Rogue had been avoiding Logan for the past week. She wasn’t even quite sure why; she wasn’t angry or sad, she didn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable around him. Perhaps, she reasoned, it was because the next time they talked, it would be about something that could change their lives forever. She felt that something with that kind of importance deserved to be acknowledged by her acting differently, behaving in an extreme manner that was in direct proportion to the seriousness of the situation.
It was ridiculous.
She kept thinking of questions that had her wanting to run to Logan for advice. He was always the one who listened while she talked things through. She considered briefly talking to Storm, but didn’t want to leave Logan hanging if he felt the need to turn to someone other than her. And if he did, Storm was the one he’d go to.
And that left Rogue with nobody to talk to. She was almost bursting with the need to talk, and she knew, just knew, that if she went anywhere near Logan, she’d start rambling and never stop. That wouldn’t be fair to Logan, she thought, since she might inadvertently influence his decision.
Rogue scowled and wished for the first time since she had taken the cure that she hadn’t lost the voices in her head. If she had kept them, she would have never found herself without someone to talk to. She wondered, sometimes, if that had been her mutation’s gift to her. Her skin would always leave her isolated, always an arm’s length away from real human contact, real connections, but in her mind, she had had five people who knew her inside and out. People who had never judged or scorned her. It was ironic, she knew, that the Magneto in her head had taken to giving her rational, fatherly advice, genuinely wanting to help her through things, with none of the homicidal intent of his real-life counterpart.
Maybe they could still help her, even though they were gone, she thought. She had known them just as well as they had known her.
Magneto would have said to choose anyone but Logan as the father of her baby. Hands down, no explanation offered. John would have shrugged and said, “Whatever. Doesn’t have anything to do with me. Just as long as you know you’re gonna end up with stretch marks and saggy boobs.” Bobby would have howled and raged and threatened to freeze Logan’s balls off.
She snickered when she pictured Bobby cupping Logan’s crotch to accomplish that.
David, she thought fondly, raised with the same southern family-oriented values as herself, would be appalled at the prospect of deliberately having a child out of wedlock. But, he would grudgingly concede, her views on family values had been irreparably skewed and scarred when her parents kicked her out for something she couldn’t help. If he had still been around after the cure, Rogue imagined that he would have been just as angry and hurt as she was when her parents still refused to have anything to do with her. She had waited a year after taking the cure to make sure it wasn’t going to wear off like it had with other mutants. Then she had called them. The conversation hadn’t even lasted a full minute. It was just long enough for her to say, “Daddy, it’s me. I’ve taken the cure, and I’m not a mutant anymore,” and the silence followed by the soft click of the phone as her father hung up on her had left her shocked and shaken.
She had cried then for the first time since Logan found her on the train. She hadn’t cried at the Statue of Liberty, hadn’t cried when Jean, Scott, or the professor had died. She hadn’t cried when Bobby cheated. But when her parents decided to cast her away even without her mutation, she finally faced the fact that they hadn’t ever loved her the way they were supposed to.
She had cried for days, locked up in her room not eating, sleeping, or showering, and snarling through her door for people to leave her alone whenever they knocked.
Logan was the one to finally ignore her wishes and he sliced right through her doorknob with his claws and stalked angrily into her room. She had screamed at him to get out, but he stood there silently, a look of challenge in his eyes. When screaming got her nowhere, she started beating at his chest and arms with her fists, crying all the while. He still didn’t move or respond in any way.
When she eventually wore herself down and she slumped against his chest, her hands knotted into fists at his shoulders, his arms had immediately come around her and pulled her close. After a few minutes, when the last of her tears finally dried on her puffy face, he had announced unceremoniously, “You stink, kid,” and pushed her toward the bathroom to shower.
Rogue chuckled as she thought about it. She wondered what the Logan in her head would have said about her current situation. Probably nothing, she mused. He had always had a habit of remaining silent on the big decisions, but she had never felt abandoned by it. Instead, she had always felt his quiet support and acceptance of whatever choice she made, even if she knew it was something he’d like to protest. With a sad smile, Rogue realized that that was the type of love and acceptance her parents should have given her.
And all at once, she knew that Logan was the only one who would ever love and protect a child of hers as fiercely as she would, regardless of its paternity.
* * *
They hadn’t agreed to meet in the kitchen at 2 am exactly one week later. It just sort of happened.
Rogue was contemplatively spooning peach-swirled vanilla ice cream straight from the carton when Logan came through the door. She wasn’t surprised this time, and merely slid the extra spoon in front of him when he sat down beside her. She hadn’t even realized she had taken a second one from the drawer.
They worked their way companionably through the carton, occasionally battling over a choice morsel with their spoons. When the last bit of ice cream was scraped up, Logan broke the silence.
“So?” That was it. That was all he said, but in it, Rogue heard all the things he wasn’t asking, first and foremost his concern that he wasn’t good enough.
“So,” she said, holding his gaze, “if I’m going to do this, I can’t think of anybody I’d rather do it with than you.”
“Yeah?” Logan asked tentatively, the beginnings of a smile quirking up the corners of his lips.
“Yeah,” Rogue said firmly. “What about you?” She held her breath as she waited for his answer.
He shrugged. “I’m in if you’re in.”
“Logan,” she chided, “it’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“Because we haven’t even discussed the details yet.”
“Details?” He frowned. “Like what?”
“Like when we’re gonna do this. And how.”
“Whenever you want. And what do you mean how?”
“Well,” she began tentatively, “do you want to ask Hank to help us, or do you want to go to somebody else?”
Logan’s frown deepened. “Why would we need Hank’s help?” he asked in genuine confusion.
Rogue blinked in surprise. “We’d need his help with the…the procedure.”
Logan’s head snapped back as if she had punched him. ‘Procedure’ was such a coldly clinical term. It brought to mind labs and needles, strangers in white masks. The picture he had been holding in his mind all week of Marie and the blanket wrapped bundle was replaced by another picture. For the first time, he was able to clearly imagine the baby, and he didn’t like what he saw.
A cold, gleaming room with a crying infant lying alone on a steel examination table, its arms and legs flailing, its little fingers grasping only air as it reached for someone, anyone.
“There won’t be any…any procedure,” he rasped finally, spitting the word from his mouth as though it had a particularly vile taste to it.
“What?”
Logan glared at her, his eyes glittering. “No kid of mine is ever going to be the result of a fuckin’ scientific procedure,” he said flatly, threateningly.
Sudden understanding filled Rogue’s eyes. She swallowed hard. “It…it wouldn’t be like that, Logan.”
“No?” He laughed mirthlessly. “You wanna be the one to tell our kid that he was the result of a cold, hard procedure? That he was an object to be acquired through impersonal science?”
“It wouldn’t be impersonal!” Rogue cried in protest. “We would love him no matter how he came about!”
“It wouldn’t be impersonal?” Logan mocked. “I don’t know, Marie, jerking off in a cup and handing it over to Hank or whoever the fuck else so he can squirt it into you with a turkey baster sounds pretty damn impersonal to me.”
Rogue gasped and her face burned with a blush. “You don’t need to be so hateful about it,” she said with quiet dignity. “I know why the thought upsets you, but what other option do we have?”
“The only other option there is. Have the baby the good old-fashioned way.”
A steely glint appeared in Rogue’s eyes. “You’re not willing to compromise on your wants and beliefs here, so I have to compromise mine?” She raked him head to toe with a withering glare. “Whatever happened to ‘waiting for marriage is decent, honorable, Marie’?”
They gave glare for glare, neither willing to back down. Rogue remained mutinously silent, challenging him to answer her question. When a low, frustrated growl rumbled from Logan’s lips, she knew she had won the match. She waited expectantly for his apology. But it never came. Instead, he snapped out a challenge of his own.
“So we’ll get married.”
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