Marie pivots, overcorrecting for the loss of balance, but instead of falling face first down the steps she gets a shoulder to the gut and her breath is knocked out of her. Logan dumps her over his massive shoulder and Marie has to grab onto something to keep from pitching all the way over. That something is his belt. Her poorly timed thoughts remind her that it’s the furthest she’s ever gotten with a guy.
Anger over awkwardness, her mind screams.
“What the hell are you doing?! Put me down!”
“I liked you better when you were scared of me.” She feels him grumble the words, the vibrations rumbling through his tense frame into hers. And that really doesn’t help her obliterated composure at all.
“That’s bull!” And that is bluffing.
He grunts, “Well at least you were quiet then.”
They reach her room, with her not-too-desperately wiggling out of his grasp. Her shirt is in danger of riding up, which would leave plenty of her skin exposed to his. Add the fact that she isn’t entirely sure that he wouldn’t just drop her on her ass. When he doesn’t put her down after crossing the threshold into her room, Marie grows more concerned and ups the struggling. Why is he taking her into the bathroom?
“Put. Me. Down!”
And he does. Kind of. Logan pitches her back off of his shoulder, controlling the momentum of her fall with one hand while the other turns on the shower. He doesn’t bother turning on the hot tap. She lands awkwardly on her butt, tangled up in the ripped off shower curtain, stunned into sputtering silence while the cold water seeps through her clothes.
“Wh – wha- w –“
“The fuck are you thinkin’?!”
Unwrapping her hands from the plastic sheet around her, Marie wipes the wet strings of hair away from her face and tries looking up at Logan through the falling water. She does some quick calculations and figures that he doesn’t look as wildly pissed as he did the first day he brought her to this room. This is more of a…controlled fury.
“Well?!”
“Huh?” She’s still shocked from the cold and her tailbone is starting to throb.
“Where the hell do you get off, huh?!”
“Seriously?! Where do I get off?! You just threw me in the shower!”
His eyes give her a once over before he replies, “You needed to cool the fuck off. Someone is trynna offer you help and instead of takin’ it, you’re too busy shootin’ your damn mouth off.”
That is not something Marie would have been accused of by anyone in the Brotherhood. Most of them probably thought she was mute. She doesn’t have a good reason why she can’t hold her tongue around these guys. Just thinking about it should have been enough to keep her quiet, but it doesn’t. She can’t even blame Carol for it either.
“He’s not helping me! That’s the problem!”
“You didn’t listen to a goddamn thing he said, did you?”
Despite Logan’s opinion, Marie is about to open her mouth and argue that point when he reaches for the knobs and finally turns off the water. Leaning over her, he braces himself with one hand pressed flat against the tile above her head while he uses the other to point one thick, dangerously exposed finger in her face. She’s close enough to see that the fourth button on his red plaid shirt is going to need reinforcing.
“I’m gonna make this real fuckin’ clear.” He growls lowly. “You’re hip deep darlin’ and no one out there is gonna be makin’ you any better offers. You wanna keep bitchin’ instead of gettin’ with the program, then fine. That’s your choice, but you take that shit to the Brotherhood. You stay here, then you gotta put in the work and quit complaining. We clear?”
Marie just swallows. He had inched closer to her while talking and from this distance she can probably count each one of his eyelashes. Hell, each one of the whiskers on his face – and there are a lot. Once again his eyes pin her. She desperately wants to look away. A tiny part of her, a part that she wants to kick, concedes that he…kind of…makes a point; one that she isn’t entirely ready to admit, especially not to him, but he looks like he’s waiting. Not too patiently either. Right. He had asked her a question. Okay, then that means he’s expecting an answer. All she can do is nod, still all too aware of their proximity. And all that skin.
When he straightens up she feels like she can breathe again and realizes that she actually hadn’t been while he was setting up shop in her personal space.
Logan gives a decisive nod as he looks down at her. “Good. You know where ‘Ro does her gardening?”
Marie is momentarily at a loss with the abrupt change of subject. Again she just nods.
“Your ass better be there at six a.m. tomorrow. You’re gonna have even more problems if I have to come lookin’ for you.” He turns and as he’s leaving, throws over his shoulder, “Wear something comfortable.”
She isn’t quite sure if she’s just been propositioned or not. Even though Logan left her in the tub, cold and soaked, her traitorous thoughts remind her that she still received the most welcome interaction with a guy that day than ever before.
It’s much later, after going through many towels to dry herself off that she realizes she hasn’t had so much as a single thought about the Wolverine killing her all day.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Part of Marie’s work with the Professor includes addressing the guilt she feels about what she did to Carol, which is how he wants her to think of it. Not as killing her. He tries to impress upon her the idea that she isn’t a murderer, that she didn’t want to do what she did to Carol, that she harbors no homicidal tendencies.
Until now.
After meeting Logan at the crack of dawn Marie is filled with nothing but homicidal tendencies. Waking up and doing anything before nine in the morning is already high on the inhumane scale in her opinion. So when she finds out that she has to meditate with the guy that early she’s less than pleased. Apparently the Professor had previously suggested that Logan could teach Marie the finer points of breathing deeply and inhaling pollen spores. Or as Logan puts it, “finding her inner peace and shit”. Despite his harsh words, Logan actually seems to take the whole process very seriously. It’s too bad he has her for a student.
Marie’s half asleep when she meets him in Storm’s garden, then he has the gall to tell her that she’d be doing something that will probably make her fall back asleep. Logan tops off his cruelty by discarding the standard issue zip-up X-sweatshirt, conducting the meditation session in sweatpants and white tank. Tease. She gets the impression that the shirt is a very, very rare formality for her sake.
Last night’s missing thoughts of him killing her resurface, but they take on a whole new approach to the method.
It’s pretty much a disaster. The one saving grace is the fact that Carol doesn’t choose this one-on-one time with Logan to act up. Marie does nothing but doze off, huff, puff, sneeze, and shift around on her mat after she imagines ants crawling over it and onto her. Logan, for his part, yells at her for every infraction. She’s never wanted to “mouth off” more in her entire life. In fact, she literally bites her tongue until it bleeds to keep from saying something bratty. She hears him sniff and when his feral senses pick up the smell of her blood he curses wildly before declaring that the morning’s session is over.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
It’s still entirely too early in her opinion, as she sits on the sink in her bathroom, trying to stem the bleeding from her tongue. Marie makes sure to turn the lock should any more intruders barge in and see her awkwardly holding toilet paper to her tongue. Not the best idea in the world, but she’s swallowed enough blood while under Carol’s control to last her a lifetime. Maybe Jubes is right, Marie is turning into a bit of a vampire.
At the thought of the other girl, a brief pang of guilt hits her. She really shouldn’t have jumped on Jubilee like that and Marie knows that her real mother would have been appalled at her lack of manners. On the other hand, Jubes didn’t really deny that she was only after the memories now housed in Marie’s mind. And if there is one thing Marie is sick and tired of, it’s being manipulated and used. On top of those conflicting thoughts is the fact that Jubilee’s suspicions are probably on track, judging by Carol’s reactions to Scott, Jean, and Logan. Still, why didn’t Carol react when Jubilee was unloading all of that information? Marie expects that out of all the situations she’s found herself in at the mansion, that Carol would have retaliated the most during the discussion with Jubilee. Instead, the new tenant in Marie’s mind was uncharacteristically silent then.
And on the subject of out of character behavior, just what the hell is Marie doing? Sure, back talking was common during her early teenage years back in Mississippi, when all she had to rebel against was the iron fist her father ruled with. She’s almost positive that part of her had been stamped out. If not from the unending hopelessness of surviving on the streets, then the oppressive climate of living with the Brotherhood. Marie was the Brotherhood’s Kitty, quiet as a church mouse, unremarkable. At least that’s what she worked hard to be.
Maybe that’s it, Marie thinks as she swishes her mouth out with water. In the past, she had to willfully suppress that naturally reactive part of herself while she was with the other set of mutants. Being backhanded by her very human father is one thing, but getting knocked around by Victor is quite another. Marie leans over the sink, trying to get a better view of herself in the mirror. There’s not too much of a difference in her appearance. Same dark brown eyes, large enough to give the mistaken impression of complete guilelessness. Her hair, just as dark and more than a little wavy for her liking, only now marred with a shock of white from her encounter with Carol that she’s avoided thinking about until now. The visible evidence, a beacon to all others of what she’s done, what she is. Like those poison dart frogs in the Amazon, she thinks with the barest twitch of her lips. The lily-white complexion of her skin betraying her southern roots and giving no hint of the long summer days she spent running through the sprinkler as a kid. She doesn’t know how long she spends looking at herself, really looking this time. To the point where her features seem to distort, though logically Marie knows it’s all in her brain. It’s just the simple effect of examining oneself so closely and being so disillusioned while doing so.
Every time she looks at herself like this she half expects to see the remnants of those she absorbed flit though her expression, through her eyes. She knows that sometimes if one personality is able to get enough control her eyes will actually change from her secure brown to whatever color that person had. There’s no logic behind it. That shouldn’t happen. Eyes shouldn’t change color! Marie turns away from the mirror in renewed disgust; there is nothing right about her anyway.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Professor asks Marie how her meditation session went with Logan and her knee-jerk response is to be snotty about it. Lately that reaction to old man has gotten stronger and stronger. She catches herself though, remembering Logan’s scared straight tactic from the night before all too clearly. She has an inkling of what that may be, even if she doesn’t know what words to label it. All she knows is that it feels dark and sticky, a tar pit slowly growing in size and yawning out before her, all too ready to swallow her up whole. It’s a completely different consumption that her absorptions constantly threaten her with. This…whatever it is…is purely Marie. She can tell that her increasing attitude towards this man is organically her own.
With as much diplomacy as possible, she informs him that it wasn’t the most helpful exercise in the world. The Professor leans back and to Marie, it looks like he has his thinking cap on.
Unexpectedly, she feels a ghost of a long ago touch against her cheek, paper-thin and rough with age, still as cold as the day Erik first tasted her mutation. Through a veil of borrowed memories she sees the Professor in a machine Erik helped build, a large round room that she now knows is housed in the sublevels of the mansion. Perched on the end of the ramp is Xavier, fully engaged in the process of using Cerebro. And he has something covering his head. Helping him think. He has a thinking cap.
Marie can’t control the following bout of laughter now anymore than she could when she was in the elevator with Logan. To his credit, the Professor patiently waits for her to finish, letting her soak up the tears with her gloves.
“Anything I should know about?” he asks her kindly.
Marie just shakes her head, not trusting her mouth. She does raise a hand to her temple and swirls a finger, making the universal sign for “crazy”.
He’s about to launch into a speech to boost her self-esteem, she’s sure, but after Carol’s last “take over” Marie feels like it’s time to take a chance and make a move to grab the reigns herself.
She cuts off his little pep rally with her own question, “Did you know that Carol was supposed to meet with the Brotherhood that day?”
The Professor is startled for a minute at the interruption, but takes a moment to consider her question nonetheless. She can tell because he does the steeple-finger thing.
“No, I did not. Furthermore, I was not aware that she had made any type of contact with the Brotherhood.” Marie has to bite her cheek at his “thinking cap look”.
“She…I…well it was Carol who realized things. Kind of. At least I think so.” She’s always hated trying to explain the workings of her mutation to others. She always sounded like a nut. For his part, the Professor is at least favoring her with a patient look.
“I don’t know how to explain it, but when I k- uh…absorbed her…I got little bits of her thoughts. I mean, the whole thing was so…it was just…overwhelming and I couldn’t control anything. I couldn’t even control what was happening. Mystique….but I did get a few things.” She’s rambling, picking at the pilled up fibers on her hand-me-down gloves that had clearly seen too many washes. “She – Carol – expected me. I’d never talked to her before, I mean I wouldn’t have known her to pass her, but she thought she’d be meeting me. Someone told her that she’d be getting information from me.”
“Can you ascertain who would have told Carol this?”
Marie shakes her head, frowning, because No, she doesn’t have access to that memory of Carol’s. “I – I don’t know, but I mean…now that I think about it…she wasn’t like…alarmed to see Mystique at first. It was…it was when she – uh, Mystique – was holding me to her – to…to Carol – that she thought it was an assassination. Well, I didn’t get that until….you know…when she was in my head and all.” It’s not until the Professor pushes the box of tissues on his desk towards her with all the subtlety of a man used to people having emotional crises in his presence, that Marie notices her eyes are indeed leaking.
When the Professor doesn’t say anything she glances up to see that “thinking cap look” still on his face, but this time the sight doesn’t prompt any laughter from her. Marie really hopes he’s not the type to fancy himself a therapist, the kind who just sit and stare at you, assuming that you’d talk yourself to some kind of conclusion. Her parents took her to one of those before her mutation surfaced, when her biggest problem was her typical teenage attitude. Didn’t work then and she’s sure it wouldn’t work now. Only the Professor isn’t looking at her. His eyes are trained on the surface of his desk, which seems odd on him since she’s accustomed to his penetrating stare. Maybe he does that when he tries to read people’s minds? He already said he had a hard time reading her so maybe he’s not even trying at this point. Maybe he’s actually looking for an answer that he can’t lift from someone else’s brain. She imagines that coming up against her, Miss Unreadable, after a lifetime of doing that would leave him a bit lost now.
So how the hell is he going to be of any help?
Marie forces herself to push that thought away. Okay, so he’s not the all-powerful Oz, but that doesn’t make the man incompetent. Just because he’s pushing some New Age relaxation techniques with one majorly Fed Up Feral doesn’t mean that he’s as out of touch as the Brotherhood said.
Marie thinks back to how disastrous her morning “session” was and thinks…yeah, maybe that last part is a little true.
As she leans her head back in the chair, Marie considers that maybe this is becoming a matter of where she’ll spend her final days in lucidity instead of how to help her permanently achieve that state.
The ticking sound of that internal countdown timer, activated after reading A Study in Scarlet, grows louder.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Hola. So this may or may not be the last chapter I post before I leave for spring break. There's a good chance I could be eaten by bears on my quest to find a feral mountain man in the Columbia River Gorge. Or the pilots on the return flight will indulge in the drunk pilot stereotype since it'll be St. Patrick's Day by then, & I will go down in a blaze of pants-crapping glory. It was nice knowing you all. Thanks goes to Moviemom, who should now be addressed as MovieMamacita since she's an awesome beta. Spread the word.
Chapter End Notes:
If you need to reference back to A Study in Scarlet, it's in Chapter 5. I just want to thank those of you who have added this to your favorites - even if you don't leave a review. While I would love to hear from you, I'll settle for the little happy stomach flip I get when I see that another person added this to their favorites. For all the rest of you constant reviewers - the review monster just woke up...it's feeding time.