It was hot out and shielding her eyes did nothing to squelch the brightness of the sun - it seemed intent on surrounding her from every possible angle. Well, except for from the ground-up, but she wouldn't get much done staring at the dirt and dried out grass.
Not even near noon yet, and the heat of the day had made itself well-known as she wrung her clothes out with a firm, practiced twist and tossed them over the haphazard line she'd hung just a few days after arriving here.
With a heavy breath, she turned back toward the house, looking down the length of the wooden-plank, front porch as if it were a tunnel, frustrated, again, by the sight of the empty road. She thought she'd heard the low rumble of a motor, a car, possibly, coming up the tiny, dirt path that lead to the three-room shanty of a lodge she'd been living in for the past ten-odd months.
No dice.
She told herself for a moment that it must've been a plane engine sounding somewhere off in the distance, denying the inevitable fact that she'd most likely been hearing things again - her mind's way of compensating for the lack of human contact for nearly a year.
She tossed the last pair of worn jeans onto the wire and let her hands fall to her hips. She leaned back with a satisfied groan and enjoyed the coolness the light breeze offered against the sweat-soaked skin of her neck and face. That was one good thing about living out in the open - the wind came through unimpeded. The house was muggy, like a trap for the humidity of the outside air, and while it offered a little shelter from the blazing sun, the outdoors were more welcome than the make-shift cabin.
God, she missed air conditioning. And electricity.
'I know it don't look like much, but it'll keep ya 'til I get back.'
And keep it had.
He'd spent ten days there with her, showing her everything he knew that he hadn't already passed on, teaching her how to live on her own - literally, because for the first time in the past four years, he wasn't going to be there for her. It wasn't fighting, it wasn't training in the Danger Room or the methodical research of how to take down her foes - no, she already knew how to do all of that. The instruction she needed now was how to find food, how to make do with what she had and ways to stretch things out longer than they'd been made to give.
He'd taught her well because even after all those months, she was still making out all right.
When they'd first gotten there, she'd all but turned up her nose at the harsh change of lifestyle she was about to undergo. Her time on the road forgotten, years of life at the mansion had spoiled her. No matter the side risk of injury or even death while on the X-Men squad, she had led her life of luxury and now - going from that to this?
It hadn't taken her long to break herself of those habits, not when she had to trek the two hundred yards or so down the bumpy path that led to the hand-made well Logan had dug out. There were simply more important things in the world than comfort - like survival - and she'd had to learn that the hard way.
With a groan, she hefted the large pail of dirty water onto it's side and poured some carefully into a small gardening tin. The vegetables around the back of the house needed watering if she planned on them making it through the scorching day, and with a little luck, she might not run out of water before that was done.
Another look at the small pile of still-dirty laundry on the front porch made her swear to herself that no matter how much of a hassle it was, she'd do the clothes more than once every other week. 'One more load,' she encouraged herself as she trekked around the side of the house, the sound of her own voice almost foreign to her ears.
When he'd first left, she relied on the memory of her friends, him, speaking to keep her company, but after months of silence, reminiscing grew old and she'd taken to singing, despite the fact that she couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.
She tried not to think about how amused she was by that thought as she was now, actually carrying said bucket.
He'd written things down for her, little tips, stuff to and not to do, what vegetables needed to be planted at what time and how to make use of every single piece of a deer carcass. She'd appreciated the fact that he'd done that for her. Remembered that her memory wasn't so great at times.
The booklet was thick. He'd spent a while on it - far longer than the two weeks he'd disappeared right before he came to take her away.
He'd told Xavier, warned him repeatedly that this rift with the Senate, this push to reintroduce the Mutant Registration Act wasn't like the other ones. This time it wasn't a false alarm and his instincts were telling him so. The Professor had refused to believe it, falling back on his steadfast conviction that man wouldn't allow a travesty of this proportion to take place.
It was his rejection and downright denial that had gotten him and over half of the mansion's residents incarcerated. They'd been deemed 'hostiles' and 'at-risk' for the safety of the general public and taken away during the night, when it was least expected.
In a rare moment, he'd called, told her to stay the night in the city, that he had a bad feeling. He would've been there himself, but he was too far away and wouldn't be able to get home until dawn.
At first, Marie'd scoffed at the notion, citing that she was an X-Man and she knew how to take care of herself, that the Professor wouldn't let anything happen and that she was safer at the mansion than she would be anywhere else. She knew she'd hurt him when she snapped at him that he was being paranoid as usual, so she went along with his request as an apology of sorts.
That morning, after she'd learned what had happened to her supposed safe haven, she made a promise to herself that when it came to Logan, she'd cast all of her own feelings aside and never doubt him again.
When he'd shown up at the hotel just after check-out with a hastily packed duffel of her own clothes slung in the backseat of the beat up Pontiac he was driving, she knew there was no turning back. They hadn't said a word to one another - he knew she'd heard the news and there was no sense of reminding her that everything in her life was about to change.
For hours they drove, until city gave way to countryside and concrete buildings faded like the sun behind them. When they pulled into the woods and he'd cut the engine, it wasn't until then that Marie had thought to speak.
'You knew this was going to happen, didn't you?'
'History repeats itself, darlin'. I may not remember much truth about mine, but this...this is somethin' I know.'
They had a half-mile trek through the sparse, but deep woods before it opened up into a clearing, a valley of sorts where she spotted the tiny shanty, just barely hidden by a rock ledge, that was to be her home for an undetermined amount of time.
'I know it's not what you're used to,' he'd told - no, apologized to her as soon as they set foot inside and she'd had a good chance to look around. 'But it'll keep the rain offa your head - mostly - and if you're watchin', no one can get near this place without you spottin' 'em first.'
'Me?'
Up until then, she had no idea that he was actually going to leave her there. Alone.
'It's not that I don't trust ya, Marie, because I do, but when I go out this first time, it's gonna be ta gather intell, so I can figure out what in the hell it is we're gonna do about gettin' the rest of those guys outta wherever it is that they're stuck. That's a whole lotta blanks there, darlin', and I'm not about to take that kind of risk with you - not when you're the only one I've got left.'
She would've argued the point twenty-four hours earlier, bringing up her trained X-Men status once again, letting him know that two heads were almost always better than one, but she remembered her self-made pact and told herself that this wasn't Logan being obsessively suspicious. This was Logan doing exactly what he did best, what he was made and trained to do and that right now, she was there to shut up and follow along for the ride.
In the silence of the day, the groan she let out when she hefted the watering can sounded much louder, almost booming to her ears. Every patter of the drops against the thirsty leaves was magnified and she wouldn't let herself believe that was actually the sound of dust settling back into the ground after it had been disturbed.
Only halfway done and already feeling the familiar wooziness from the heat, Marie decided to drag herself back around to the front of the house and cool off for a moment on the front porch. The days were getting hotter by the flip of the calendar page and she didn't know if she'd be able to make it through the summer's peak months. It hadn't seemed this bad the year before, but, then again, she'd been inside, in an air-conditioned home with insulation and protection from the heat.
As she wiped away a loose lock of hair from her forehead, she glanced up the road once more, almost disregarding the black fleck of something that was moving steadily up the path toward the house. In the wavy heat, she couldn't make anything definite out, but her heart skipped a beat at the thought that she'd finally lost her mind. She could handle hearing things through the tricks her ears would play, but combining that with the occasional conversation with herself *and* seeing something that wasn't really there was, in her mind, a one-way ticket to the looney farm.
She tried to ignore the road, hoping the spot would disappear and she'd once again be left alone, her sanity intact, but with as much as her body was telling her to keep moving, to seek the shade that the tiny porch roof could offer, she couldn't make her feet go any further. Her gaze was glued to that point nearly a quarter-mile away and there was no focusing on anything else.
Her free hand slipped down from shielding her eyes to help grip the top handle of the water bucket and she held it in front of her, still unable to pull her stare away from the growing vision of her longing personified.
She didn't want to believe it at first because she knew she was just seeing things, that the heat and near-desperate need for human contact were working together, conspiring against her in what she was sure was a war for her reason. Then it kept growing and she could make out a body - a tall, wide frame, dressed in black, despite the heat. And when she was able to process in her blanched mind that it was a motorcycle this man - because she was sure it was a man now - had in tow, she felt her feet give way beneath her.
In what seemed like no more than a blink, her eyes opened to see a flesh-colored blur looming just above. She felt something cool press against her lips and, on instinct, she opened her mouth to the water that was being offered.
From the porch where he'd dragged her to, Logan cradled her head gently against his thigh as he held the wooden cup to her lips with one hand and tried to fan her face with the other one.
Looking up at him from this angle, with him behind her, was a bit disconcerting, but she couldn't keep from smiling when her eyes finally settled on the face she hadn't seen for three hundred and fourteen days.
"Your hair's all gone," she said suddenly, a hint of both question and amusement in her quiet tone.
The random comment unsettled him a little, but he could see the clarity coming back into her eyes with each passing second and he grinned.
"Got hot," was all he offered as he lifted her and took her inside.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
This was written purely to get me back in the mood of writing X-Men fic again. It's a series with a few more chapters that have already been written, then a couple more that are still in the works. Haven't decided on an ending yet, but when I do, you probably won't know. *g* This has been looked at, but not really beta'ed since I'm kinda antsy like that, so the mistakes are all on me. Feedback is appreciated, but not needed, so if you don't feel like it, don't feel obligated. I'll live through it...somehow.