Author's Chapter Notes:
Oh hey there! Remember that time I had a story that I almost updated regularly? No? Well I almost forgot too. So as you can see I'm back from the wilderness. Sadly, I did not find any feral mountain men or else I wouldn't be here. I did, however, eat at the Rogue Brewery & now am a proud owner of a "Rogue Nation" shirt that I love & rock proudly. Flew over the Golden Gate Bridge & Alcatraz, but no mutant activity to report. Anyway, what I'm delaying in telling you all is that I'm suffering from a raging case of writer's block. It's completely halted work on this even though I'm a few chapters ahead, but I desperately need the cushion of being a few chapters ahead of you guys. Please don't hate me. Thanks to Moviemom for the beta & consultation. All mistakes are mine for continuing to screw with it after her approval.
She’s struggling, straining, fighting against the arms grabbing for her. The thick, pudgy extensions reaching for something she’s not willing to give up for payment. They had made a deal, one that she’s becoming so used to making in order to get from one place to another, that she can easily just shut down during. She’s getting to the point where she would even forget to turn her emotions back on well after she scrubbed her gloves clean. This time is supposed to be like all the rest. He’s not supposed to say that he isn’t satisfied with just her hands. He’s not supposed to reach over and cop a feel. He’s definitely not supposed to pin her down and try to find purchase on her bare skin after she screamed about how she could kill him.

When Marie pushes his nearly lifeless body off of her somewhat clothed one, the trucker’s raging voice in her head lets her know that he didn’t heed her warnings due to all of the other professionals’ various threats to end his life.


With a scream still lodged in her throat, Marie comes awake at that last memory. She barely registers the intruder barging into her room as she scrambles to the bathroom. She slams the door out of some misplaced reflex for privacy, but it kicks back open as her stomach empties into the toilet. Her body is on autopilot, convulsing and heaving against her wishes, doing so even when there’s nothing left to get out. Her stomach clenches reflexively and an ache starts to form between her shoulder blades at the unwelcome spasms. Twin trails of burning hot tears race down her face as she spits and shakily flushes. Not even bothering to look, Marie drags herself to the sink and reaches a hand up, sloppily patting around for something, anything to get the acrid bile taste out of her mouth.

A shadow falls over her crumpled form, cast by the bedroom light that she didn’t turn on. She cowers, still too fresh, too raw from the dream. Whoever’s casting the shadow keeps their distance from her exposed skin as she hears the tap turn on. A cup enters her vision. It’s attached to a very large hand with an even larger arm, but it’s nowhere near the pudgy form of the man in her dream. Even behind a blurry veil, Marie registers the hard planes that are uniquely Logan.

“Rinse.”

Slowly, carefully, still shakily she grabs the underside of the cup to avoid contact. His touch isn’t the only contact she’s avoiding. Marie doesn’t want to know what his expression has to tell her. Dragging herself back over to the toilet, she spits after rinsing and flushes. The cup is plucked out of her grasp and replaced with a toothbrush and toothpaste.

While brushing, Marie remembers a quiet, small-town girl she brushed against in the convenience store of a gas station a while ago. The girl went to a party a few nights beforehand and got pretty drunk. Her roommate was there, but didn’t even bother doing half of what Logan is doing now.

More rinsing follows before Marie tosses the toothbrush in the trashcan. Xavier – or maybe Scott the Perfectionist – included a couple of sealed toothbrushes in the cabinet under the sink. She’d get to that later. Without so much as a grunt Logan leaves, he doesn’t bother turning off the bedroom light and Marie can’t find it in her to really care. Instead, she curls up on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, relishing the shock it sends to her body as she closes her eyes.

The enjoyment lasts only minutes when he comes back, covering up his previously bare torso and arms with a long sleeve shirt. His scowl is filled with something other than menace, but she closes her eyes again to block it out.

“What are you doing?”

“C-c-cold. Have t-t-t-to be c-cold.”

“You’re gonna get sick. C’mon, get up.”

She only curls up into herself even more and makes a small sound of disagreement. In this the Wolverine is wrong.

“You will.”

“No. N-n-need this.”

Marie assumes she’s won as she hears his footsteps pad away from her.

He’s not doing what she expects tonight.

Again he returns to her and she feels the soft linen from her bed draped over her, one of those weighty hands cradling her head as he lifts it and slides in a pillow. Her hands, legs, feet, all bare and still exposed to the tile floor and it’s enough.

She doesn’t hear Logan leave again until a good while later. He doesn’t come back.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


For three weeks Marie continues to meet with the Professor and reluctantly, with Logan. Her Muscular Meditation Muse never once mentions the conversation they had on the deck or the night after. She figures he would relentlessly hound her about it, latching onto the nugget of information she dropped like…well like a wolverine. Hell, she doesn’t even know what he was doing, busting into her room in the middle of the night. Was he still on stalker duty at three in the morning?

So he keeps up his gruff attitude, but on occasion Marie catches Logan giving her the contemplative looks that he usually bestows upon his cigars or a bottle of Molson.

It bothers her.

Carol has been relatively well behaved. Marie figures that she should be more concerned about that instead of Logan’s behavior. She isn’t. And that disturbs her even more. There are a few hiccups to be heard from the peanut gallery. Marie can’t spend too much time around Jean without rumbling starting in her mind. For her part, Jean doesn’t seem to want to spend time in Marie’s company anyway. The same is true with Scott. Marie starts to feel ticking in her extremities whenever she’s around him for more than a few seconds. Even more concerning is the new lack of response from Carol during the sessions with Logan. Nothing. Not. One. Thing. It’s a problem.

Aside from her sessions with the Professor and Logan she tries to stay in her room. Those handful of times she found herself outside of it only ended in disaster for her. She hasn’t heard from Jubilee since their argument even though Marie knows she sort of owes the girl a bit of an apology. The way Jubes went about the whole thing still rubs Marie the wrong way, but her reaction could have been reigned in a bit.

Logan’s cold shower must have really done a number on her.

Marie is loath to leave the safety of her room, but if she’s going to find Jubilee and offer some sort of apology, then she has to seek her out. Making sure that she’s completely covered, Marie ventures out of her sanctuary. It’s just past lunch, but she has no idea where to find the girl. As Marie strolls the halls she realizes just how little she knows of the mansion, only remembering the places she frequents and the paths that take her to and from.

Once she’s in the main hallway, in almost the exact spot Pyro and Friends cornered her, she hears voices. Pressing herself against the dark wood paneling behind her she waits, holding her breath and thinking how un-effing-funny it would be if the same merry bunch of teenage mutants cornered her again. From her spot glued to what she now knows is a door, she peeks around the doorjamb and sees Scott and Jean round the corner, mid-argument. Desperate to avoid a Carol uprising, Marie takes a chance and twists the knob of the door she’s pressed to, thinking that anything behind it has to be better than earning a trip down to the med lab.

Marie turns and takes stock of her new situation.

Music room. More than she could have hoped for. Her eyes shoot straight for the baby grand piano soaking up the natural light afforded by the large, pristine windows. She’s vaguely pleased that Logan’s abs aren’t the only thing her gaze is magnetized to. Approaching the instrument like a skittish horse, Marie can’t help the flood of memories that wash over her. Thankfully, they’re all her own.


For all the resentment she holds for her Momma’s passive silence at Daddy’s side, Marie can almost forgive her for the gift of teaching her to how to read music and play the piano. At first it saved her from getting caught up in the path of her father’s ire, then when her mutation manifested it saved her sanity when she was confined to the house. When Marie decided that she had to leave, after overhearing her parents talk to a “recruiter” for a “medical facility”, she began to grieve not just for the life she would have to leave behind, but for the instrument and the sheets of music that had given her more comfort than anything.

When she was on the streets Marie recited the notes to all of the songs she had memorized over and over again in her mind. The E-E-F-G-G-F-E-D beginning of Ode to Joy, one of the first songs she had to remember, became her tried and true method of detachment when she needed a quick fix. The harder the situation was to deal with, the more complicated the pieces she would try to recall. It helped drown out the new voices she kept accumulating and the more unpleasant external sounds coming from whatever hellhole she found herself in. Then, during her time with the Brotherhood she would unconsciously find her hands spread out on the closest level surface, fingers stretching to reach chords that she wouldn’t hear. In the solitude of her own room she was free to remove her gloves and she watched as her pale skin shifted over bones and tendons, blue veins marbling the translucence while she went through the motions of playing scales on her desk. She turned it into an exercise to preserve what little of herself she had left whenever there was a new absorption or mutiny among the ranks already occupying space in her mind.

Marie had passed many music stores in her travels, stopping to stare through the windows before pushing herself on, but this is the first time she’s been in reaching distance of a piano since her childhood home. She didn’t know how much she ached to feel the cool keys under her bare skin until she sees them reflecting nothing but pure shine. It would almost be a shame to mar them with her fingerprints. Lucky she’s confined to gloves these days…

The pull is too strong to deny and when she touches them…

…when she touches them it’s like coming up for air. Pure and clean. It’s as if someone had opened up parts of her that were long closed up to air out in the sun and warm breeze. This is the one thing in the entire world that is safe for her to touch. The gravity of just combining the words “safe” and “touch” makes her stomach flutter.

She sits down heavily on the bench, hands still poised and ready over the keys. Up close she notes that it’s electric, currently off. No chance of creating a disruptive noise even if the probable soundproofing of the room already assures against that. She gives in and presses down, closing her eyes in pure satisfaction despite the lack of sound. The light pressure she uses, the weight of the taught strings inside, the cool slide of the veneer against her gloves.

In this she finds her peace.


When she was with the Brotherhood, Magneto had always spent his time talking about peace. His old dream of it, his twisted new conception of it. He once told her how America failed to be his land of tolerance and peace. So now he’s trying to turn it into whatever that means for him. Sitting on the bench, with her fingers pressing down the silent keys and feeling like she had come back to something even though it’s her first time at this particular instrument, Marie understands why Magneto will fail. All this time he’s been looking for a place to find his version of harmony. A free land, a sanctuary for his people has always been the basis of it all for him. After a beat, Marie jumps to the conclusion that with this mansion, the same can be said for Xavier, even though he’s the one pushing her to find what she’s feeling at that moment. They’re all hinging something so abstract – safety, harmony, peace, freedom, whatever – on something concrete – land, government, laws, buildings.

Not possible.

When she thinks about it, she gets that those concepts are all just too theoretical to pin down to a tangible thing. Yes, they can try, just as they have been. But it’s kind of like music to her. The notes can be marked on paper, arranged in a certain way, neatly placed on evenly spaced lines. Each person plays the same piece differently though. Past experiences, lessons, teaching techniques, even mood lends to an alternative approach, a new meaning. Magneto and Xavier will never find their opposing versions of peace if they don’t get this. As Hallmark Moment as it sounds, it has to come from inside. They each have to pull it out from within themselves or they’ll only end up finding conflict everywhere they turn.


“You gonna play that?”

Marie screeches and launches off the bench, smacking her hip into the lip of the keyboard as she turns to her intruder. Logan’s leaning one shoulder against the door frame, booted feet crossed at the ankles, giving her a glowering look reserved for mental patients.

“Or were you just gonna sit there all day?”

She feels like she just got caught, even though she knows how absurd that is. She was so caught up in her thoughts when he yanked her out, she can’t help but feel like she’s treading water. And she’s hard pressed to give up the insight she had just been luxuriating in. Marie doesn’t notice that he’s walked up to her until he’s snapping his fingers in her face.

“Hey. Kid. You okay in there?”

“Not a kid.” It’s a mumbled reflex at this point, but with the path her thinking was taking moments ago, it still rings true. It effectively pulls her back to the here and now. More so than his snapping, which she bats away, growing fully annoyed at the realization that he interrupted her. He looks down at her gloved hand, confused and clearly not used to being dismissed so physically. Belatedly, she realizes that it’s the first touch she’s initiated in longer than she can remember. That it’s with Logan, even if she’s still gloved, bothers her like his sidelong glances. She uses that.

“What do you want? There’s a whole mansion full of people for you to stalk and growl at, y’know.”

He just crosses his arms and lifts The Eyebrow at her tone and she will not, will not be intimidated by the unspoken threat of more cold showers. Not in this room, not even with him.

She sighs, trying to aim for something less bitchy. “Just…what are you doing? You ruined my moment.”

“Your what?”

She makes a small gesture towards the fine specimen of an instrument behind her. “My moment. I was having one. You ruined it.”

He’s moved on from the “I’m gonna haul your bratty ass into a tub of cold water” look back to the “where do we keep the straight-jackets” look from nearly a month ago. And here she thought they were making progress…

He grunts and the world makes sense again. “You weren’t playin’ it. Damn thing wasn’t even on.”

“That’s…that just…that’s not the point.” She sighs and straightens up, chin lifting to prepare herself for her next statement even if she can’t quite meet his eyes when she says it. “And actually, I’m not going to be needing those meditation sessions anymore.”

“Wanna run that by me one more time?”

“I know you’ve got super mutant hearing. You heard me. I’m…good to go.”

“Only because of those sessions, maybe.”

She snorts. “Those haven’t done a damn thing and you know it. I spend most of the time fighting sleep!”

“You haven’t had another…”

“Fit?” She finishes for him, using Jean’s favorite word.

Logan reluctantly nods, shooting her a wary look as if she’s about to start spazzing out right then and there. “Somethin’ like that, yeah.”

“Not around you, but I have to avoid Scott and Jean.”

He’s about to open his mouth and Marie can tell by the set of his features that he’s about to settle in for a good old fashioned inquisition, so she turns away from him, kneeling down and rifling through the sheet music she finds tucked away in the bench. In her mind she’s desperately grasping for the hard won thoughts she had been having, the ones that seem to be all too eager to slip away with Logan in the room.

“And why the hell is that?”

She shrugs, belaying the growing concern she’s been reluctantly harboring about that. “Don’t have an answer for that.”

“Then what the hell were you goin’ on about? What’s all this shit about –“

“I don’t know!” She half-turns to face him this time and meets his stare, reminding herself to check the hysterical tone of her voice. “I wouldn’t be like this if I knew. It’s not like I’m enjoying the ride, y’know.”

He takes a steadying breath that she recognizes from the day he showed her to her room, which jogs another memory.

“What were you doing outside of my room that night?” She’s not entirely sure he’s going to answer. That’s something she suspected even before the question left her mouth.

“Wasn’t outside of it. I was next to it, in my room.”

She can’t have heard that right. Marie briefly wonders if early hearing loss runs in her family. When exactly did her MeeMaw start going deaf?...
So she asks for clarification in the most eloquent way she can manage. “What?”

If his expression is any judge, they may be on the same page with thoughts of her functioning capabilities. “I could hear you from my room.” He drops eye contact and directs his utmost attention towards his boots. “You musta had a bad dream or somethin’.”

Marie chooses not to confirm that, apparently not needing to, but takes a few seconds to digest this information. In a measured tone she slowly asks, “How come I’m just finding out about this now? I’ve never seen anybody else up there.”

He grunts and gives his boots an answer. “You never come out. Plus, ain’t nobody else up there. Just me before you came along.”

“So is this…what? A part of the plan or something?”

He finally glances towards her, head still ducked a bit in case he finds his boots more interesting again, but he scowls nonetheless. “There ain’t no plan.” He straightens when she stays quiet, her eyes giving his boots the attention he gave up on, even though her mind is a million miles away. “Now what was all that shit about Scoo-“

“Logan, are you ready?”

The deep, serene voice rings out clear across the music room and both sets of eyes swing towards the white-haired woman peeking in the doorway. Logan gives his customary grunt and nod, “Meet you down there.”

Sparing Marie a glance, Storm ducks back out and despite what he said, Logan shows no signs of moving. Wanting an out and hating herself for it, she grabs a stack of sheet music from the bench and makes sure to give the man a wide berth when she passes him on her way out.
Chapter End Notes:
Okay. So I originally wrote that piano scene back when it was still 2010. Really, it was one of the first scenes I had written - I just had no place for it yet. I really wanted that in here, especially after what I took away from Marie in Chapter 5. Maybe it's the writer's block, but I just don't know how this scene reads anymore. I remembered her mom playing piano in the opening of X1 & thought, "Ok I can definitely use this." I hope it fits. I hope you like it. I hope you guys will stick with me even though I'm an inconsistent-with-the-updates-a-hole.
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