyone from seeing that I’m breaking the Professor’s rule of “no flying close to home.” That rule managed to get Logan’s motorcycle wrecked once, and since then, he’s been one of my best secret-keepers when it comes to my clandestine night-time flights.
The gate squeaks a little when it opens – someone should really come oil it – and the security camera whirrs a little as it turns to capture my image. I smile and wave, knowing that whoever is on security duty in the basement is probably on his eighteenth cup of Starbuck’s house blend and bored to death.
I walk around to the side of the house to the wall beneath my bedroom window, where the spreading limbs of the oak tree will hide my transgression as I employ my stolen powers of flight one last time tonight, just long enough to float to the open window and slip quietly inside. Using the front door is dangerous in more ways than one — it has a tendency to wake some of the lighter, more paranoid sleepers in the house, and also presents the risk of happening upon any given pair of the residents in flagrante delecto. I shudder, wondering if I’ll ever be able to burn the image of Scott and Jean on the couch four years ago from my brain.
I turn to close the window even before my feet have touched the floor, and I sense him only a shred of a moment before his arms slide around my waist and his voice rumbles close to my ear, “Where have you been?”
“My thinkin’ spot,” I whisper back, my body immediately melting into his embrace, every nerve ending sparking to life as I run a gamut of ecstatic emotions.
He chuckles, and it reverberates through my skin. I shiver. “Gettin’ awful brave, aren’t ya darlin’? Flyin’ that close to home while I’m away.”
I shrug, struggling to turn around in his arms so I can see his face. He tightens his hold, keeping me where I am a moment longer. As soon as he relaxes, I turn, sliding my arms around him and pressing my face into his chest. I’ve always loved to hold him like this, the warmth of his flesh and the firmness of muscle and bone so prominent through the soft cotton of his shirt. It reminds me that he is solid, that he is real; it is a reassuring sensation.
“Sorry I missed our anniversary,” he says softly, and my face scrunches up in confusion even though I know he can’t see it.
“What’re you talkin’ about?” I ask, my voice muffled by the flannel he is wearing.
“I tried to make it in time, but I didn’t get back ‘til after midnight.”
Now I’m a little worried, wondering if his sense of time is off. It happens sometimes when he is working a deep cover assignment – he loses all track of dates. “Logan,” I say cautiously, “Our anniversary isn’t for another two weeks.” *You haven’t gotten out of that party yet, sugar.*
He grins and pushes my hair back from my face. “Nah,” he smirks. “It was yesterday.”
“Logan—”
He shakes his head, cutting me off. “I know, darlin’. Our weddin’ anniversary ain’t for another two weeks. But I metcha thirty years ago yesterday, an’ I was hopin’ to be home in time to remind ya of how glad ya are that I did.”
“Oh were you?” I tease, delight soaking my tone no matter how hard I try to sound casually indifferent. “Well, I guess you’re gonna hafta work double hard to make it up to me, then. Might take some real effort to make me happy I met you, you know.” I guess my wink might be called saucy, flirtatious; he smirks back at me and arches an eyebrow.
“Darlin’,” he answers smugly, “I ain’t never had trouble with that before. I doubt I’ll start now.”
I doubt it too, sugar. Sincerely.
The End
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
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Author's Chapter Notes:
For WRFA’s celebration of Wolverine’s 30th “birthday” challenge. However, as much as that should mean that I would look back over a canon-accurate history for this little ficlet, I didn’t. I made up my own Life-With-Logan universe. Again. Although I did try to stay with most of the movie-inventions, ignoring the X2 things I didn’t think made sense. Ben and Ari are mine. Terri owns Jules; I only waved at him a little. I also stole (verbatim) some lyrics from John Mark McMillan’s song “Ominous,” but you know what they say, JM: plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. Besides, if anybody tries to pay me for using those lyrics, I’ll just send them your CD. Thanks to Taryn, for the beta, and to FLa, my ex-beta who made a reappearance for this little ficlet. It was nice to have you back, if even for just a little while, girl. Any parts of this vignette that do not make sense are not their fault; it’s because I ignored their advice. Although FLa advised me that if I’m going to hint at back stories, I’d better be planning to tell them at some point. Maybe one day… or somebody else can.