Worthless Physicians Are You All…Job 13:4
Psychic power isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
And a medical degree isn’t all that big a deal either.
Most people think you could solve all the problems in the world with one or the other, let alone both. Well, trust me. Not likely. I used to think at least I could solve some, about a million years ago.
Every day, I try to fix things, patch people up. Figure things out. Make a difference, somewhere, somehow. That’s what I said I wanted when they asked me why I thought I should get into med school. What I said when they asked if I wanted to join the X-Men, come to that.
Sometimes I don’t think I should be painting iodine on skinned knees. That’s how bad.
A telepath is supposed to understand people’s minds, right? Leaving aside the moral question of intruding on someone else’s thoughts, et cetera. Well, here’s a telepath who failed to appreciate something as simple as the anger and insecurity building up in her own husband—the person I’m supposed to know best in the world—until it blew us apart. What’s that quotation, jealousy is cruel as the grave? It’s true. And I didn’t see it until it was too late.
Never mind that, even. Why didn’t I see what was going on in my own mind, those strange weeks after we found Logan and Rogue in New Orleans? I was so confident, then. I thought I knew all the right answers. It was obviously better for a teenage girl to be living at the school, getting an education, than wandering around on the road with a man.
Even a man like him. I’m ashamed of the way I reacted to him. Not because we ever did anything wrong, and not even because I was so intrigued by him. All right, attracted to him. Let’s drop the pretty euphemisms entirely, shall we?
It would be more accurate to say I’m ashamed of the way I reacted to them. Rogue was so young then, so wounded by what had happened with her parents, terrified at what the manifestation of her mutation meant, and it was obvious from the first moment I saw them that there was something special between the two of them. And no matter what Scott said, I don’t believe for an instant that it was anything it shouldn’t have been. I knew Scott for more than ten years, and I knew Logan less than two months, but there was no question whose word I would have taken on that.
And this is hard to admit. The analytical part of my mind that studied psychology has all sorts of fancy terms to dress it up in. I felt a need to assert authority. I was displacing the tension in my already-strained marital relationship. I was reacting to an unfamiliar situation and a difficult and emotional state of affairs by personalizing inappropriately.
Oh, bullshit.
The fact is, I was jealous. I was jealous of the way he was so protective of her, that she could obviously do no wrong in his eyes, and that her best interest was so clearly his first priority. I was in a so-called adult relationship, and that kind of assurance was completely foreign to me. Scott was certainly protective of me, but it came out of insecurity, not love. He was convinced I was going to leave him, and he acted out on that belief at every possible opportunity. (In the psychiatry biz, we call this a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”) And it wasn’t just Logan and his bad-boy persona that brought that out of him. He reacted that way to Henry McCoy, to the point where Hank and I had to curtail our research together, and if you can find a more gentlemanly and educated and civilized man than Hank…well, tell him you know a nice doctor who’d like to have dinner sometime.
But I digress. So I was jealous. Not in an overt high-school sense, but it was there. And I overcompensated in pretending it wasn’t, keeping quieter than I should when Scott loudly voiced his objections to Logan’s accompanying us back to the Mansion, and to his near-constant insinuations afterwards. Rogue’s psyche was so fragile then, and she so badly needed to know that she would be accepted, and I did my part in depriving her of the one person most capable of easing her through that transition in her life.
God, I sound like a doctor, don’t I? I didn’t want Logan to leave, or to ignore her, but I wanted some of that unreserved attention for myself. Logan’s tendency to flirt with attractive women was practically instinctive, and I enjoyed it. Encouraged it. And I let myself believe that it didn’t matter, because I also told myself that what Rogue felt for Logan was a form of hero worship that wasn’t healthy, even though I could see how much it hurt her to watch us, how much it made her feel inadequate.
Tell me that isn’t pathetic, a thirty-two-year old woman needing to prove something about her ability to relate to adult men to a sixteen-year old girl. A Southern small-town girl at that. And as I said, she was sixteen, not six. She was perfectly well aware of what all of her friends and family would have said about her being in Logan’s company, but I don’t think she ever worried about what we would think about her.
It bothered her because it colored what people at the Mansion would think about him. I saw it from the instant in the bar when Logan had his arm around her. She looked at me and Scott and she edged away from him, and I know she needed that support. She pushed it away to prove to us that it wasn’t like that. That he wasn’t like that.
I should have put a stop to that right then and there, but I didn’t. As I said, it was all wrapped up in things that had nothing to do with their circumstances, but that doesn’t make it any better. The best I could manage to do was to insist that Logan coming along too was a good idea, and that backfired badly anyway, so no points to me anywhere in the whole ridiculous mess. I foolishly thought that getting back home, getting back to civilization, would improve things.
In many ways it was worse. New Orleans was really a brilliant if unintentional choice. It’s a fairly laid-back city at the best of times. In the aftermath of Katrina, much like after 9/11 back in New York, both the best and the worst of people came out, but there was definitely an extraordinary acceptance of unusual situations. People’s lives were still in upheaval and very few questions were likely to be asked of another displaced survivor, neighborhoods were rebuilding and there was a great deal of goodwill to go along with the efforts to get back to normal. You could see the need people had to take joy where they found it. If you had to be a runaway mutant teenager, it was probably as good an environment as any.
We should have given them the address of the School and left them alone to get there when and if they felt like it. I’m sure they would have come eventually—Logan was far too intelligent and concerned for her to have kept her out on the road indefinitely. Another couple of weeks with him would hardly have mattered and probably would have done her a lot of good; it would have put their relationship on more solid a footing, and it would have been her free choice to come, not a decision made under pressure by strange adults. But Scott refused to give it more than overnight, I idiotically didn’t want to oppose him openly, and so it was up to Logan to make the best of a bad situation.
Which he did. I am absolutely in awe of the self-control he displayed over the next few weeks. He snarled at Scott occasionally, but honestly I’m surprised there weren’t open hostilities. There would have been, I’m sure, if not for Rogue. Logan simply wasn’t going to do anything that would make things more difficult for her, and that left him terribly vulnerable to Scott’s needling. I turned a blind eye to the whole thing, because facing it out openly would have turned all that jealous rage on me. I just kept hoping that things would eventually settle down.
Absurd, in retrospect. Things just kept getting worse. It wasn’t easy for Rogue at first, at the Mansion. Teenagers are like packs of wild dogs; they sniff around each other forever before they finally make overtures of friendship. And the majority of our students come from comfortable family backgrounds; many of their families are supportive, and others don’t know the nature of the school, so very few were in a position to identify with her. Those who were undoubtedly seemed strange to her, and it was far too much to expect of her to assimilate easily into yet another new environment so quickly. Her nature is not to want to give trouble, anyway, and although of course we offered her help in adjusting, we left it up to her. We should have seen to it that she got more support.
Hindsight is always 20/20. Rogue became more and more withdrawn. I think the other students saw it as either shyness or aloofness, but it wasn’t either. She was just lost. She wouldn’t let anyone get close to her, and that included Logan. I could see how frustrating that was for him, but again, his behavior outshone any of ours. He kept trying.
I didn’t know there had finally been words between them until after the accident. Actually, I didn’t know it until some months afterwards, when one of the other students mentioned it to me. That was the real explanation for why she’d gone to his room that late at night; she was upset about their argument and wanted to apologize, wanted to make it up with him.
She never got the chance, and I’m not sure she’ll ever really get over that. All the unpleasantness, all the tension that we’d allowed to build up came to a head that night, and Logan left before she even woke up.
I tried to stop him, but even there, I tried in the wrong way. I don’t know what I was thinking, if I was thinking at all. Kissing him came out of all the wrong motivations—to prove that I too could act on impulse, to petulantly act as badly as I’d been accused of, to feel just a touch of that unconditional acceptance for myself? I don’t know. I know I’m not really the kind of person who could ever conduct a relationship that way, and I know Logan wasn’t the type of man who would seriously go after someone else’s wife. But it was a desperate impulse, and I really was trying to make him understand that I didn’t think those things about him. I was.
It was the wrong thing to do. No surprise there; I was compiling a near-perfect record. But I think he did understand that, in fact I’m sure of it. It was just too little, too late. We’d had him backed into a corner from the instant they’d arrived and I suppose he just didn’t see any other alternative than trying to take the culpability on himself. He figured by leaving, he’d look like the bad guy and no one would blame her.
It worked, in a way. Rogue had been badly injured and the other students were solicitous of her, and the attention helped her form some relationships. But there is no doubt in my mind that it didn’t make up for losing Logan. She was very angry with both me and Scott, understandably, and I think she took a good deal of satisfaction in watching our marriage end. She certainly deserved that, uncomfortable as it was for me to see it.
I miss Scott. I don’t miss the fights and the tension and the constant problems I never seemed to be able to solve. But I do miss him. Sometimes I wake up at night and stretch out and it isn’t until my hand touches nothing on the other side of the bed that I remember that he isn’t there any more. There was something good there, once, before we let it get away from us.
The Professor and I discussed trying to find Logan and ask him to return, or at least to contact her, and I don’t think we made the right decision there either. In the early aftermath I just couldn’t be completely honest about everything that had happened—it was too close and too raw for me even to truly acknowledge it to myself. And as time went on and Rogue seemed to be adjusting better, it was just easier not to upset the status quo. She never asked for us to try, in fact she told us not to. She was developing interests in her schoolwork and art, she had friends—we didn’t want to interfere. The Professor had attempted to contact her parents early on, and that had gone badly. We felt we couldn’t risk raising her hopes again. I did try once to contact the owners of the bar we found them in, but either the name of the bar had changed or it had closed. And, well, that was that.
Rogue has become an extraordinary young woman, in my humble estimation. She seems to have outgrown her hostility towards me, or at least she’s learned to mask it decently. I was incredibly touched when one of her portraits was of me, done from a casual photograph out in the garden and titled Beauty. She’s channeled her energy into her artwork over the last few years, and her work is astounding in its depth and intensity. I’m so glad that she’s found that, and I saw the painting as a sign of forgiveness, of sorts.
But still I wonder, sometimes. One of the most uncomfortable things to realize about the fights I had with Scott was that I’m not entirely certain that he was altogether wrong. When I look back, after all this time, I know the signs of abuse were there in Rogue. Scott was right about that. He was just wrong about who had done it. Rogue has never talked to anyone, that I know of, about the time between her leaving home and when Logan found her. I'm not even quite sure how long that was. But I think it was long enough.
The touch of Rogue's mind is cool and unruffled, at that level that I can’t help feeling from the people around me, but I still suspect that there’s a great deal more underneath, things that perhaps she hasn’t yet dealt with completely. I hope, if that’s so, that she’ll eventually find a way to open that part of herself, painful though it might be.
I can’t ask. Our relationship is still far too tenuous for any offer of help on my part to be met with anything more than defensiveness, I know that. She’s an intensely private young woman, anyway, and the last thing I want to do is to invade. I simply don’t have that right, where she’s concerned. So I firmly put a lid on the temptation to pry, and I tell myself that it’s not my job to find solutions to problems no one has even told me exist.
I just hope that if there’s any other part I have to play in her life, I won’t get it wrong again. The last thing Logan asked me to do before I left was to look out for her, and I can’t help feeling how miserably I’ve failed at that in just about every respect.
But I’m trying. Wherever Logan is, I hope he knows that. And I hope someday he’ll come back, to see her, and to know that it was true, what I told him.
He was the good guy in all of this, and until I can know he believes that, it won’t ever really be right.
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
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Author's Chapter Notes:
In the way of life and fiction as well, time passes. We're picking up about five years down the line. Long enough for everyone to have gained some perspective, right?
Chapter End Notes:
For those who aren't fans, well, sorry to start off the five-years-later with Jean. But you know...I think she and I would get along. ;)