Chapter Ten

Rogue gaped at the livid man hovering above her. This wasn't how she'd pictured her reunion with Logan. She'd imagined relieved smiles, laughter, throwing her arms around his neck, and all the things which happen behind closed doors.

But anger—she'd never anticipated that.

"I was looking for you," she stammered in her uncertainty.

"Who the Hell asked you to?" Logan snarled back.

Again, Rogue gaped at him at a loss for words. He was pacing the living room now; sniffing, testing the air. He brushed past where she remained sprawled on the living room floor, stopping to sniff around the loft ladder before disappearing down the hallway. He returned to the living room a few moments later with a posture less wary but, all together, still angry.

"I'm so sorry I attacked you," Rogue began quietly, hoping an apology might clear some of the horrible, angry tension in the air. "I'd heard noises and thought you were an intruder."

Wrong thing to say. Logan whipped around to face her. "You let that bastard Tony Stark and his peons crawl all over my home—my home—but I'm the intruder?" He shook his head on a derisive snort.

Rogue sucked in a breath. Logan knew Stark and his men had been here. Had he discerned their scents just now or had he been here yesterday and seen for himself? Those strange noises that had woken her the night before and those boot prints in the woods, had it been Logan all along? "Stark had been beating himself up for months over the fact that Magneto used his weapons to incinerate you," Rogue knew it was, again, probably the wrong thing to say but felt the need to stand up at least a little for the man that had done so much for her the past month. "He was just helping me find you. Everyone else believes you died that day but I knew—I knew—you survived."

Suddenly Logan was pulling her from the floor by a fistful of her pajama top and his own flannel shirt. "Who else knows?" His voice low; dangerous.

"Only Stark and Kitty but she didn't believe me," Rogue gasped. It wasn't exactly the truth—Paul Morrow technically knew but she'd never referred to Logan as Wolverine in Paul's presence, so she doubted he'd make the connection.

He let her go with a little backward shove. "And who else did you and Stark lead to my door?"

Rogue shook her head, feeling her eyes burn with the beginning of tears. She wanted so badly to reassure him that no one could possibly know she'd come here, but it would be a lie. They hadn't been careful; they hadn't been discreet. Stark had brought her here in broad daylight in a Stark Industries jet. Anyone with the slightest interest in Stark's day-to-day movements could know about the cabin.

And what price would Logan now pay for their impatience?

She never should have dragged Tony Stark into this. She should have gone it alone. It may've taken months longer but her own instincts and the Logan in her head would've led her here eventually. If she had come alone instead of accompanied by a Stark Industries invasion force perhaps Logan's reaction would've been different—more like the reunion of her dreams.

Instead, the man she loved more than anything hated the very sight of her.

Logan had resumed pacing a line between the front door and the stack of supplies in the living room, his left hand opening and closing reflexively; the heavily bandaged right arm hanging limply at his side. The anger flowing from him was a near palpable thing and more than Rogue could stand.

"I'm so sorry!" she blurted out, "I just wanted to find you, make sure you were OK. I didn't mean to cause you any trouble. I just needed to know you really were alive. I'm sorry. I'll go now."

Logan said nothing; hadn't even stopped his pacing as she spoke and Rogue rushed from the room before she broke down in front of him.

Even in her frantic state, Rogue took the time to pull on a pair of gloves and fold Logan's flannel shirt that she'd been wearing reverently across the foot of the bed before diving for her duffel. She shoved her DVD player into her pack along with an armful of her clothes—why had she even bothered to unpack?—from a drawer. As she was stuffing the clothing in, Rogue came across the envelope of money Stark had given her. She removed the credit card bearing her name and placed the envelope atop the chest of drawers. Logan was more likely to use it for kindling than to spend it, but that was Logan's decision to make and it felt right to leave it behind.

Rogue zipped her duffel and slung it over her shoulder. She had no coat; actually, she had two: a black wool pea coat and a parka that Han Solo could've worn quite comfortably on the ice planet of Hoth, both of which she'd purchased on her shopping trip after many disapproving looks from Alfred the chauffeur. But she didn't have time now to go digging through boxes and Logan's leather jacket was just that: Logan's. She'd just have to do without.

Logan did nothing to acknowledge her presence as she reentered the living room. Rogue stopped next to him, her hand resting on the doorknob, "You should know that not everyone is a screw-up like me. Kitty delivered your box."

Logan's eyes cut sharply to hers.

"Don't worry, she didn't tell me where she took it or who it was for. She did just as you asked."

Rogue waited for Logan to say something; to tell her to put down her bag and stay. But, with shoulders tense and his left hand clenching the back of a kitchen chair in a white-knuckled grip, he remained silent.

Rogue compressed her lips and shut her stinging eyes as she turned the doorknob. The cold October air ripped straight through the cotton of her shirt and the thicker flannel of her pajama pants. She hurriedly clomped down the stairs, stepping on the untied laces of her combat boots and nearly falling in the process.

Stop! her inner-Logan commanded. Turn around and go back inside.

Rogue shook her head and kept on walking. Logan hated her; didn't want her here. And no matter how much she wanted to be with him, she wouldn't force herself on him. Even if it broke her heart.

And there were so many questions she'd never know the answers to now. How had he survived? How had he gotten here from Magneto's crashed citadel? And why was he dressed like a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent? Had he been a captive of S.H.I.E.L.D. this entire time? Had he escaped? Had they let him go? And his arm! That thickly bandaged right arm, had it regenerated itself or was it the same one they'd buried? If it was, how had he gotten it back? She'd agonized so much over that arm and now she'd never know.

Rogue, stop! inner-Logan cut in again, It's barely above freezing and you're not wearing a coat. Now, use the brains I know you have in that pretty little head of yours and GO. BACK.

"I'll dig a sweater out of my bag when I reach the main road."

She'd walk to Grande Cache, find a phone, and contact Tony Stark. He'd take her back to New York and—then what? Stark would certainly allow her to stay at Stark Towers; maybe even find her a job so she could earn her keep. Or she could just disappear somewhere and do her best to forget these past months ever happened.

That desperate to get back to the easy life with Tony Stark, are ya? her inner-Logan sneered. You must be cause the Rogue I know wouldn't be so quick to run off with her tail between her legs. Not without putting up one Hell of a fight first!

"He hates me!"

Wrong! He's pissed and weak and near feral at the moment. But, given time, he will calm down. And, when he does, he'll still be pissed that Stark was in his home, but he will be damn glad to see a friendly face.

Rogue sincerely doubted that! Again, she shook her head, "I'm paying the price for my own stupidity."

Or just lookin' for any excuse to run back to Stark.

Rogue growled in annoyance and doubled her pace; all the while doing her best to shove Logan's voice to the back of her mind. But she wasn't familiar enough with the gravel road to be trekking it at this pace in the pitch black. Either her feet had gotten tangled in her untied boot laces again or she'd set her foot wrong on a rock as, next thing she knew, Rogue was on her way to meeting the ground face first. She managed to catch herself with her gloved hands, the duffel falling heavily beside her on the ground.

Rogue pushed herself onto her knees; her face burning in frustration, embarrassed shame, and the cold mountain air surrounding her. Her wrists ached where she'd caught herself, as did her shoulder where her duffel had wrenched down. If the ground around her suddenly opened up and swallowed her whole, she'd be just as happy.

How she hadn't heard the footsteps behind her, she didn't know—probably too caught up in herself. As it was, Rogue nearly jumped out of her skin when a heavy hand landed on her shoulder. She gasped and whipped her head around.

"Would you get your ass back inside?"

* * *

"Now what, O Wise One?" Rogue groused at her inner-Logan as she plopped onto the couch. She tugged off her soiled gloves and sent them flying at her duffel before spearing frustrated fingers through her hair.

Logan hadn't spoken again since retrieving her from his driveway. That he was still angry was clear by the dour expression on his face, but that anger felt less directed at her now than at the world in general. But his continued silence left her wondering why he'd bothered to bring her back to the cabin; was it a change of heart or was he just taking pity on a young woman alone in the cold darkness and fully intended to show her the door come morning?

Logan soon disappeared down the hall into the bedroom; a few minutes later she heard the bathroom door latch and the sound of the shower running.

"Well?" Rogue again prodded her inner-Logan.

Food, he suggested, wouldn't be a bad idea.

Rogue looked to the kitchen and blew out a breath; cooking was preferable to sitting here brooding over the whys and wherefores of Logan's every action. A quick rummage through Stark's food supplies and she came away with a small canned ham and a box of pancake mix. The fear crossed her mind that Logan may refuse to eat what Tony Stark had provided, but she quickly batted that concern aside. For all his snarls and growls, Logan was a practical man; he wouldn't starve with food right under his nose simply because he didn't care for its source.

Rogue cut the ham into thick slices which she set to frying in a skillet before mixing up a large batch of pancake batter. The first two pancakes were inedible: burnt on the outside and gummy in the center. Cursing herself, Rogue tossed the ruined food into the trash. With her focus firmly now on the stove in front of her instead of on the muffled splash of water on tiles rooms away, the remainder of the batch came out decent, if not pretty.

She had just enough time to start a pot of coffee and dig a fresh pair of gloves—any thought of wearing her suppression ring was quickly discarded as a subject for another day—from her duffel before she heard the bathroom door open.

Rogue was setting the table when the slap of bare feet on the wood floor announced Logan's return. She looked up from placing maple syrup and strawberry jam on the table and froze. Logan had taken the time to shave and all that the bushy beard and loose clothing had concealed was now revealed to her. And Rogue wasn't prepared for what she was now seeing.

Logan's skin clung tightly to his skull with brow ridge and cheekbones jutting over sunken and hollow cheeks; the cadaverous effect exacerbated by his still thickly matted mass of hair. A pair of sweat pants cinched to their tightest configuration drooped low on his rail-thin frame. With every step the sharp bones of his feet appeared on the verge of slicing through the translucent paper-thin skin. He was wearing the flannel shirt she'd removed earlier and laid across the foot of his bed. The shirt was unbuttoned revealing the sharp contour of ribs and collarbone and thick bands of white bandages that continued down his right arm.

Where was his healing factor? Why hadn't it repaired all of this? She'd stood beside him in battle; seen him torn-up and mangled in ways that would have killed a lesser man a thousand times over and his healing mutation had always returned him to the same strong, healthy, well-muscled, prime example of manhood they all knew so well. Why not this time?

He stopped behind one of the kitchen chairs with shoulders tense, head defiantly thrown back, and a challenging gleam in his eye. And it didn't take the Logan in her head for Rogue to know that he was waiting for the inevitable gasp of horror; the "Dear God what happened?" and the like.

Instead, Rogue finished placing the bottles on the table and offered him a soft grin. "The you up here," she tapped lightly at her temple, "said you'd be hungry."

She hadn't expected her words to bring surprise and confusion to Logan's face. He was full aware of her mutation and all its effects.

"I'd forgotten," Logan murmured; brow creased. His eyes traveled a slow circuit around the room, "Explains a lot, though."

With a short, sharp shake of his head, Rogue watched as Logan's posture visibly relaxed.

That Logan could've been wracking his brains over how common knowledge of his cabin was to his former teammates had never even occurred to her. And, she felt, she could be forgiven for not thinking an explanation necessary in this case. A deep uneasiness, courtesy of her inner-Logan, had spread through her gut at Logan's lapse of memory. What Hell had he endured these past months that such everyday knowledge would be suppressed in his mind?

"Logan…," Rogue began; whether to offer another apology or to go against her inner-Logan's warnings and beg him to reveal all he'd gone through, she wasn't sure. Whatever she was going to say, the words died on her lips when Logan pulled out his chair and began piling his plate with pancakes and ham; effectively changing the subject.

"Smells good," Logan said while smothering his pancakes with syrup.

Rogue glanced down at the table and suppressed the urge to snort. It wasn't her most successful attempt at cooking and she knew it. She put very little on her own plate, not having much of an appetite. Her innate Southern manners, however, would not allow her to sit across the table while Logan ate without joining him. Her grandmother (if her grandmother should condescend to acknowledge her "vile mutie" granddaughter) would be proud.

Logan ate ravenously at first; overloaded forkfuls washed down with gulps of too hot coffee. All too soon, for Rogue's liking, however; his bites became much smaller with longer and longer pauses between each one. By halfway through his plate each forkful now brought to his lips was chewed and swallowed with an obvious effort.

"So, what happened?" Logan asked; setting down his fork and reaching for his coffee mug.

Rogue's head jerked up from the contemplation of her own pancakes, "Huh?"

"I've seen enough to know that Magneto got his ass handed to him," he took a drink of coffee, "But the home team wasn't looking so hot when I exited the field. What changed?"

Rogue gouged a pancake with her fork. "Oh. Nick Fury showed up and had Jean beam something directly into Magneto's brain."

"What exactly?" Logan asked.

Rogue shrugged, "Don't know. The ones who were there might, but I've only ever heard the short version. Whatever it was, Magneto righted the magnetic poles and got all contrite; insisting that Xavier would've understood why he'd done what he'd done and forgiven him for it. Cyclops wasn't buyin' it and took Magneto's head off with an optic blast."

Logan's eyebrows leapt skyward, "Scotty-boy? Huh. Wouldn't've thought he'd have it in 'im."

Rogue shrugged and took another small bite of pancake. She understood how Logan's and Scott's personalities had grated on one another—not to mention their former rivalry over Jean, but Scott was a good man and a good leader. If he had survived perhaps the X-Men would have, too.

Logan set his coffee mug back on the table. "What I don't get is," he began with a short shake of his head, "if the Good Guys won, why's the mansion busted all to Hell?"

The mansion? Rogue's forehead scrunched; she hadn't mentioned Xavier's mansion, had she? How could Logan know it was in ruins, unless…

Rogue's fork hit her plate with a clang.

Logan was concentrating on the table where his left hand was absently turning his empty coffee mug in circles. "I saw you, you know," he said quietly, his hooded gaze touching her briefly before sweeping down his bandaged right arm, "the night I took back what was mine."

Rogue's stomach clenched and rebelled against the syrupy pancakes she'd just swallowed. She rushed for the kitchen and a glass of water before she made a mess on the floor she so painstakingly cleaned the day before. For several minutes she stood clenching the countertop in front of the sink, taking shuddering gulps of air. "You were there?" she croaked, her back still to Logan. "You saw me?" She finally turned around. "I'd spent months at Xavier's waiting for you to show up; it was the only reason I'd even gone back there!" she scrubbed angrily at the tears—when had she started crying?—falling down her face. If she hadn't gone into the city to pester Kitty about a box then she would have been right there when Logan arrived; and things would be a lot different right now, she imagined. Again, her own impatience had turned around and bit her on the ass. "Why didn't you say something?"

Logan slouched back in his chair, "I wasn't exactly fit for company."

"Please!" she cried, throwing her hands up in exasperation. "When are you ever?"

Logan lifted a single brow in response, but there was also the slightest ghost of a grin on his lips. A grin which promptly disappeared as his eyes swept again down the length of his bandaged arm, "And reattaching an arm ain't exactly pretty."

Rogue strode back to the table and slid into her abandoned seat, "But that wouldn't have bothered me, you know that!"

Logan looked away; a muscle in his tightly clamped jaw contracting semi-rhythmically.

It would have bothered me, her inner-Logan supplied what his counterpart wouldn't say.

Rogue blew out a breath and slumped back in her seat.

"I did think about it," Logan admitted, eyeing her sidelong. "Saw how upset you were and was debatin' whether to show myself when I heard a car comin' up the drive. You left with Stark not long after," he shrugged.

Rogue looked down at her gloved hands tangled in her lap. "What did you do then?"

Another shrug, "I remembered about the hidden entrance in the boathouse as soon as I saw you and Stark head that way. After you'd left, I went down there myself. Figured it was a good place to hole up and do what I needed to do with this arm."

His arm. How much sleep had she lost beating herself up over not being at Xavier's that night to protect it? And poor Franks back at Stark Industries, who had been so depressed that he hadn't recovered it before she'd left for the cabin; he was probably still at his desk running searches.

"How long were you down there?" Rogue asked, thinking about the day she'd spent an afternoon outside Xavier's boathouse going through photos on one of Stark's tablet computers. Had Logan been right under her nose even then?

"A day and half. Two, tops."

No, then. He would've been long gone before she'd returned to Xavier's. Somehow, it didn't make her feel any better.

"Who destroyed the place?" Logan asked.

"We did."

"What the Hell?" Logan shifted forward in his chair; his brow scrunched.

Rogue folded her arms across her chest, bitterly pleased at having shocked him for a change. "Magneto was gone but the damage had already been done: mutants were public enemy number one. Having a bunch of mutants living together in one place was nothing but a convenient target. We went back long enough to bury our dead and demolish the mansion. With Xavier gone and no one left to lead us, the X-Men were through, anyway. No reason to be sticking around there."

Logan shook his head, "Whaddya mean no one was left to lead you? Summers wasn't up to the job?"

Rogue looked down into her lap, "Logan, Scott's dead." This time she felt no pleasure at the shock which crossed his face.

"What happened?" he asked, his voice barely audible.

Rogue drew a deep breath through her nose. "He was doing what Xavier would've wanted him to do. Congress was about to vote on a bill calling for mandatory mutant registration and Scott stood in front of a group of anti-mutant protestors, urging peace and co-existence. He got a bullet to the head for his trouble."

Logan was silent for several minutes. "Where are the others?"

Rogue licked her lips and began ticking the names off on her fingers, "Kitty, last I saw her, was still in New York with her mom. Believe it or not, Bobby is living with Spider-Man and his aunt. Piotr, I'm assuming, is wherever his boyfriend is. Jean and Storm…," she trailed off with a shrug.

"That's all?" he asked, incredulous.

"That's all." Rogue quietly confirmed.

Logan looked away from her again. A mournful silence stretched between them for several long minutes. Finally, Logan scrubbed a hand across his face. "I'm beat," he announced, standing from the table. "Thanks for breakfast," he mumbled and disappeared again into his bedroom. He reappeared a minute or two later with a pillow and blanket which he placed on the couch for her use.

"Thanks, Logan."

Logan gave a short nod in response. He took the time, however, to build up the living room fire, before returning to his own room.

Rogue pushed away from the table with a sigh and began the thankless task of clearing the table and washing up. When she did finally slide onto the cool leather of the couch it wasn't to sleep. She lay there for untold hours replaying the night she'd discovered Logan's arm missing; reanalyzing it from every angle, looking for any evidence of Logan that she'd missed at the time and coming up empty. When sleep did finally overtake her, it came with little hope that she would still be welcome here when she awoke.