The Professor, bless his heart, was able to provide quite a bit of help on the tangible side on things. He’d agreed that the best way for me to control my newfound powers was firsthand experience, but when it came to the more dangerous elements of two of the individuals, his notes and memories could provide ample information. But first things first, was Bobby.
“Rogue, it’s important to remember the original temperature of the room or area you’re in. If you concentrate you can feel what you’ve changed. What’s natural and what’s not. After that, everything should fall into place for you.” Bobby was handling the entire thing with the aplomb of a three war veteran.
I was impressed. I took everything he told me to heart and focused on the natural feel of the room. There was a touchy moment, where I focused too much on the old hurt, the pain that he’d caused me, and the closure I never got, but it faded rather quickly when I froze him to the floor.
Logan smirked at me from the control room above the Danger room where he stood with the Professor. Emma was noticeably absent.
“Wow, Bobby. Seriously, that’s all you’ve got to do to control it? It’s so easy.” I smiled, genuinely as I created an intricate ice sculpture of the view of the mountains from Logan’s cabin windows.
“Don’t look so smug Rogue, it took me years of work to get this far. I think your original mutation allows you to have a better control of the powers you’ve absorbed.”
“Sorry Bobby. I’m just excited. And I mean that, I’m sorry.” My emotions took a bit of a softer turn, not in a bad way, but in a much needed way. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t be the person you needed. I’m sorry that I pushed you so far away that you had to seek comfort and solace in Kitty’s arms. I’m sorry that we couldn’t work the way you wanted. I hope that we can be friends. I really cared, do care, for you. As a friend.”
Bobby came forward and hugged me awkwardly with one arm. “Me too.” He said before he turned to admire my work. “That’s a really, really good sculpture. Where did you see that?”
“Canada.”
I was studying the Professors notes on John’s mutation when Logan settled into the loveseat next to me. He placed a hand on my lower back and lightly massaged the sore muscles there. In the last month we’d been at the mansion I’d gathered a great amount of control over the fire, but was a bit further off from total control.
“How ya doin’ sweetheart?”
I stopped my studying and massaged my fingers into my temples.
“OK. I’m tired. I’ve learned all I can from these notes I think. Now I just have to practice.” I leaned over into him. “You’ve been go good to me Logan.”
“Nothing more than you deserve Marie.”
“Logan, I know I’ve been a pain in the ass lately. Even with the vomiting backing off to a rare occurrence, and the emotional outbursts under control I’ve still been difficult. I’m trying to get over all the difficulties we’ve had in the past but I’ve got a few questions.”
Logan steeled himself visibly for my questions. “Shoot.”
I turned in my seat to face him. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
He sighed and leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees and lightly clasping his hands. He smelled of resignation ad looked like a man a little bit broken when he turned his head and met my eyes. I leaned backward against the arm of the loveseat, my hand rested on my stomach even though it was still flat. I was lucky I’d managed not to lose too much weight on the trip from the cabin to the mansion.
Logan’s eyes left mine ad found a place on the floor across the room to focus. I practically felt him gather his thoughts and wondered where he’d start. We’d discussed him killing Jean repeatedly. In the beginning, when he was so trashed out of his mind drunk that he wouldn’t cry these rivulets of tears. At the cabin once, where he tentatively and sober as the day he was born told me in emotional heart wrenching detail everything that had happened on the island.
Recently, about a week after I’d given Emma a mental bitch-slap, he’d holed himself up with the professor for half the day and when he came out he told everything the professor had told him about Jean, and dealing with responsibility, and survivors guilt, and grief and he finally really looked like he was over it. I was so happy for him.
But we’d never, not once, discussed the night of ‘The Great Sin’. His pining, the drawing, the sex (which as of yet has still only happened the one time), the odd behavior, my running- none of that had been discussed at all. Not directly. And I was ready to clear the air, especially with my more dangerous mutations under control.
“Marie, I love you. I’ve loved you for as long as I’ve known you. It’s gradually changed from the kind of love you have for someone close to you that you care for to the love we have now.” He ran his hands through his unruly hair and leaned back against the couch digging the palms of his hands into his eyes for a moment before gathering the courage to continue. The words ‘feelings’ and ‘Logan’ weren’t generally spoken in the same sentence.
“I hadn’t thought about you in a while, not anymore than to know that you’d be there when I needed you to get me. I knew you’d make sure I found my way someplace safe and give me a protective shelter until I was back to being myself again. I knew that you’d jump to protect me no matter what it meant you had to go through.” He removed his hands from his eyes and rested his head against the back of the couch, looking up at the ceiling. I didn’t mind that he wasn’t looking at me when he spoke. Even emotion that was pouring off of him told me that he was having a difficult time talking about this at all, and I was just way to glad to finally have the subject out in the open.
“I didn’t give much thought to it, to be honest. I just accepted it as truth, law, an important part of our relationship. Then, suddenly, one day I was thinking about calling you for a ride and I kinda had this sudden realization. Why would you come to me? That answer was easy, because I knew you love me, I knew you loved me like I loved you. And then I realized I was hurting you. I went to a hotel and crashed out.” He paused, and drew in a deep breath. He met my eyes.
“Sometime that night I sat straight up in bed out of a dreamless sleep. I was tired and had a little bit of a hangover and I knew I loved you too. Not the same way I had before, but in a different more scary way. I tried to talk to the Professor once. He told me about survivor’s guilt and the pain I was putting myself through because I was alive and she wasn’t. I just felt like shit because I was convinced that I loved Jean and was fucking everyone over by loving you too. Did that mean I’d never loved her? That I hadn’t ever cared about anyone? That I was just some stupid, pathetic, fucked up, age old mutant who ruined everything and everyone around them?”
I leaned forward and reached out to him and he met me half way. Tears he was silently crying soaked into the thin fabric of my fawn colored skirt and soaked into my thighs. I did my best to keep my own sadness and tears at bay. He was silent for a moment longer before he spoke. “It’s easy to drown yourself in the bottle.”
We sat like that for a while, the quiet and sadness hung in the air like a humidity I remember from summer in Mississippi. His grip didn’t lessen on my hips at all until he spoke again and heaved himself into a sitting position.
“I’d been drawing you for a week before I noticed it. I started drinking harder and let myself fall into the oblivion, barely looking up for the right direction to move in until that night.” I blushed and looked away.
“Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t, Marie, don’t be sorry. I was-”
“Logan,” I interrupted him. “Don’t. We were both at fault. You shouldn’t have drank yourself into a stupor repeatedly, you should have told me how you felt, you shouldn’t have shut me out. I shouldn’t have assumed I knew what was going on with you, I should have tossed everything into a nice neat little box and labeled it ‘not my fault’, I shouldn’t have run. We were scared, hurting, and wary of fucking everything up. I love you. I’ve loved you for a really long time, and I brought this up because we finally need to clear the air. I don’t want anything lingering between us, not anymore. There can be no margin for error.”
We sat, staring at each other for a long time. The room was quiet around us. I spoke first.
“I need you to not drink like that, ever again. I need you to open up to me with any issues you have. Don’t hold back from me for fear of hurting me. Can you do that?”
“I can, but I need a few things from you first. I need you to never run from me again. I need you to trust me to take care of you and the baby and not to ever hide anything from me. Can you do that?”
I smiled. “I can.” I leaned forward and places a soft, light kiss on his lips. His hands went back to my hips and settled contentedly there. I felt, for the first time in a long time, that everything was settled between us. It wasn’t complicated anymore and suddenly, I could take on the world.
Piotr arrived at the mansion two weeks later. His little sister Illyana, who was currently enrolled in a School for Mutants in Colorado, came with him. It took one conversation and zero trips to the Danger Room to Master his mutation. Kitty was delighted to see Illyana, apparently they’re penpals, and the two of them immediately headed off to twitter and gush over… something.
The Professor and Logan were again observing again from the Control room and I stood waiting patiently for the mutant who was going to help me with Magneto’s powers. He had managed to dig up an old contact, which led him to a possible lead in helping me gain control.
I didn’t bat an eye when a girl, a few years younger than I and sporting green hair, jogged through the opening doors of the Danger Room. “I’m sorry I’m late Professor, I got caught up with Jubilee and we were just talking and talking and then I totally remembered that you’d needed me here, so I ran the whole way. Did you know that you can really get a good grip on those metal floors with you’ve got rubber soles? I was wearing heels on them the other day and totally slid and wasn’t able to stop at all. But in my sneakers? I can stop on a dime!”
“It’s quite alright, Lorna. Please, meet Rogue.” The Professor’s voice echoed out over the speakers of the Danger Room. And I smiled and waved. She practically bounced over to me, her mouth moving again at a speed I was barely able to keep up with.
“Oh! You’re Rogue. Jubes has told me so much about you. I just really can’t believe I’m finally meeting you. You’re practically a legend around here, the girl who took the cure. I mean, not in a bad way, a good one. You know, seeing how you kept fighting the good fight and all after you took it. Putting your life on the line with no way to heal and all. No powers on your side. It’s crazy girl. Anyway, the Professor says that I’m supposed to teach you about controlling metal and stuff. That’s cool. I’m Magneto’s bastard child you know, so I’ve got troves and troves of info. Not on him, because he’s a dead beat dad and all, but on his powers. We’ve got the same one. About the only god thing that guy ever gave me.”
She stopped abruptly and threw her arms around me. “How’s about we get started?”
I nodded a little shell shocked by her, before a small smile grew on my face. This was going to be interesting.
Lorna, or Polaris, and I spent the next two hours playing with magnetic fields and substances until I had a good grip on harnessing the ability. The most useful, and stress reliving, piece of information I garnered was that the tingling I kept feeling creeping along my skin wasn’t its lethality coming back. Lorna felt the same thing when she started manipulating the magnetic fields.
“It’s how you know you’re in tune with them.” She’d said. “For me, different varying degrees of and intensities tell me which way I’m changing the natural state of things. I can tell which ones I’m messing with and how much by how much my skin in tingling. It’s really amazing.”
“It is.” I’d told her, staring at the bared skin, wanting to tear off all my clothing and run naked through the hallways. Of course I tamped down that urge and turned to look in awe up to Logan, who I knew had heard each word.
Then I hugged Lorna. “Thank you.”
Logan and I couldn’t make it back to the Cabin before the winter set in so the Professor gave us use of a small cottage a half hours ride from the Mansion that had been in his family for generations. It was perfect for us and had a small second bedroom that could be used as a nursery.
He gave us an obscene amount of money to refurnish the place.
Logan made a crib and bassinette for the baby. We decided that after the baby came, and Hank gave us the OK, we would rent a small house in Grande Cache while Logan and a few of the guys built an extra extended section on the cabin.
Finally everything was good.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Title: When It All Comes Together
Rating: PG 13
Verse: Post X3
Summary: Logan's dealing with Jean's death and Marie is the one he turns to.
Genre: Drama
Disclaimer: I do not own the X-men, Marvel does.
Author's Note: Finally this beast is finished. *grin* Tell me what you think. Any and all mistakes are mine, I didn’t wait for a beta. Although everyone can thank hidden_relevance at ffn for kicking my butt into gear.
Rating: PG 13
Verse: Post X3
Summary: Logan's dealing with Jean's death and Marie is the one he turns to.
Genre: Drama
Disclaimer: I do not own the X-men, Marvel does.
Author's Note: Finally this beast is finished. *grin* Tell me what you think. Any and all mistakes are mine, I didn’t wait for a beta. Although everyone can thank hidden_relevance at ffn for kicking my butt into gear.
Chapter End Notes:
Well...?