Logan slammed the door to his room and threw open the drawer to the bedside table. He snatched the bottle of Whiskey that lay half-empty next to a box of cigars and took a long, satisfying swig. He screwed the cap back on and tossed the bottle onto his bed. He had spent the past few hours sulking in the garage, and he figured that it was late enough to avoid interaction with any of Xavier’s brood. Arming himself with a fresh cigar, he swaggered toward the French doors that led to a narrow balcony. A familiar scent brushed his nose. The bathroom door was ajar, and the light was off, but someone was in there. Changing course, he flipped the light switch and examined the stark white tile of the floor and counter. Muffled sobs echoed to his left. He sniffed the air instinctively and slid the shower curtain open.
Rogue sat in the bathtub, knees drawn to her chest, her eyes red and raw. The expression on her face resembled a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Logan rested his hands on his hips and asked, “What are you doing, kid? Most people shower with the water on and their clothes off.” He secured the cigar between his thin lips.
She stammered. “I…I… This isn’t my room...is it?” It was definitely more of a statement than a question.
Logan chuckled. “No, that would be the next one over.” He extended a hand to help her up, and quickly realized his mistake.
She shook her head vehemently and muttered an apology. She pulled herself up with the soap shelf and the faucet head, but her bare foot slipped. She knocked her elbow against the metal tracking as she fell on her back, her skull barely avoiding the sharp handles of the water spigot. Without a second thought, Logan scooped her up by the waist and gently sat her on the closed lid of the toilet. He had failed to notice just how tiny she was in the high strain of the events of the past week. She weighed a good twenty pounds less than when she left the mansion and disappeared. His hands, though they were larger than most, fit loosely around her arms and then some. “Jeez, kid, don’t you eat?”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the torn fabric of her sweatshirt near the base of her humerus turning burgundy and sticky with blood. “Le’ me take a look at that.” He pushed the sleeve up and grimaced at the sight before him. It was a small gash, but her apparent lack of nourishment was a big problem. “Kid, you’ve got bruises all over you!”
Logan grabbed a washcloth from the cupboard under the sink and saturated it. Crouching down to meet her, he dabbed at the cut kindly, careful not to touch her exposed skin with his. Suddenly, it occurred to him that if she had absorbed Carol’s powers, then theoretically, it would have been impossible for the jagged metal of the shower to harm her. Gesturing toward the laceration, he pursued the subject. “Kid, I don’t mean to pour salt in a wound, but…how is this possible?”
Her dull and arid lips parted, and she shrugged. She turned her head away, sending a few unruly strands of hair forward and away from her neck. Her sweet intonation adopted a cynical attitude. “I dunno. The Professor says that everything will come and go until… until I can get control and allow her to be part of me.”
Pausing to read her emotion, Logan kept quiet for a moment. “So, right now, it’s you?”
“What do you mean?” her upper lip crooked slightly, a quirk that Logan had discovered, a long time ago, to mean insecurity.
He did not want to offend her, and he racked his brain for a nice way to play interrogator. “I mean, Chuck managed to suppress the others for a while?”
Her eyes donned a sad emptiness. “They’ll come back soon. I can’t hide them forever.” Logan knew that if he pushed any further, she would start crying again, and that was too awkward for him. He took the soiled washcloth to the sink and rinsed it, casting a rose hue on the basin. He opened the medicine cabinet that disguised itself as a mirror and grabbed a small box of isopropanol swabs. Tearing open one of the packets, he asked Rogue to hold her arm out.
“This is gonna sting a little.” He wasn’t lying. She hissed as the alcohol seared her skin. “That’ll dry it out. You don’t need a bandage.”
Coddling her elbow, she murmured, “Thanks.” Childishly, she watched Logan clean up and put the red-stained towel in the garbage can. As he shut the door to the cabinet, he caught her staring at him through the mirror. “I…I’m sorry for the trouble. I should be going now.”
She stood, her vision spinning slightly, and tottered out into the bedroom. Logan shut off the light and followed. “You okay, kid?” She looked as if she was going to topple over if someone so much as breathed on her. “You want something to eat?”
Hugging her arms across her chest and shivering, she nodded. She gasped in surprise when Logan hoisted her up and carried her downstairs like she was some sort of damsel in distress on the cover of a romance novel. He set her down in the communal kitchenette, and she lifted herself onto a stool next to the granite-topped island. Logan tugged open the fridge and examined its contents. “There’s some leftover steak… turkey… Carrot cake? Wait, don’t eat that. One of the squirts made it. Tastes like cardboard. Uh, beef stew… ham?”
“No…” Rogue scrunched up her nose in aversion. “I… I’m a vegetarian.”
“Since when?” Logan turned his head toward her slightly.
“Since… like…” she knitted her brows and chewed at her thumbnail, “I don’t know. I can’t remember. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure if it’s me or…her.”
Logan bumped the refrigerator door shut and moved his search to an overhead pantry. “It’s you, kid. Carol likes cooked animals almost as much as she loves Guinness. You got anything against peanut butter?”
She shook her head, and Logan carried a jar of extra crunchy Skippy, a plastic squeezable bear filled with honey, and a loaf of wheat bread to the islet. Rogue spun the bread bag open and took out four slices, spreading each with a thick coating of peanut butter. She drenched her sandwich with honey, and it dripped from the crusts of the bread. Logan snatched the bottle from her before she could destroy his. “Why don’t you just pour the damn thing down your throat?” He handed her a paper towel.
“You know what goes good with peanut butter?” she ignored his sarcasm, taking a large bite. “Coffee.”
“You’re crazy,” Logan chuckled. “Just putting this stuff anywhere near coffee makes the whole room smell like silicone.”
“What?” Rogue coughed, launching crumbs from her mouth. “Are you serious? What, like breast implants silicone or plastic putty silicone?”
“Both.” He grabbed two glasses from the dishwasher and filled them with milk. “Speaking of fake knockers, how’d they let you on stage without ‘em?”
Rogue flouted the question and scraped peanut butter from her teeth with her tongue. “You knew Carol?”
“Yeah, you could say that.” Logan’s reply was curt and touchy.
“Are you mad at me?” Rogue looked him square in the eye for the first time.
Never one to give a straight answer, Logan shrugged. “Why?”
“Because of what I did to her…” she sipped delicately from her acrylic tumbler.
Logan shifted uneasily. “There wasn’t anything you could do about that, kid. Don’t dwell on it. Besides, I haven’t seen her in years. We went on a couple missions together for the CIA, and I guess you could say… she was one of the first people I could trust. What I don’t get is why you thought you could trust Mystique.”
Rogue gulped down the rest of her milk and poured a second glass. “I don’t know. I didn’t really have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice, kid.”
“Look,” she exhaled despondently, “I’m not going to justify myself to you, Logan. I just want you to know that I’m sorry for what happened. Please don’t ask me for anything else.”
He leaned across the cool slab. “I deserve an explanation.”
“For what?” her voice cracked with indignation. “Logan, I was suffocating here! Whenever you felt the smallest hunch of being tied down, you left. Besides, you don’t even know anything about me!” She brandished the last small chunk of her sandwich and waggled her head in frustration. “And, as for how I dealt in the big bad real world…that’s none of your business.”
“You are my business, kid. I can’t exactly protect you if you’re in some Louisiana dive playing out fantasies for a bunch of lowlifes. Did it make you feel good to have those scumbags eyeing you like a skirt steak every night?”
She rolled her eyes and snorted. “Please, Logan. You and I both know that you forfeited the titled of older, protective father figure a long time ago. I’m grateful for your concern and your noble sacrifices, but I don’t regret anything. I got a chance to live a relatively normal life. I got to have a job and take cooking classes and manage money and go to the movies and go on dates…”
“Couldn’t you have just been a waitress or something?” Logan smirked.
Rogue wiped the crumbs off the counter and into her hand. “Could you be an accountant?”
Logan smiled at her. “You’ve got a point.” To an outsider, their argument seemed to go unsettled. But, they had reached an understanding. Rogue was more independent than ever, and Logan had to get used to it. He liked her sassiness. She padded across the kitchen to the garbage and tossed in her crumpled up napkin. She washed her hands in the sink and flicked off the excess water. When she turned around, she jumped in shock. Logan stood unnervingly close. He twisted a lock of her hair around his finger and inspected her from head to toe. “So what’s Chuck’s plan for you?”
She rested her elbows against the smooth tile ledge. “Intense therapy sessions. He’s going to test out what triggers my behavior and build on that. I feel bad because it physically exhausts him. Today, he managed to create a temporary shield, but he said it wouldn’t last long. And, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared.”
He slipped his arm around her and nudged her into his chest. Shakily, she complied. He rubbed her back soothingly. “Am I still in there?”
“All the time…” The loud drone of the refrigerator and the crackling of the icemaker nearly drowned her words. They stood, fit together like puzzle pieces, for almost fifteen minutes.
Disturbed by the unexpected sentimentality, Logan forced as much masculinity and authority into his voice as he could. “It’s late, kid. You should get to bed.”
“I’m not tired,” she nuzzled the fabric of his undershirt.
“You will be in the morning. C’mon, I’ll walk you to your-…”
“No!” she snapped. Logan’s body tensed when he felt her hands trace the waistband on his jeans and her thumbs hook into the belt loops. She looked up at him and there was a difference in her demeanor. The gawky teenager was gone, displaced by a seductress. Testing his intuition, his hand inched lower down her back. She bit her lip and hummed in satisfaction. Knowing that no good would come of his predicament, he retreated quickly. She caught him by the buttons on his shirt and pulled him back toward her. “Why do you keep avoiding this, Logan? You were never scared of me before.”
“Carol…” he squirmed free of her grip, “like I said; you’re not yourself.”
“Call it role playing…” Her hands found his weakness, and he temporarily lost clarity.
“Stop it,” he spat through clenched teeth. She was persistent and ruthless, and he didn’t like having her in control. He grasped her thighs forcibly and boosted her onto the counter, unsympathetically knocking her head against the cupboards. She giggled in delight.
“You always did like it rough.” She burrowed her hands into his thick brown hair and pressed her lips brutally to his. He was imprisoned by the pull of her skin and it pilfered his strength, thrashing his lifeblood. She ended the agony and grinned wickedly.
“Bitch!” Logan panted. He was pissed off and aroused and ready to pass out. She yanked his hips deeper between her legs. He gave a violent thrust and sank into her curves, capturing her in a second fiery kiss. It was much shorter, and he recoiled with a roar. Her eyes exhibited defenseless lust, and he wanted to devour her. Their lips met again, and he fought her power, tasting her fully. Stopping only to breathe, her name escaped the confines of his mind before he could smother it. “Marie…”
She pushed herself further against him and teased, “I’ll be anybody you want.” That did it for him. His face contorted in repulsion as she closed in on his mouth again. His rejection incited the monster deep within. Her lanky, but sturdy fingers trapped his throat. Perusing his thoughts, she smiled venomously. “You want this, Logan. But you’re too chicken shit to take what I’m offering.” She tossed him to the floor, and he slid several inches across the linoleum. She hopped off of the counter and kneeled next to him. “The body of the forbidden fruit and the mind of a woman who knows how to satisfy the beast. And absolutely no commitment.”
In one swift motion, he razed her and pinned her wrists to the floor, carefully avoiding her noxious skin. “Is this what you want?” he snarled. “You want me to give in to your sadistic, fucked up little source of amusement? You think it’s fun to torment her, to use her mutation as a fucking weapon? To absorb so many thoughts and emotions and memories that she’ll never know which are her own anymore? To let me fuck her night after night and have her never remember any of it?”
“Logan…”
“Shut up!” he barked. “There’s nothing you can say that’ll get my sympathy! You're a desperate, conniving bitch, and I will not be part of your bullshit!”
“Logan,” his name was a strangled cry. “Please stop…you’re hurting me.” Her eyes were gaping with disorientation and panic.
The hard angry lines across his forehead softened, and he surrendered his hold on her. The sorceress was gone. He sat back on his heels, and she hooked onto the rungs of the bar stool to wrench herself free. He reached out to reassure her, but she ducked. “Kid, you were having another…another episode. I had to control you.”
“Don’t…” she rose to her feet and slowly backed toward the arched doorway. “I can’t… I can’t…”
Chest heaving with anger and defeat, Logan bared his gritted teeth as she vanished into the dark hallway.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Disclaimer: The X-men and their likeness belong to Marvel Comics and 20th Century Fox, not me.