*


At the end of the week, unable to stand it anymore, he finally accosts her in the medbay, when she is working late, alone, watching over a sleeping student with chicken pox.

She is watching television. On the screen, Ricky Ricardo, with tears in his eyes, is singing, “We’re having a baby, my baby and me!”

He towers above her, arms crossed, and says, “So you’re really not gonna tell anyone.”

She looks up at him. “Who would I really tell, Logan,” she says.

He keeps looking at her. She smiles at him, then looks back at the television. “Jacket looks nice on you, by the way.”


*


So he goes to Danbury, uses her wipes. And when he sees that he is about to run out of them, he tells himself, grudgingly, that he should go to the medbay to ask her for more—but before he does, four more packages appear in the helmet compartment.


*


He is waiting outside of her room when she comes back, late, from the medbay.

Once inside, he realizes he has never been in her room. He stands in front of her closet and surveys it; sees the desk with its pile of medical books and papers and a pair of reading glasses he did not know she wore; a hamper nearly-full with dirty clothes.

He turns around and asks, “So how long have you known.”

She takes off her shoes, her jacket, then crosses the room to lean against the front of her desk. “I don’t know. A while.” Her voice heavy with fatigue.

He asks, “How.”

She looks at him. “Arithmetic,” she replies, and at his perplexed look, she adds, “Adding little things together.”

“Little things,” he repeats.

“Little things,” she affirms. “Little things like lunch breaks, holes in the couch, receipts from Walmart, blood on your stomach from being thrown against a wall.”

She is gazing at him. “During my training, Hank’s taken me on a couple field trips. The hospitals in Danbury think all the mutants they keep getting are victims of hate crimes or gang wars.”

A silence. “Well?” he says finally.

“Well, what?” she asks.

“Shouldn’t you be telling me to stop going?” he asks. He quotes her, mockingly, “‘To stay, to go upstairs and unpack?’”

She snorts. “‘I’m not your father, I’m your friend.’ Jesus, fuck, what a bad line.”

“I was being honest,” he says, scowling. Then, “But aren’t you going to?”

“No,” she says, and he waits for the rest, but there is no rest.

She pushes herself away from the desk. “All right, it’s late, I need to get some sleep.”

He doesn’t move, still standing in front of her closet, staring at her.

She sighs, and says, “You really don’t trust me.”

“I just don’t understand.”

She looks at him for a long time, then says, “I’ll let you in on a little secret, then maybe you’ll feel more at ease.”

Then she lifts up her bare hand and says, “It’s coming back.”

It takes him only a second to realize what she is saying. “You serious?”

“Been feeling it coming back for about a month now,” she answers.

He sucks in a breath. “Anyone else know?”

“Hank knows,” she says. “He doesn’t think we should tell Storm—she’d take me out of the medbay. You can’t tell Hank I told you, either.”

“But isn’t that—” He hesitates. “Would that be so bad?”

Her jaw tightens. “This is my life, Logan, my work. I—” Then she sighs, lowers her hand.

“Hank and I are working on how to control it. Mostly mental stuff mixed with some immunosuppressive drugs. That’s part of why I’m always there so late. Hank’s already cut down on a lot of my duties while I work on it. It’s going well so far, but it gets harder and more unpredictable as my full mutation comes back.”

He straightens. “What about that kid, the one they got it from in the first place,” he says. “Can’t you just get another—”

“No,” she says. “I’m not going to use Jimmy again. It’s not right.”

He exhales. “So you’re—controlling it.”

“Yeah,” she says. “But I don’t want anyone to know. Until I know for sure that it’s really—taken care of.”

She smiles wearily at him. “So now you got something on me. Satisfied?”

He looks down at his shoes. “I’m sorry, kid,” he says, at last. “I know you really wanted it to work.”

“Well, that’s life,” she says, and the smile on her face cuts through him.


*


The club is open less frequently in the winter, and it is as he is trying to sleep, his body humming and itching, that he gets the idea.

“You could practice on me,” he tells her when she finally opens her door, at two in the morning.

She closes the door in his face.


*


The next day, having lunch with her, he tries again, his voice low: “It could be helpful for you.”

She looks at him, makes an elaborate show of having to chew an enormous mouthful of salad, very loudly and with great effort, for a very long time.


*


He is waiting for her when she gets back from the medbay, late at night. “Would you just let me fuckin’ talk to you for five seconds?”

“Five. Four.” she mutters.

“If you practice on me—“

“Two. One. Thanks for playing, folks.” She opens her door, steps inside, closes it in his face again.


*


He is waiting outside her door in the morning, blocking the entire frame with his body. “Just hear me out.”

She glares at him. “You’re persistent as hell.”

“Can I come in?”

She sighs, steps back. He enters the room, and then turns around to face her, where she is standing with her arms crossed.

“If you practice on me, we kill two birds with one stone. You know why I go over there. If you practiced on me, I wouldn’t have to go to the club anymore. You’d like that, right? And you’d be able to practice on someone, you’d probably get better faster. Right?”

“Are you done,” she says quietly.

“Kid—”

“If you’re done, I need to get to work.”

“You were the one who came into my room in the middle of the night!” he shouts. “You came to Danbury, you gave me those fuckin’ wipes! But what, now that I want to help you, you ignore me, you’re not involved, it’s got nothing to do with you?”

“I think you’re done,” she says.

She walks towards the door, tries to push past him, but he grabs onto her arm, the way he did in the garage, when they first came back from the club.

“Wait,” he says. He finds himself breathing with difficulty, as if he has been running. “I want to help you,” he says again. Then his face twists. “Or do you not want me in your head again? Is that it?”

“That’s not it,” she says immediately, firmly.

“Then what the fuck is it? Why won’t you let me help you?”

She grabs his hand with her bare hand, and he flinches as a reflex, until he realizes that she is controlling it, and the pain comes from her nails digging into his skin, not even hard enough to break the surface.

She sees the disappointment on his face, and when she looks at him, her face is somber. “That’s why,” she says simply.

He looks down. “What—what—”

“Because I’m not going to do that for you,” she says. “Because we’re not going to have that between us.”

He rocks back on his feet, angry, defensive. “So what, you’re judging me. I thought you understood.”

“I do,” she says. “I get why you do it.” She gazes at him. “It’s just not going to be with me.”

Then she releases his hand and smiles. “Now get the fuck out of my face.”


*


After he has waited outside her door, morning and evening, for the next few days, she finally says, “Why don’t you just do it to yourself?”

He swallows, then confesses, “It doesn’t—I mean, I can, it’s okay, it works, sometimes I do, but—it’s better if it—it’s better if it’s—someone—”

“Yeah,” she interrupts him, holding up her hand, looking tired and remorseful. “Yeah, I know. I don’t know why I asked.”

“Come on,” he says, and the desperation in his voice sounds awful, even to himself. “Please.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “No.”


*


Who is this girl, he thinks to himself. This girl who no longer smiles shyly and slyly at him, as she once did; testing out her burgeoning allure, a teenage girl practicing how to flirt.

He tries to think of the last time she has asked him for help, the last time she has really needed him. The time when her boyfriend had put a wall of ice between himself and the hope of his past, and her voice had called out to him—but he is not sure if she had needed saving then, or if she had already been the one trying to save him.

And when she had been blown out of the jet, it had been Kurt who had taken her back. He had only been able to scream, too shocked to even claw himself out of his seat, and before he had even realized what had happened, what he had lost, she was back, at his feet, Kurt’s arms around her.

It wasn’t so long after that she was flying the jet—terrified, sobbing like a child—but, still, saving them. Saving him.

Who is this girl, he thinks to himself again. This girl who now closes doors in his face; who looks at him without an ounce of dreaminess or adoration; who wipes the blood from his body with a calm and unreadable face; who buys him a jacket with a fur collar; who enters his room while he is being tortured in a dream and is gone before he awakens; who knows his body as if it is her own; who now asks for nothing, absolutely nothing from him.


*


Then, out of nowhere, Storm asks him if he would be available for a mission with Kurt. “Yeah, sure,” he says, after he regains his bearings. It will be his first mission since Alcatraz. And then he realizes that it has almost been a year since then—that the anniversary will be coming soon.

Storm says an anarchist mutant organization, based just outside the city, is rumored to be financially backed by former members of the Brotherhood. She says the government suspects the group is a cover for the activities of an ever-widening terrorist network, dissatisfied with the fragile truce forged between the nation’s remaining mutants and the rest of its citizens, and is steadily preparing for an imminent attack.

He and Kurt arrive at the reported headquarters, a tiny house in a poor neighborhood. The entire roof has been burned away, while the rest of the house is still smoking. He can smell the freshly charred flesh of at least three or four distinct bodies. A clumsy swastika has been spray-painted on the garage door.

“Scheisse,” Kurt murmurs, so softly Logan knows he wasn’t supposed to hear it.

Inside the building, they only find one person alive, partially-buried under a collapsed wall. Kurt teleports the man out, and even with the bloodied face, Logan recognizes him as an occasional visitor to the club: a perpetually-smiling man with strange eyes, who had simply put two playing cards in his hands, making him wonder what the hell this torture method was supposed to be—until all the flesh and muscle from his palms to his forearms had been blown off in an instant, and he had seen the metal-covered bones in front of him. Revealing the bloody knife of his body.

The man recognizes Logan, too, though his eyes are barely open, and when he speaks, Logan sends thanks to the god Kurt believes in, that once again only hyper-sensitive hearing would be able to catch the words: “I know you, I know you, I know you.”

And in the jet the man continues babbling to himself, still at the same volume, so the words only sound like indistinct grunts: “You the one, I saw you, you, you.” Logan does not turn around from the cockpit, his fist tightening around the controller.

Kurt says, worriedly, “I think he is in shock.”


*


Once they arrive at the mansion, they take him directly to the medbay, where Hank and Rogue are already waiting, Logan having briefed them from the jet. She barely spares a glance at him as she rushes forward with the IV, and Hank is saying, “It’ll be all right, son,” and Logan hears her say “—escharotomy incision—” and then she turns around and barks, “Get out of here, Logan, we’ll take care of this,” and Kurt has to pull him away.


*


He doesn’t go to Danbury during his lunch break the next day. He goes to the medbay instead. From the hall, he can hear the man’s voice, saying, “I never seen such a beautiful face, it hurt this old dying man just to look at you.”

Rogue, laughing: “I’m not beautiful, you’re not old, and you’re not dying.”


*


Logan doesn’t go to Danbury the next day, either. This time, he can hear the man saying, “No, Gambit don’t need none of that; just keep talking to me, chère, it does me so good, hearin’ a voice from the South again. Where you from exactly?”

“Mississippi. Bayou country.”

“Hey, hey, I’m Louisiana bayou,” the man says. “You know what they say about Mississippi bayou girls, don’t you?”

“What?”

“They kiss Louisiana bayou boys.”

“Nice try.”


*


Logan doesn’t go to Danbury on the third day, either.

“Come on, marry me.”

“Again, I’m asking you if your pain level is all right—”

“Marry me.”

“Or if you need more medic—”

“Marry me.”

“I have a boyfriend,” Rogue says, laughing.

“So leave ‘im.”

“No!” she cries, still laughing.

A loud gasp, then the man says, “Now Gambit gonna die for real.”


*


And at night, Logan cannot smell her anywhere on their floor, and he realizes she must be sleeping in the medbay.


*


On the fourth day, Logan waits outside the medbay doors, until he sees Rogue leave for her lunch break. He enters; the man is there in bed, partially hidden by his curtain. Logan can smell Hank nearby, in another room, but he is talking on the phone. He calculates that it would take Hank fifteen seconds to cross the distance from that room to this one; enough time for him to slip away unnoticed if need be.

He approaches the man’s bedside. When the man sees him, his black and red eyes crinkle in amusement. “Ah, Gambit wondered when you show up.”

His voice is rasping, full of fiercely suppressed pain; though his face is unburned, his head is bandaged, likely wounded when the wall fell on him. The rest of his body is covered, but Logan can smell the infection, the festering wound that is now his body.

He says, “Did you tell her anything?”

Gambit looks up at him, says, “Don’t tell me you the boyfriend.”

“No,” Logan says, but does not say anything more.

Gambit looks at him again, thinking. Then: “No,” he says finally. “You not nice enough to be the boyfriend.”

Logan is not sure why he is here, why he has come. The man breathes out, looks down at his covered body. “Dieu, look at me. Look what it do to me. Look how it goes.”

His eyes lift again to look at Logan, and he says, “You heal fast, yeah? What’s that like?”

Logan does not say anything for a long time, until he says, “Like being trapped in the present.”

Gambit’s laugh turns into a cough again, and Logan wants to tell him to stop laughing, for his own sake.

“Ah, Gambit wouldn’t mind being a little bit trapped in the present right now. Seem like the opposite, seem like I’m bein’ kicked out the present.”

Before he can say anything else, Logan smells Hank coming back into the room; so he turns around abruptly, leaves the man’s bedside, and makes his way towards the door. He is just opening it when he can hear Hank call behind him, “Logan?”

He turns back around, thinking, Less than fifteen seconds, did I calculate wrong, or was I too slow.

Hank says, “Were you looking for Rogue? She went to the cafeteria, I believe.”

Logan nods, says thanks, and leaves.


*


Weil: “To do good. Whatever I do I know perfectly clearly that it is not good, for he who is not good cannot do good … On every occasion, whatever we do, we do evil, and an intolerable evil.”


*


But Rogue is not in the cafeteria; he is passing by—Storm’s—office when he hears her shouting.

“And because the Department of Homeland Security said jump, you said how high?”

“Rogue—”

“They were activists for mutant labor unions, that’s it—it was their goddamned home—but I get it, in this fucking joke that they call peace, any sort of semi-organized dissent is a crime, even if it’s five mutants in a shitty house writing articles about how every fucking industry is importing foreign mutants as slave laborers—”

“Rogue—”

“And even if that house really was burned down by ordinary neighborhood bigots—and I fucking doubt it—is that who we are now, is that what we do? Are we just their new private mercenaries, but with even better toys?”

Rogue’s voice is rupturing with rage. “Is this what Xavier’s house is for? Is this the peace they died for? Is this what Logan was trying to protect when—”

And he hears a crack, which he realizes is Storm slapping Rogue across the face.


*


It is too late to make it to Danbury before his afternoon class, so he decides to have lunch in the cafeteria. Rogue enters several minutes later. Her face is only a little red.

She sits down by herself, at another empty table. He hesitates, then stands from his own empty table, sandwich in hand, and makes his way over to her. “Any of these twelve seats taken?”

She smiles sheepishly. “Hey, Logan.” She is also eating a sandwich, which she unwraps with slightly shaking hands.

He sits down. “You look like hell.”

She smiles. “You know you’re right, that jacket smells like shit.”

They say nothing more to each other. There is just the sound of their chewing, passing back and forth between them.


*


Without really knowing why, he visits the man again in the middle of the night. As he expected, Rogue is in the medbay, but he can smell her already sleeping, most likely slumped over her desk—

—which used to be Jean’s desk—

And it is the first time he has let himself think of her name since Alcatraz, and he has to put his hands in his pockets when the claws come out.

In a flash, they penetrate an inch into his upper thighs, and he retracts them just as quickly, breathing hard. He is thankful for his dark jeans, which will conceal any blood.

The man is still awake, staring at a large television propped up against the far wall. “You again, old man,” he says when he sees Logan.

Logan glances at the television screen. A woman he now recognizes as Lucy Ricardo is dressed as Superman, and stuck on the ledge of her apartment, being drenched by a broken drainpipe. Another man, also dressed as Superman—whom Logan does not recognize as Christopher Reeves—climbs onto the ledge to help her, drenching himself in the process. When he is at her side, he holds his hand out, as if they are meeting in a coffee shop, and says, cheerfully, “How’d you do, I’m Superman.”

Both Logan and Gambit snort at the same time.

Then, next to him, Logan hears the man say, “So what you go there for.”

Logan looks at him, startled; he cannot lie, but he cannot speak, either.

The man lets out a small laugh and casts his eyes back down to his body. Then he looks back up again, and Logan nearly takes a step back. Now the eyes do not seem merely strange, but endless, bottomless, futureless. The intensity of his gaze has such force that it seems as if the man has moved nearer towards him, though Logan knows he has not, cannot.

The man murmurs: “You go for why we all go there.”

He coughs, then continues, “How many times you try to give it back, eh. Keep trying to deserve it. Try to be good, but we wasn’t made for good.”

He coughs again, even more painfully, yet still he does not stop talking, or trying to talk, and his gaze is fiercer than ever, Logan feels as though he is physically caught within it:

“And the house is already burning, and you can only make the fire worse—after all you only good for one thing—so you don’t save none of your friends—‘cause the lucky one’s always you—the lucky one’s always you—”

The coughing does not stop, and Logan can smell Rogue awakening, so he turns around abruptly, leaves the man’s bedside, and makes his way towards the door, and this time he makes it out before being seen. And when he gets back to his room, he steps into the shower and washes the now-dried blood from his thighs, trying not to think of the man’s words, the man’s gaze, holding him with his eyes as if he had been holding him with his hands.


*


The next lunch break, Logan goes to the medbay again, but the man is no longer there. He can smell only Rogue, and salt.

He walks into the office she shares with Hank, and she is there, alone, bent over—her—desk, sobbing. She is wearing a long, blood-spattered trenchcoat he only recognizes after a moment, and when he touches her shoulder, she says:

“Why, why, he was stable, he was fine, we were going to do his skin graft this morning, he was going to be fine, why, why,” until the wave of sobbing takes over her again, and she holds the sleeve of his jacket so hard she leaves fingernail marks in them.


*


Blanchot: “It is true that, with respect to the disaster, one dies too late. But this does not dissuade us from dying; it invites us—escaping the time where it is always too late—to endure inopportune death, with no relation to anything save the disaster as return.”


*


And fortune laughs upon them, because not two days after the man’s death, she receives news from her mother—with whom she had resumed tentative contact since taking the cure—that her father has also died, of a heart attack.

He does not even see her before she leaves; he has to find everything out from Hank when he comes to the medbay, having been unable to find her in her room.

“So how’s she doing,” he asks.

Seated at his desk, Hank sighs. “The first death is very hard,” he says. “For anyone in this profession—one never forgets the first death.”

Logan’s face tenses.

Hank continues, “And she and Gambit had grown close, in a way. He was very flirtatious with her; and I believe she was, in a way, touched by him. It can be an incredibly intense relationship, the one between physician and patient; it’s very common to fall a little bit in love with one of your charges.

“Of course, that only makes things especially difficult, if something like this happens. I think she’ll be all right; but for now she’s taking it quite hard. And the news about her father has certainly not helped. And to top it off, I believe she ended things with Bobby Drake, just before she left.”

“Fuck,” Logan says. “Christ. Shit.”

“I concur,” Hank says wryly.

Logan runs a hand through his hair. “Well.” He stands to leave, but Hank calls, “Logan.”

He turns around, and Hank says, carefully, “You do know, don’t you. About her mutation coming back.”

Logan hesitates, then nods.

Hank rubs his eyes with his face. “She has been working quite hard on it, but—I can see she’s having a very difficult time. She can control it quite well, for quite long periods of time, but she seems to feel that the control is unpredictable, could slip at any moment, randomly. And while that’s more than satisfactory for an ordinary life, or even a member of the active team—for a paramedic, it’s—risky. Even if she’s wearing gloves.”

“I offered to let her practice on me,” Logan says.

“Yes, I thought of that, as well,” Hank says. “And even suggested it to her, once. I thought, given your close relationship, she would be at least somewhat open to the idea. But she is adamantly opposed to it.”

He frowns. “Frankly, I don’t know what to do. I feel obligated to tell Ororo, as she is leader of this—household, organization, whatever we are. Perhaps she might even be able to come up with some ideas. But as you might know, Rogue has had her issues with Ororo’s—leadership style—and to be quite honest, so have I.”

He rubs his large forehead. “I don’t wish to betray Rogue. She loves the work, is astonishingly dedicated—she’s irreplaceable. But—but—”

Logan says, “Just give her a week off, or something. Don’t tell Storm anything for a while. I’ll try to talk to her again.”

“Would you?” Hank asks. He sighs. “I don’t know what else I can do for her.”

Then he smiles wistfully. “That is our cross, isn’t it. Trying to find a way to live within these bodies.”

And Logan hears Gambit’s whisper again, try to be good, but we wasn’t made for good—

“Thank you, Logan,” Hank says, interrupting his thoughts; and Logan swallows, nods, and leaves.


*


The next day is a Saturday, so he takes the bike to Danbury, and when he gets there, Rogue is in the parking lot, sitting on a curb, a duffel bag at her side.

“Hey,” she says when he climbs off the bike. She looks gaunt and exhausted, painfully young, and for a moment she looks like the girl he first met—and he is ashamed to realize the sight cheers him as much as it hurts him.

“Hey,” he replies. Then, he remembers, and adds: “How’s your family.”

“Great,” she says. “Really nice to me. Sad for me, of course. But so happy for my news. I guess my mom told them.”

She smiles a little. “Everyone bringing me more sweet tea, another slice of pie. Anti-mutant bumper stickers on every truck.” She laughs joylessly. “Jesus fucking Christ, I didn’t realize how much I would hate it over there.”

He pauses, waiting. Then he asks, “So what’re you doing here.”

She looks into the distance, at the passing cars. The not-so-nearby Jiffy Lube. The not-so-nearby fast food chain restaurant.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Went straight to Grand Central from the airport and took the train, but I just kept going past all the Westchester stops. Now here I am.”

She shifts her gaze over to him. “You’re here earlier than I thought.”

He shifts his weight between his feet, uneasily.

Then she looks down, and adds, “I know he came here, too.”

He recoils, then looks down at her. “How?”

She pulls something out of her bag; a large, brown leather wallet. “It was in his coat,” she says. She opens the wallet, takes out a slip of paper, and holds it out to him.

He comes closer to her, and sees it is a receipt for the Danbury Walmart. Two 10-packs of black shirts.

His chest constricts. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing.

“Did you know,” she asks, her voice empty. Her eyes are glassy.

He hesitates, but will not lie to her. He nods his head.

“Did he fight you,” she asks.

He presses his lips together, swallows, then nods again.

“How,” she asks.

“Kid—”

“How.”

He clenches his fists, then tells, “He put playing cards in my hands, then blew them up. He had some kind of charging power, like he could make a bomb out of anything.” He swallows. “It nearly blew my arms off.”

She stares at him. “Jesus,” she breathes. She crumples the receipt, then wipes her eyes.

“Okay,” she says brokenly. “Let’s go in.”

“Are you gonna fight,” he asks, terrified of the answer.

“I don’t know,” she says, and he was right to be afraid. “I just want to see something. I don’t know what.”

“If you go in there—” and he nearly bites his own lip, daring to say it. “If you go in there, then you have to agree to practice on me.”

Her body goes stiff. “I thought we were done with this bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit if it helps you keep a job you love.”

She stares at him. “Hank talked to you.”

“He’s worried about you.”

“We’ve already talked about this.”

“Now we’re talking about it again.”

“I already told you why I won’t,” she says. “Nothing’s changed.”

“You wanna go in there, it changes,” he says, already walking towards the back entrance that leads underground. “If I see you in here, you’re letting me help you.”

“Fuck you,” she cries after him.


*


In the club, he is being beaten by a previous opponent, a woman with superhuman strength. The blunt force of her blows has him against a wall, and through swollen eyes, he looks, for the first time, at the other fights happening at the same time—electrocutions, fireballs, poisons, projectiles, metal arms, deafening screams that affect him, too—and he closes his eyes again, and now he can feel her hands pummeling his stomach, against his organs, where there is no metal to protect him, and he thinks she must have learned from the last time.

Blood comes up his throat and out of his mouth, and she hits him again, again, again, again, again—and every strike crushes something new and fragile within him, and he can feel his ears ringing, his body struggling to remake itself.

And he opens one of his eyes, and he can see the look in the woman’s eyes, and he knows that she is seeing someone else, punching someone else; that she, too, is trying to atone for someone else—

But then, abruptly, the blows stop. He slumps to the floor. His eyes swollen shut, he does not know what has happened; the time limit is not over yet.

Until he hears someone shouting, “Hey, there wasn’t any tag-teaming for this fight, hey, hey—”

And when his eye heals enough for him to crack it open, just a bit, he sees Rogue there in front of him, her bare hand around the woman’s neck, holding, holding; and then she lets go, and the woman drops to the ground.

Even if he could physically speak, he wouldn’t be able to.

But he can hear her, panting, shaking, and she says only, “Give me a minute, Logan, just give me a minute.”

And he can barely smell the life of the woman on the ground anymore.

Someone comes up to Rogue and says, “Hey, new girl, that’s not fuckin’ cool—”

She turns around and throws the mutant to the ground, and Logan feels the ground beneath him shake with the force of it.

And then she is above him, around him, everywhere—and she picks up his slowly repairing body, and carries him out of the club, and the entire crowd backs up around them.

Distantly, dully, he realizes they are flying. He looks down, and he sees the Jiffy Lube, the fast food restaurant. He feels his body as a crumb, a speck, a piece of nothing in her arms.

“Why the hell did you do that, why the hell,” he spits out finally, blood still clogging his mouth. “Why, why.”

She says nothing, but only grips him more tightly. He can feel her arms still shaking, and he heals just enough to realize that he is going to pass out.


*


When he awakens, they are already in a patch of wet, slushy grass. He can hear the sound of speeding cars; they must be near the highway. Every cell in his body still feels sore, each one wrenched inside a minuscule fist.

He stirs; something wet and freezing is passing over his mouth, and when he opens his eyes, he sees her above him. She is using the sleeve of her sweater, soaked with melted snow, to wipe the blood from his mouth.

And he feels something soft on his neck, and he realizes the collar of his jacket has been lifted up, to cover and warm the exposed skin there.

With all the strength he has regained, he reaches out with his hand and grabs her wrist. And she is not expecting it, so he feels the massive pull of her, speaking to every part of him, and all the pain in his body since Alcatraz is renewed in a searing flash—

—before it shuts down, like a light being turned off, and he is left panting, gripping a wrist, only a wrist, a single small wrist.

And just as he is about to pass out again, he thinks: Don’t be gentle, please, don’t be gentle, don’t be gentle to me, don’t be gentle to me, don’t be gentle, don’t be gentle, don’t be gentle, I can’t stand it, anything but that, anything but that, just don’t be gentle to me, don’t be gentle to me, don’t be gentle to me, anything else, everything else, but not that, anything else, just don’t be gentle, don’t be gentle to me, not that, not that, not gentleness, not gentleness, anything else, but not gentleness, not gentleness, please, please, please, I can’t stand it, I can’t stand it, don’t be gentle to me, don’t be gentle to me—

Until he realizes he is still fully conscious; and now he is now unsure if these are only his thoughts, or if he has said the words aloud.

And he knows she could now easily remove her wrist from his grasp if she wanted to; he can feel and smell the new power in her. But she doesn’t move; instead, she lowers her wrist—and his hand, still holding it—back down to his face, and covers his mouth with it.

He hears her say, “I know." Her voice breaking, then steadying. "But I can’t help it.”

And he keeps gripping her wrist, tighter, as something falls apart in him—and then he has to move the wrist upwards, to cover his eyes.


*


He remembers, without wanting to, without knowing why: It took him more than two weeks in the forest to stop vomiting every time the claws came out; to figure out how to keep them inside; how to tell when they were safely locked within his arms.

And the first time he had held a cup of coffee, bought with money he had earned by begging on the side of the road, his hands had shaken and shaken, so frightened they would come out, here, in this diner, in front of all these people—and he had spilled the whole cup all over the table. And when the waitress came over, full of friendly assurances, he was already halfway out the door, running.

He has no memory but this one, no knowledge about himself but this one: what his body was made for. And there was no getting out of it, no being free from it.

Feeling Jean die around his claws, smiling; feeling those claws draw back into his arms, her living blood still on them, in him—and every fearful hatred he had about himself had once again been proven right. As when he had woken up with his claws in the kid, the first time.

And it was just as Gambit had said; that he was not made for good; that any good in him was still made in the shape of a knife.

And just as Gambit said, he had thought to himself, Then I’ll give it back, every day I’ll give it back, I’ll give it all back, again and again—this impossible life, this impossible and unredeemable life.


*


That a kid without a single wrinkle in her skin should now be attentive to such a life—that she should want to lift even a single hand over it in tenderness—that is far more unbearable than all the pain he has been seeking, to pay back all the pain he has caused.


*


Weil: “There is a point in affliction where we are no longer able to bear either that it should go on or that we should be delivered from it.”


*


Because they have left the bike back in Danbury, she flies them back to the mansion, in silence. She lowers them back to the ground, just outside the grounds. He looks at her, but she walks away from him.

He follows her. He follows her through the mansion, up the stairs, through the hallways, back to her room. Seeing the unsteadiness in her body as she tries to find her new center of gravity, as she struggles to accommodate the new veins of power opening up within her.

And when she reaches her room, she doesn’t even bother to tell him not to come in, but holds the door open for him.

He makes his way inside. Looking at her desk, with its medical books, its papers, the reading glasses he has still never seen her wear. The life she has made for herself. The life she is determined to protect, without hurt, without harm.

Then he turns around and leans against the front of the desk, the way she did, the night when she first told him her powers were coming back.

He watches as she sits down on the bed without removing her shoes or jacket, sitting perpendicular to him, so he can only see her profile. It is the part of her face with the faint scar on it—but he looks, and the scar isn’t there anymore.

At last, he says, “So I guess that means you have to practice with me now,” trying to make a sound that will resemble a laugh.

She turns her head, looks at him fully. She does not say anything for a long time, just looking at him. This look without adoration, without dreaminess, without gratitude, without pity. Just this look of knowing. Like a hand on his face, like a breath in his mouth.

“You know you’re wrong,” she says, and it is not a response to what he just said.

“Him, too. Her, too. You’re all wrong,” she adds.

Still gazing at him, she says, “You don’t have to give anything back.”

And across their separateness, he feels her words on his skin, in his flesh, in his blood. In the part of his bones that is still bone.

He does not move as she climbs underneath her blanket, still wearing her shoes and jacket, and turns on the small television across from her bed.

And she does not invite him to sit next to her, but, without looking at him, she continues to talk, explaining the different characters, the various back stories—

“—oh, this is a good one—”

—so that he remains standing there at her desk, unmoving, for the next several episodes.

And even when she is no longer talking, but only occasionally bursting into laughter, he does not move.

And even after the laughter has turned to steady breathing, long, long after she has fallen asleep, he does not move.