I can admit it. I know I'm not perfect. I think, eventually, even the most narcissistic, egotistical, self-worshiping jerkoffs have at least a moment of understanding that they aren't perfect. Everybody sees it sooner or later.
I guess my problem is more that I can't stop seeing it.
When I was younger and didn't know that things would be hard, when I didn't know that life was a huge struggle and survival a battle, when I didn't know that love did not always come to you as a birthright guaranteed or that it could be taken back…I don't think I knew what happiness was.
There's this idea floating around in the world. I heard a girl state it pretty clearly once in an essay composition class. Her eyes were both sad and elated in saying it. The idea that without pain, we cannot know joy. Without death, we cannot appreciate life. Without loss, we cannot know gratitude. Without dark…there is no concept of light.
She said that the beauty of life relies as much on the existence of everything wrong in life as it is possible to rely on something.
So basically, I guess, we're supposed to be thankful at some point that things go wrong. Because if they didn't, we just wouldn't know how good we have it. We'd be taking all the beauty for granted, and it would lose its meaning, and it wouldn't be beautiful anymore.
So I'm not perfect. I don't think I want to be. If there were nothing wrong with me, if it was all sunshine and daisies, I would be drop. Dead. Dull.
But sometimes I have these moments of painful clarity, where I realize that I'm dwelling on my imperfection so much that I can't gain even the most miniscule measure of perfection at all. And everyone has to have a portion of perfection.
He says I'm afraid of myself. Afraid of my own skin, afraid of the very idea that I can hurt someone. But I think he's wrong. Which is funny, because I never think he's wrong.
I'm not afraid anymore of hurting someone. I've actually got it down pretty good, the control thing. I just haven't been able to take the step yet, to touch someone. To let someone touch me. There have been times, I know, when I almost did it, when I had the courage. But I lost it. I can count exactly eight times when it happened, and seven of them were with him.
Four of those seven times were on the couch, right after a hockey game, when he's yelled all he can at the TV screen and jumped up and raged at the oblivious players from hundreds of miles away. He gets all the tension out, he starts to grin before the game is even over, I can tell jokes and he actually huffs out what counts as laughter for him. And then after, when all the tension is spent up and he settles back down on the sofa, and the night starts to set in and everyone drifts off to their rooms bit by bit, and we stay behind in the rec room and idly discuss the leagues and the teams and the players and the maneuvers, good points, bad points, blah blah blah. Words start to slow, sentences are fewer and farther in between, and the silence becomes okay and even companionable. I get tired soon into that, and he knows it. It's kind of an unspoken tradition. I fall asleep there on the couch, barely leaning on him because space is an issue that's been drilled into my habits by absolutely everyone but him and he doesn't push me that hard to go against the habit. And when he's ready to go to bed, when he's done for the night and tired too, he'll make sure I get to my room even if he has to carry me.
It's weird. I know he's carried me in my sleep sometimes, and I've wondered…does he know? Has he ever accidentally touched my skin and felt no pull and knew what I've been keeping from him, from everyone? But I don't dwell on that. I do dwell on the idea that he's close to me when he carries me off to my bed. That when I'm not awake and don't know it, he's close to me.
But yeah. After the hockey games. Four times, during the stretches of silence, I would notice some portion of his skin showing. Sometimes he wears gloves around me, sometimes he doesn't. It's not a big issue to him, I guess, so he doesn't feel like he needs to take precautions just for my sake. He thinks that being my friend is for my sake, and that's what counts. He's right there. It definitely counts. But sometimes, yeah, he doesn't wear the gloves, and I'd notice the skin. Or it might be his arm, or his throat, or his cheek, or his goddamn ear. Something. And I'd think… I can touch that. I can touch that skin. I can touch *him*. And I'll even feel my fingers twitch, I'll feel the muscle in my forearm tighten in preparation for the movement it would require to reach up and touch the man next to me.
And I check my focus, check my blocks, check my control. I check even though I know it's not a problem, that unless I consciously think that I need to activate the pull and deliberately relocate energy, nothing will happen other than an innocent touch. I've practiced, don't think I haven't. But not on a person. I've practiced with caterpillars, butterflies, moths, houseflies, and even a mouse. I only messed up once, and I felt bad about it. I felt bad about killing a moth. Can you believe that? Even though, thank god, I don't pull thoughts from insects, their brains too tiny to conjure such structures. That would be weird, if I had the thoughts of a moth…
No, I felt bad. I know they don't think I understand the magnitude of pain my touch can inflict, but I do. When I touch a person, I pull thoughts, memories, life force, mutations. That includes whatever feeling or thought they're having at the moment I'm touching them, so that means the very pain my touch causes, I feel too.
It's just easy to forget that, I guess, when I'm the one who walks away looking okay.
But yeah. Check my control. And I'm aware of the involuntary nerve commands in my body that say 'hey, pick up your hand, move it, touch him right there'. And I don't do it.
Instead, I maintain our unspoken tradition, and I eventually just go to sleep in his presence, the closest thing to touch.
The other three out of seven times were different. One, my nineteenth birthday. Four weeks after I gained control and told nobody. Jubilee and Jean, of all people, organized my party and completely surprised me. Damn near made me cry it was so nice. I got presents and everything. Three sets of gloves, which I appreciated with sincere liking and gratitude, but also with a hint of sick-to- my-stomach resentment that nobody could have detected. Not Jean. Not even the Professor. Other stuff too. Clothes, music, art supplies, cash. Heh. Even an IOU from Piotr, our resident gentle 'oh my god is he on steroids' giant, for a trip to any art exhibit of my choosing. I know he likes to paint. He just won't admit it, even though everybody's seen his cartoon sketches.
So yeah. There we were, my nineteenth birthday, and of all things, Kurt started trying to dance with Storm to Chubby Checker's "The Twist". I mean, wow. And next thing I know, everybody was dancing. Except the Professor. Oh, and me. Yeah. Obviously. It's kind of a given at good old 'we accept you for who you are!' school that Rogue does not participate in activities that might risk a touching accident. Ever think it would be cool to have that whole Moses power? Split the Red Sea? Split a crowd?
Yeah, uh, no. Not cool.
I guess they think I've learned to accept it, the idea that I just can't risk touch at all. They think I'm okay with not getting into spontaneous group situations, not sitting on a crowded sofa when something great is on the rec room TV. That I'm bravely letting everyone go on without me because I care. Oooh, sappy. I shouldn't be bitter. I let them think that.
Funny how it's also just sort of a given that the Wolverine is going to be in close contact – as much as permissible – with the Red-Sea- splitting Rogue.
Sorry. I keep going off on these tangents. I just want to get all these thoughts out now, let you see the way my head spun without me knowing which way it was spinning or why. Give you an observation of my life, without the answers to the questions not answered, because I don't know the answers and they aren't really relevant to the results.
Anyway, so they were all dancing. And I was just sitting there trying to genuinely feel the enthusiasm I was putting into laughing at Bobby trying to get Remy to dance with him – he was just trying to be funny, that's all, I swear on my soul. And the 'fessor, he turned to me and said, "Say yes." And then started whirrin' away on that damn speedy wheelchair of his before I could say "Huh?" Not that it kept me from saying it, but he was gone by then, yeah.
And then there he is, the mighty Wolverine, standing in front of me and glowering for all he's worth, hands in his pockets. "You even wanna dance at your own party, kid?"
Professor's advice still spinning bewilderingly in my head, I said yes. And the man nobody had spared a thought to in regard to dancing, who hadn't even *been* at my party until that moment, plucked me out of my chair by my elbow and started slow-dancin' me right there. To the twist. Yeah.
And god, why didn't I touch him then, when his arms were around me and I wasn't asleep? Dammit.
Second of the odd three is simpler and shorter. I was in the garden kicking a hose that had tripped me and having a general tantrum seven months after my nineteenth birthday. It had been a bad day, for reasons I forget now. Kicked that hose until I tripped again, and then just sat there on the ground huffing furiously at the inanimate opponent. And he appeared right behind me and to my right, leaned down for a minute. Said, "Least it wasn't a snake," all snickery like. And I turned my head and saw him glaring mockingly at the garden hose and I laughed. And I almost kissed his cheek to say thanks. Buuuut I didn't.
Third out of the three times. Four weeks after I turned twenty. I went for a walk and lost track of time, ended up on some road really far from the Mansion. Horrible day, it turned out, because the sun had barely set when that little station wagon skidded around the curve and slammed into the tree. I got there in two heartbeats, and I realized I didn't have my gloves, didn't have my scarf, had panicky flipped on my skin when the sound of the car skidding scared me and couldn't concentrate at all to flip it off again and if I touched that kid bleeding out on the steering wheel or the two little boys in the back seat all crumpled up funny, I might kill them. And I swear to high heaven, I tried. I really tried to concentrate and turn my skin off and I just couldn't. I could feel it was still on. I was just too freaked out. So, freaked out, I was about to scream all mental-like for the Professor, but he was in Australia of all things and I automatically switched to screaming in my head for Jean.
So Jean called the ambulance and had the gorgeous sense to send good ol' Wolverine to get me because the legal types wouldn't appreciate that a witness with no cell phone was on hand when they got there and hadn't done anything to help those kids. He got there in four minutes. I swear. Four minutes, when I didn't even know which way the school was anymore since I'd been walking for hours. And I was so freaked out. I screamed and babbled and was apparently pretty incoherent, because he stopped trying to ask me to get on Scott's bike and instead shoved me at it by my shoulder. And I got on the bike, and he got on in front of me and we left those kids there just as the sirens started coming around the curve.
He stopped halfway back and waited quietly on the bike while I stumbled off the road and spilled my guts to the grass in the ditch. And when I came back to the bike he handed me his jacket and I felt so scared and confused and sick that I just wanted to touch someone so badly and by then I did have enough concentration to have flipped off my skin. He saw what I wanted too, when I started lifting my hand toward his wrist without having taken the offered jacket. Looked me right in the eye and wasn't going to budge or begrudge me of it even though at the time he still thought my skin was deadly. But I stopped. And I took the jacket, and I got on the bike, and he took me home and handed me off to Jean, who knew exactly what a terrified untouchable accident witness needs: enough sedatives to knock me out for thirteen hours.
So I know you're wondering: the one other time. The time that wasn't him. Who was it?
Don't laugh, okay? Not that I can stop you, since I don't know you or where you are, but don't laugh don't laugh don't laugh.
…I wanted to change a baby's diaper.
You're laughing aren't you? Dammit.
Okay, look, it's a lot more complicated than life-hardened Rogue going all mushy and motherly instinct or something, you know! WAY more complicated. Dammit. Dammit, man.
…so there's Warren. About the time I turned nineteen, I didn't know him, but he had been working with Cyclops and the Professor some on things that never concerned me really. Other members of our school got to know him though, and somehow it turned around that he got to know a girl who had been in the school for seven years, since two days after her "mutant debut" when she was fifteen and caused six hundred different species of plants to mature from seed form to germinating age in under thirty seconds at one of those seed bank places. School tour. Caused quite a fuss, I'm told. Pissed off some plant geeks too. Anyway. Her name was Sidney Turnhouse before she joined Xavier's. I'd always known her as Bloomer though, and that was the name she preferred.
So there's Bloomer, twenty-two, and Angel starts hanging around Xavier's, and they meet, and so on and so forth. Definitely not love at first sight or anything, I heard. Actually, I heard that first sight involved Angel kinda stepping on a little cactus Bloomer had been trying to slow-grow (she tends to have difficulty keeping her mutation from making plant life grow instantaneously and expire almost as fast). She'd just gotten it to grow at the speed she wanted and was excited and took five steps away to call Storm and show her…and Angel landed square on it.
Now, you know, it's bad enough for the guy that he landed on a cactus (Angel had a reputation that year for thinking he could go barefoot anywhere, or in what I called "ballet boots" – cloth boots that might as well have been slippers). But Bloomer heard him howl, turned and saw he'd squished her poor little cactus, and from what I heard, she nearly strangled him to death when all the plants in the area reacted to her temper tantrum by growing so big and fast that we had to use machetes, several bonfires, and one temperamental backhoe to clear the garden for the next two weeks.
Angel didn't strangle to death though. In fact, he didn't even get scratched by the roses. But he did get bee-stung, which was kinda funny. Still, despite a very rocky start, four months later they were dating, and by the time I turned twenty, before the station wagon crash and all that, they were engaged. Happened pretty fast, if you ask me, but they were pretty madly in love. I think the fact that Bloomer could control her mutation so well around Angel once he'd kissed her for the first time – when she couldn't seem to make it do what she wanted at any other time – was a big testament to how good he made her feel.
So they got married only one month after they got engaged – still pretty fast, even for a girl who makes everything grow too fast – and ten months later, Mississippi was born.
Okay, alright. His name wasn't actually Mississippi. That was just what I called him in my head. But come on. He might have been born looking like any average baby, even though Kitty swore up and down that he had Angel's eyes, but to me, when I looked into his eyes that didn't know me and saw me nonetheless, I had this hilarious flashback to an old John Wayne movie. "El Dorado" it was called, and there was this ridiculous knife-totin' funny-hat-wearin' kid in it with a prissed up name that made people look at him funny, so he went by Mississippi instead. I think James Caan was the actor…before he got old, of course. I haven't got the slightest clue to high heaven why that's what I thought of the first time I matched stares with the baby boy, but that's all there is to it. And I'd think to the scene in the movie where Mississippi does the "fool thing" of divin' under these problem men's horses. "A man can't shoot if his horse is jumping and a horse won't step on a man."
Mississippi in the movie really was a fool, cuz a horse'll step on a man same as it'll step on the dirt, just as soon as there isn't any dirt available for stepping on. Mississippi in the movie just got lucky.
Mississippi in Bloomer's arms would have been right if he'd done the same thing though.
I don't know what I'm saying, really. The first time I saw the kid was in a room full of people and he was the only one looking at me.
It was about two days, I think, after my twenty-first birthday. I'd been edgy as all heck and I didn't know why. There was some big news on the TV when I walked into the rec room to ask Wolfsbane a question about Scottish mythos. There were twelve people in the room, and all of them were gathered around the TV, watching the news break, and Bloomer was among them. She had her baby boy, Gavin, propped against her shoulder and was patting his back like she meant to burp him or something, but he didn't seem to care about burping. I came through the door, and he was looking right at me, baby-blue eyes sharply focused on my own. I had to pause, because I just…it was different. It was like, for all the people in that mansion and all the people in the world, this baby boy who'd never met me saw me straight away where nobody else did.
I was a little bothered by it, I guess, cuz I started trying to move around the rec room out of his gaze, but he just kept looking at me until I left the way I'd came without having ever talked to Wolfsbane at all.
I managed to be confused and not like it for about ten hours, and then it was six in the morning the next day. Bloomer ran down to the kitchen for baby formula or something, I guess, and Angel was off someplace businessy, I suppose. And I just…found myself wandering into their suite, leaning over that kid's crib and thinking, "Hello, Mississippi. You're awful young to know where I'm from."
And watching him. I don't know. He opened his eyes with this weird burbling noise and looked right at me again and time got strange. I don't know how long I stood there, really, or when it occurred that I realized he needed a diaper change.
I know that I was looking at a baby boy, and then Bloomer was behind me whispering all fear. "Rogue, what are you doing?"
I don't know. I really don't know. My hand was halfway to her months- old baby boy, and she knew me and my hand only as a life-draining mutant at that moment who absolutely could not be allowed to touch that baby and she was scared… I don't blame her. If I'd been in her shoes, I guess I would have been just as terrified. Because, really, who wants death to touch their precious newborn son?
I could have touched that baby boy, little Gavin, my Mississippi déjà vu. It wouldn't have hurt him and finally everyone would know that Rogue wasn't death anymore, and Bloomer wouldn't have had to be afraid. She could have been relieved.
But instead, I drew my hand back and looked at her and answered honestly that "I don't know," to her question, which was true only because I didn't. I didn't know when my hand had moved or what I was doing. I mean, I wasn't doing what she was afraid of, I knew that, but still.
And my answer made things worse. There was no relief that I'd pulled back before death touched her child. Rather, there was fear that I didn't know what I was doing, and I would touch him sooner or later because Rogue must be crazy.
I didn't mean it that way.
I could have touched him. It wouldn't have hurt.
But she didn't know that, and I answered with the wrong words at the wrong moment in time, and she had every right to be frightened by my mistake.
I got out of that room so fast because I couldn't handle the sick feeling I got from the way she was looking at me. Fear and anger and even a bit of defend-her-young challenge against me. Mostly fear.
I got back to my room so fast because I suddenly was afraid too. I don't know what of, maybe I'll never know.
Jean and the Professor came to my room only fifteen minutes later, and I knew there were sedatives in Jean's pocket without any evidence to prove it before my eyes. They were a last resort, but she'd use them if the fear in Bloomer's eyes were true.
I had had control for two years, eight months, twenty-two days, and maybe one hour give or take. And somehow, with all the telepaths and genius brain cells and other freaky ways of knowing everything that floated around the mansion, nobody had figured out that I had control yet.
Why had I kept it a secret for so long?
Why did I keep it even then?
…don't worry, I'm getting to that.
So Jean and the Professor talked to me. They asked me why I had gone into Angel and Bloomer's suite, why I had been there alone, why I had been watching Gavin-my-Mississippi, why I had been about to touch him when his mother returned.
I answered honestly that I didn't know, and I did my best to convey in my voice and my expression and the way I spread my gloved fingers before me where I sat by the window that I had meant no harm and would never do that harm and there was no maliciousness in my movements or thoughts.
Jean, surprisingly, caught on better than Xavier. She recognized, understood, and accepted what I tried to convey, and never caught the perception that it was the truth because I had control. No, Jean believed I was telling the truth because it was the truth and that was all there was to it.
I think I have always liked Jean more since then, because she *didn't* need more proof than the essence of truth itself. There didn't have to be reasons. It just was what it was and that was good enough.
So she conveyed her belief to the Professor on my behalf, and she gave me one of the sedative pills in case I needed it – she knew how on edge I'd been and that sleep had not been coming to me for a while – and they went back out into the rest of the mansion to deal with the rest of the day.
And what a day.
In the forty-five minutes or so that they'd been talking to me, and in the hour or so since I'd fled Bloomer's baby, word had gotten around. Rogue was dangerous in a new way suddenly. She'd nearly stolen a child's life and she might be crazy. Don't touch me? Right. They took it to a new level that day. Just that day, really, because afterward Jean and the Professor helped most of the school to get that there was nothing to fear from me. Well, nothing more than usual.
But for that day, I wanted to die.
I no longer parted the Red Sea. Rather, I evaporated it. I walked into a classroom to deliver some papers from Scott to one of our teachers during a break, and the students hanging out there between classes – all thirty or so – just filtered out like ghosts. I was only there for two minutes to talk to the instructor about what the papers were for and all thirty kids left without making a big deal of it.
I didn't think anything of it at first.
Then it was hallways. Kids would enter rooms they hadn't been headed for when I came into the hallways with them. I'd suddenly be walking an empty corridor where before it had been full.
That evening, I headed down to the rec room to play foosball as usual for a Thursday with Bobby and Jubilee and Jamie…and the two people there were Piotr and Amara. And they just…left when I came in.
The final blow? When I headed to my room for the night and saw Siryn in the hall with a glass of water, and she looked right at me…and then she turned and ran into her room.
And I heard the lock click.
So I went into my room and I just felt so depressed that when I lay down and went to sleep and asked myself the questions of "why haven't you touched someone yet?" and "why haven't you shown them you've got control?" I couldn't come up with an answer and that just made me feel worse. It was like I got hollow and untouchable in ways my skin could never make me. And I decided, half-consciously, that in the morning I wouldn't get up, and then there would be no fear.
I kept to it. I didn't get up in the morning. I just kept going back to sleep. I had never been able to sleep so much in all the years since my skin first sucked life up, not without the pills. But I slept. And I slept. And still, I slept.
Scott told me later that Jean had made the decision. That she'd been scared for me and when the Professor tried to give me more time to come to my senses, Jean had not disagreed, but hadn't agreed either.
Logan had left to visit "old acquaintances" in Japan a month before I turned twenty-one, and two phone calls since had been comfortable enough. When this whole thing with Bloomer and Angel's son started, I hadn't had a thought of good ol' Wolverine.
But that was who Jean thought of first. That was who she called immediately after leaving the Professor's office, after I'd been sleeping for about three days and didn't even have to stumble to the bathroom for a moment anymore. Scott said that when Logan didn't bother to answer his phone over the span of five hours and seventeen calls by Jean, the never-intruding Dr. Grey looked in on me one more time and then closed my door and stood *seething* in the hall while she telepathically forced herself into Logan's head from across the globe and *demanded* he come back.
I never thought Jean liked me that much.
Logan ended up letting Jean send Scott to pick him up with a rental jet, since commercial flights were out of the question for a man packed full of unexplainable metal and Jean was adamant in the demand that Wolverine get back to Xavier's pronto.
So on the fifth day that I slept in, no longer aware of the world really or even in control of my skin anymore because I had lost care and energy for lack of nutrition or emotional well-being, with Jean having set up an IV and apparently becoming extremely snappish and scolding toward a lot of the people who'd avoided me before I went to bed, Logan was brought back to the mansion to rescue Rogue again.
He wanted to touch me and give me his healing factor. Jean convinced him after a while, though, that it wouldn't help. That she'd called him because he knew how to talk to me when I was scared, not because his mutation could heal.
Scott told Jean that when he and Jean left Wolverine in the room with me, he'd been a growling, glaring man. Hank told Jean that when he checked on us two hours later, Wolverine was a silent, sad looking man. Kitty told Jean that when she glanced in two hours after that, he was kneeling by the bed, arms crossed on the mattress beside my face and his chin resting on them while he murmured words she couldn't hear to me. Bobby told Jean that two hours after that, Wolverine was stroking my hair and still murmuring. Jean told me that two hours after that, he was sitting silently with his back to my bedside table, face balanced in his hand with his arm propped on an updrawn knee…and that the only thought she could feel projecting steadily and calmly through the room was his persistent, "Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up."
I woke up, I'm told, at midnight.
It was very simple, no drama. I simply woke up, he was there, and he said, "Hey."
I replied with a, "Hey," too.
And we were quiet for a while, eyes simply watching one another, before he reached out and rubbed a gloved thumb across my forehead and said, "You can rest now, kid."
I complied, and drifted back to sleep, and for the first time in nearly six days of sleeping, I rested instead of hid.
When I woke up around eight the next morning, Logan wasn't there. I knew, intuitively, that he wasn't gone though. I got up, I got dressed. I went through the ritual of Rogue-wrapping that had ruled my life for five years, made sure as little skin as possible was showing, because it was habit. Then I went downstairs to the kitchen, abandoned because classes had started for the day, grabbed a bowl of cereal, and went to eat my breakfast in front of the TV in one of the 'staff lounge' rooms. I wasn't exactly staff yet, but Scott had been saying I might as well be for all the extremely various errands I ran around the mansion. Jean came along, quietly and simply, sat down, and talked. It felt like a very casual thing, like I'd expected her and she'd expected me. She told me that they'd called Logan home and about the reports from various people about his stay with me before I woke up. I thanked her, and I didn't have to elaborate on what for.
I can't explain why I woke up, or why it was okay that I did, or why Logan's words to me let me rest, or why things felt better after that.
There've been studies for years about the "power of prayer" or the "power of positive thinking" by people with special consideration for hospitalized patients.
Logan woke me up like that. I never heard him in my sleep, or saw him in my dreams, or felt his presence. The sleeping was a void I was hiding in, it held nothing and that's why I was hiding in it to begin with. But Logan being there, I have no doubt, is why I woke up and why things were okay again. My body responded to Wolverine in my room as a sign that it was okay to survive, and so I just did.
There is no fabulous romance to it, no mystic explanation or beautiful truth. I woke up because Logan was there and I was safe somehow and that was all there was to it.
Jean let me finish my breakfast and watch the late morning news alone. Then I returned to the kitchen, rinsed my bowl and added it to one of the dishwashers' loads, and I spent a few hours walking the grounds and just breathing. I spent a few hours in the afternoon sorting paperwork from Scott's growing disorder – he'd gotten increasingly messy the last two months for reasons that I didn't know at the time – into nice neat organization, ran a few errands between teachers, and talked about some music album with Jubilee. I received a few apologies throughout the day from people who had avoided me before I went to sleep, and I accepted them sincerely.
And at the end of the day, after making sure all the little ones were in bed and having a bit of time watching a history program on TV with Scott before he went to bed too, I headed for Logan's room. I opened the door without knocking, because I knew without having to know that he was awake and heard me and smelled me coming to his door. He stood there waiting a bit inside the room, head tilted to one side like a question, hands half shoved in his jeans pockets, weight all slouched easily to one side. I stepped inside, closed the door, and that brings us to here and now.
Here and now, I'm standing in Logan's room and the past two years and about nine months are in my head, a series of moments in life that have somehow built to this and yet have nothing to do with it. Because in a minute, I'm doing this because it was always supposed to happen and everything else was just details.
Logan is still tilting his head like a question, and now his eyebrow is up, and his eyes are trying to figure me out. The question is more intense now because I'm pulling my right-hand glove off.
My hands have been pain, and death, and fear and suffering and ruin. My skin sent me out of my hometown in Mississippi and into the north and into Logan's truck. My hands brought Logan into my head in this room when his dreams tried to kill me with his claws, my skin brought Logan into my head at the Statue of Liberty. I can't call drawing Logan in purely pain or death or fear or suffering or ruin, even though for him it had to hurt, because something about my skin taking my life from Logan's healing has given me opportunity to see what will come in a minute.
Because my hand is now reaching up and molding to the air that surrounds Logan's face. Because my skin hasn't taken so much from him that he would move now and maybe there's no way it ever could. Because right now, there's this idea floating around in the world. This idea…
This idea that without pain, we could not know joy.
This idea that without death, we could not enjoy life.
This idea that without suffering, we could not feel contentment.
This idea that without pain, he can not know me.
And right now, my fingers, hovering two centimeters over his lips, are about to prove everything to be much more complex than what is just true.
And I can feel joy. And I can enjoy life. And I can be content.
Because I'm going to touch him.
And Logan will know Marie.
Without pain.
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Story Notes:
This is the first fanfic of any kind I have ever written. I did try to resist, I admit, but the pull was just too strong! Forgive the somewhat random and confusing way it is organized, but I was really trying to capture that whole "stream of consciousness" thing. Thank you for even glancing at it, sugars.