“Ready to go, chica, “Jubilee asked, shutting the back door of the jeep for her friend. Rogue nodded silently, staring at the ground. Jubilee studied her for a moment before wrapping her in a hug. Rogue returned it, resting her chin on the other woman’s shoulder. “He’s a dick for acting the way he’s been. Forget about him. Live your life, girl. I’ll make his hell.” Jubilee smirked slightly before releasing Rogue.
Rogue frowned slightly and looked up at Jubilee. She squared her jaw. “Jubes, do me a favor.” Jubilee just nodded in response, staring seriously at her friend. “Don’t interfere with ‘Ro and Logan. If she makes him happy, then that’s how I want it to be. Okay?”
Jubilee gave her a slow nod. “Cross my heart and hope to die if I do.”
Rogue nodded and swallowed hard before setting her shoulders and holding her head high. “Well, here I go.” She smiled and hugged her friend again quickly before climbing into the jeep and turning the key in the ignition. Jubilee waved and smiled sadly before heading inside.
The jeep rolled down the driveway of the school. Rogue sighed, gripping the steering wheel tightly. When the open gates rolled in to sight, she gasped. Logan was standing there, leaning against the stone pillars. She bit her lip, seriously contemplating driving right on by without a second glance, but she slowed down and stopped as if someone else had moved her foot to the brake and pressed her foot down. She hadn’t realized she had rolled the window down until Logan came over to the jeep, resting one arm over the top of the window frame. “You didn’t say goodbye,” he said casually.
“You didn’t either when you left the last time,” she responded simply, looking at him.
“Marie…,” Logan sighed, looking at everything but her, “Don’t go.”
“I have to.”
“No… you don’t.” He paused again. “I… this place needs you.”
“For what, Logan? What purpose do I serve? I barely had a place on the team, I hardly had any friends, I wasn’t a teacher… So tell me… Why do they need me?” Logan remained silent, looking like he was trying to come up with something other than what he wanted to say. Rogue nodded slightly. “You can’t even come up with anything, can you?” She shook her head and sighed. “I’ve got to go. Goodbye Logan.” She rolled up the window and pulled away, watching Logan standing there in her rearview mirror, his head hanging.
Rogue felt guilty for treating him this harshly, but he had pretty much ignored her for the better part of a year. She had barely gotten ‘Hellos’ in the hallway from him. Jubilee, Bobby, Kitty, and Piotr were the only ones who stood by her side. Everyone else hated her, or they were oblivious to the sadness she felt.
Rogue shook her head and pushed down the accelerator. She just wanted to leave this place behind. She just wanted to live the life she had dreamed of as a little girl, even if it didn’t include the man of her dreams, a house with a white picket fence, a dog, and 3.5 kids. For now, she’d make do.
Logan walked back to the mansion, mentally kicking himself all over the place for not telling Rogue that /he/ needed her there. He shook his head, running a hand through his wild hair. He opened the door only to get a very cold thing thrown at him. He caught it in his arms and looked at it. It was a pair of jeans… his jeans… frozen solid. Logan turned his eyes onto Jubilee, a growl erupting from his throat. “Sorry. I may have accidently dropped them in the lake and then accidently put them in the freezer,” Jubilee said, glaring at him. She slammed the door right in his face… and then locked it.
“What the fuck,” Logan asked, glaring at the wooden door. It looked like it was glaring at him too. He looked back down at the frozen jeans, growled and then headed for the back door. Once inside, he immediately went to his room and set the jeans out to thaw in the bathroom, and then to hunt down the yellow wearing woman. When he found her, she looked like she was waiting for him. “What’s wrong with you,” Logan ground out at her, noticing the manilla folder that sat in the counter in front of her.
“Me? You’re the one who broke my chica’s heart,” Jubilee said. She held out an unopened, cold bottle of beer. “Here. We need to talk.” Logan begrudgingly took the bottle and sat down across from her at a stool. Jubilee opened her own beer and drank from it. “God, your beer tastes like piss, ya know that?”
“Enough. What did you want to talk about?”
“How do you know I didn’t want to talk about beer?” Logan looked at her pointedly, an eyebrow raised high on his forehead. “Oh, right. Because I’m pissed at you still.” Jubilee nodded and took another drink from the beer. Logan barely touched his. “Look, you have to know why she’s leaving. You have to. It was so blatantly obvious.”
“Well, maybe it wasn’t as obvious as you seem to think it was. Do explain.”
Jubilee rolled her eyes. “You really are a dumbass.” Logan growled. “She loves you. That’s why she’s leaving.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, kid.”
“Of course it does. She loves you, you love Storm. Makes perfect sense to me.”
Again, Logan growled at her. “I don’t love Storm. She’s a friend. That’s it.”
Jubilee nodded mockingly. “Right. A friend with benefits? Tell me, she a good lay?”
“Jubilee…” Logan snarled warningly, “I’m going to gut you if you keep this shit up.”
“You cannot fathom the immensity of the fuck that I do not give about your warnings, Wolverine. Frankly, you should be gutting yourself in my opinion.” Jubilee went silent for a moment, a death glare shot at him. “You pretty much ignored her for a year. That’s what started it all. When she realized why you were ignoring her, when she saw you and Storm… when she heard you, it slowly started to kill her. She became more and more depressed, but she was able to hide it well… clearly.” Jubilee pushed the folder in front of him. “Look at these. And don’t get them out of order. There’s a reason they’re like that.”
Logan looked down at the folder, glanced up at her, then back at the folder. He finally picked it up and opened it, pulling out a very large pack of rubberbanded photos. He saw the top one. It was a familiar scene from a very different angle. He took off the rubber band and tossed it aside. In the picture, Rogue was beamin, her arms wrapped around his neck. It was from when he had just come back from his trip after Liberty Island. The picture had been taken from above, probably from the top of the stairs. He flipped through the pictures and as each one went to the back of the pile, he noticed that her smiles became decreasingly bright. He was in almost every one, but in each one, he also seemed to be decreasing in interest of her.
There were even a series of photos that looked like they were taken one right after the other. Jubilee leaned over. “Ah, this day. Very sad one if you ask me.” Logan flipped through the picutres noting how Rogue was saying something to him while she sat at the dining room table and he was walking past. She had started off smiling, but as the pictures passed, it faded quickly. He also noticed that his eyes were fixed on something, or someone, that wasn’t in the picture.
Another picture that he saw was one of her in the library, sitting in the window seat, a book open at her feet. It was her favorite one. But she wasn’t reading it. Her knees were up to her chest, her arms crossed over them and her cheek resting on her arms, looking out the window. The expression on her face was a sad one. He continued to flip through the pictures.
The last one was of her in the music room, sitting on the piano bench, hunched over the keys, one hand on her forehead, the other braced against the music holder. She looked like she was about to cry. “She loved to play the piano. She was really good at it. You should’ve heard her,”Jubilee said. Logan clinched his jaw and set the pictures away from him, not wanting to look at them.
“What was the point of that,” Logan asked between gritted teeth.
Jubilee studied him for a moment before speaking, “She is so devoted to you...that it is fucking ridiculous. She never told /anyone/ what she got out of your head when she absorbed you. Not even me… and she shares everything with me. She didn’t even talk about your nightmares when she had them. It was bad at first. She threw up a couple times, most of the time, she just cried herself to sleep though. It got better after a while... besides that fact that she hardly got any sleep at all. Insomnia became her best friend… because /someone/ wasn’t there to help her through it… /You/ weren’t there.” Jubilee paused, and then continued. “She told me what you said to her when you realized that the cure was wearing off for her. ‘If it gets real intense, you could always get it again.’ What kind of advice is that? How is that comforting at all? She did get it again so she could move to Alaska, even though she knows it’s going to wear off... again. She'll keep getting it too because she can’t live here. She can’t live here because seeing you and Storm, hearing and Storm together, killed her more and more every day. And then when you stopped telling her goodbye when you went on your trips, her heart broke. And then, when you completely forgot about both her 20th and 21st birthdays, you might as well’ve just cut out her heart and ate it.”
Logan stared blankly at his still full beer bottle. Oh, he was listening, but he just felt… numb. He had made Marie feel that way. It was all his fault.
Jubilee continued on, “You know what the funny thing is? She doesn’t want me interfereing with you and Storm because she cares about your happiness more than she cares about her own. If you want to call, text, e-mail… or see her again, you’ll have to drag it out of me by force because I’m the only one that has her contact information.” Jubilee stood, packed the pictures back up, and patted Logan lightly on the back and smiled darkly. “Good luck with that.” She skipped out of the kitchen, leaving Logan feeling like biggest fucking asshole in the world.
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