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Chapter Text

After three months of searching, Rogue finds him washed up in a storm drain.

The sight of Logan with his head slotted into a gutter would be hilarious if the circumstances weren’t so bleak. A few years ago, she would’ve laughed and taken a photo. The sight may have cracked a smile out of her if she hadn’t been so tired, or even if he hadn’t been so damn hard to track down.

Tragically, Rogue doesn’t have the luxury of smiling. Bags tug at her eyes as she stares down at his face. Even under the flickering yellow light of the streetlamp, she can tell his features are completely unchanged, even after five years. His shoulder is bent at an odd angle, white muscle shirt completely soaked through. A thin stream of blood meanders down his temple and into the muddy runoff below.

“Guess that’s to be expected.” Rogue wipes the blood away with leather-gloved fingers.

He’ll wake up soon. The streets are completely deserted at this time of night — almost two in the morning on a Wednesday. No one to call the cops. Beneath the flickering light, the shadows cast by his features appear to lengthen before retreating again.

He’s handsome, at least. Moreso than Rogue remembers, and perhaps far more than deserved given the context. A coil of guilt curls up in her belly.

“Already came this far,” Rogue mutters. With a grunt, she stands, damp ends of her floor-length coat clinging uncomfortably to her ankles. She grabs Logan’s leg above muddy, torn-up boots. His leg hair rustles against her gloved fingers. “No use givin’ up now.”

It’s still drizzling. Ice-cold pricks of rain start to soak her back as she attempts to pull Logan out of the gutter. It seems undignified to leave him there, given what she’s about to ask him to do. Her lower back throbs in protest.

“The hell — whadya weigh, three hundred pounds?” The flickering lights are starting to make her head throb. Runoff trickles past her heeled boots with a soft hiss. When she tugs a final time, her heels slip right out from underneath her.

A frustrated scream leaves her lips before she can stop it. Her ass soaked with muddy rainwater and her hip throbbing from where it’d clipped the curb, she storms back up to Logan’s head and rips off her glove.

His coarse stubble on her fingertips is electrifying. His essence floods her through her along that thin contact of skin on skin. The taste of cheap beer, burn of cigarette smoke in her lungs, knuckles aching after a well-thrown punch, a loneliness that gnaws at the tattered edges of his soul. Virility floods through her.

She counts up to five, taking in slow measured breaths. The glove goes back on as soon as she’s done, leather squeezing tightly at her fingers.

Her back doesn’t hurt.

“Okay, darlin’. Let’s go.” Rogue tosses her hair over her shoulder before scooping Logan up. With her arms under his back and his knees, he’d almost look like a princess — if it weren’t for the way his mouth hung open, head flopping limply over her arm.

Mud and all, she tosses him into the front seat.

“Whew!” Rogue grabs a towel out of the trunk. Wipes off her gloves, her face, and strips off her coat before tossing everything back into the trunk. “I could get used to that. Wow.”

The car’s engine rumbles to life. A thick drizzle coats the windshield. She flips the wipers on and stares out at the little wavering asphalt. The gas station, tattoo shop, and convenience store on this side of the street are all closed. The only sign of life is the bar at the end of the road. Up on the sign, El Apocalipsis is scrawled in yellow neon.

Rogue snorts. “Don’t need a translator to figure out that one, do ya?” She leans over, tapping aggressively at Logan’s cheek. “Wake up, sleepyhead. Gotta tell me where to take ya.”

He doesn’t respond. The seconds tick by. The memory of unfamiliar lips gliding against her own spirals through her mind. She chases it like a feather in the wind — flash of red, the scrape of her stubble against soft cheeks — before it’s gone completely. The windshield is almost completely obscured when she looks back.

“Logan.” She taps his cheek again, harder this time. The sound of leather on skin fills the car. She’d probably stalled his healing when she touched him. A violent frustration fills the empty spaces around her heart. “Wake up.”

This time, dazed eyes flutter open. Pupils the size of saucers stare back at her. Dry lips part. Rogue can’t stop herself from grinning.

“Found ya,” she says. Hadn’t been an easy task, either. Folks a lot smarter than her had been chasing him for years. But Rogue was nothing if not determined. “Where’s home, darlin’?”

Logan blinks. He lurches forward, smashing his hand into the airbag. Rogue shushes him, but doesn’t get too close. Terror, panic, the give of a delicate neck under her broad palms; the sensation of a needle digging into the nook of her elbow. Rogue had learned that one the hard way.

With furrowed eyebrows, Logan’s gaze finally fixes on her. “Kid?”

The smile’s wiped off her face in an instant.

“I’m twenty-six.” She pushes in the clutch and shifts into first with a double thunk. Some part of her hopes Logan notices that she drives stick. “Not a kid.”

Logan stares out the windshield. His chest is heaving with panic. “Where — ?”

“You’re drunk,” Rogue answers. This isn’t going to go well. She can feel it in her bones. But drastic times call for drastic measures. “Pulled you outta the gutter. Where’s home?”

His beard hasn’t been shaved in days. The smell of sweat, beer, and smoke fills up the car. She presses her lips together and tries to cast her own motivations in piecemeal. Sixty percent pathetic desperation, thirty-five percent fear of her own impending death, five percent the nostalgic memory of her schoolgirl crush. Those had been simpler times.

“Truck — “ He wipes at his face, muddy rainwater dripping onto his palm. He turns to look out the back window. “Truck’s about two miles down the road.”

“Cool,” Rogue says. This isn’t going to go over well. It can’t go over well. The car swings in a wide U-turn. At least Logan had been walking in the correct direction when he’d collapsed in the middle of the road.

She drives slow. Logan stares at her, then out the window, then down at his own hands. She wonders if he can feel that she sapped away just a little bit of him. When she reaches, the embers of him are still alive in the back of her mind. A flash of claws sinking through skin, fat, guts, spine shocks her like a jolt of electricity.

And then he’s gone completely.

Silence sets in. Rogue gnaws on her own bottom lip.

“What are you doing here?”

She doesn’t take her eyes off the road. Logan had set up in the middle of nowhere. Water clouds the headlights like dust.

“Um,” Rogue says. She’d imagined this a thousand times. Distracted, driving in the rain, while Logan is drunk had never been one of those scenarios. Lying doesn’t sit right with her, either. “Got somethin’ to ask ya.”

More silence. The wheels churn against broken asphalt.

“Okay.” Logan’s staring at her, expectant.

She coughs. “Best wait until — um, until we get there.”

Another long few beats. Rogue’s heartbeat pounds in her ears.

“Get where?” Logan eventually asks. Rogue pulls off the road, tires scuttling over gravel. The trailer sits demurely behind a cluster of trees. “Oh. Right.”

“And you probably need to sober up, first.”

“Right.” Logan pauses. He stares at her. Even damp, his hair still twists up into little points atop his head. His head bobs up and down five times, lips twitching around a few unrecognizable words. “You’re twenty-six.”

Rogue pulls the keys from the ignition. He’s still staring, waiting for a response. “Yeah?”

His tongue on his lips. Sparse mustache stubble gives way to a thicket of beard on his chin. Rogue wonders if it’s rough on his tongue.

“Why’d you get on the train?”

Rogue squints, wrinkling her nose. It takes her a second to realize what Logan’s asking her.

“Oh.” The realization dawns on her quickly. She still has dreams, sometimes — not so much about the metal cutting through her, but about the horror-struck look on Logan’s face as he’d realized what he’d done. And then the way she’d sucked his full brown eyes completely dry. How she’d left him empty and vacant. “I, um — I almost killed you.”

“How.”

The look he gives her is heavy. Rogue can feel her eyes go shiny with unshed tears. This is humiliating. Her fingers tremble as she grips the wheel, but her voice remains steady.

“I was. You stabbed me. I grabbed you.” Her lungs burn when she breathes in, long and slow. “You were havin’ a nightmare.”

Logan’s fingers pry hers off the steering wheel. The warmth doesn’t soak through the leather.

“Sorry,” he says. “Just had to make sure.”

Rogue nods. She wipes at her eyes. It’s not the memory that’s got her tearing up, but the anxiety twisting that twists in her gut. She hasn’t seen Logan in years. No one has — not really. But the memories of him aren’t going to feel the same after this.

With rain pattering against the ceiling, she squeezes back.

“You wanna come in? Not much, but…” He trails off.

It occurs to Rogue that Logan may not love her anymore. Perhaps now, or perhaps after she tells him why she’s there. With a bit of force, she pulls her own hand away.

“Sure,” she says, cracking open the car door. “That’d probably be best.”

—

“I’d always imagined you livin’ in the mountains.” The trailer’s small, one chair, table about the length of her forearm, a few cabinets, and mattress covered in a threadbare gray sheet. “Livin’ in some li’l cabin. Happier than a pig in poop.”

Logan’s crouched at the edge of the mattress, arms clasped around his knees. “You get more southern since the last time I saw you?”

A smile tugs at the edge of her lips. “I’ve been leanin’ into it. Kinda my thing, now.”

Logan grunts. He pulls out a cigar. “Last one,” he says, shoving it between his lips.

Rogue presses her lips together. “You might,” she starts, as Logan pulls out a lighter. “You might wanna save that.”

His gaze flicks from her, down to the lighter, then back again. “Okay.” He tosses the cigar onto the cluttered countertop next to the sink. “What’re you here for, then?”

His voice is rough. A shiver rattles down Rogue’s spine. She squeezes her own palms between two bony knees, making eye contact with the floor.

“Must be serious.” The tip of his boot taps against the barren floor. It’s not just limited to the floor, Rogue realizes as she tries to look anywhere except at Logan. Dirty plates in the sink, a knife sitting on the windowsill by her arm. Nothing that could be called decoration. It makes her a little sad. “You’ve been followin’ me for a few months.”

Surprise snaps her gaze back up to Logan. “You knew?”

“Knew it was someone.” He leans back onto the heels of his palms. “Didn’t think it’d be you.”

“Oh,” Rogue says. She wonders if he’s happy to see her, or unhappy. If he would’ve stopped if he’d known. If he isn’t thinking anything because he’s still drunk. “Right, yeah. Probably weren’t plannin’ on seein’ me anytime soon.”

Rogue’s heart pounds in her ears. The silence stretches, tugging uncomfortably at her guts.

“You gotta give me somethin’, kid.”

She visibly flinches. “Oh, please don’t call me that.”

Rough leans forward, hiding her face in her hands. From between the cracks in her fingers, she barely catches the way Logan raises his palms up.

“Fine, fine. I get it, you’re not a kid anymore.”

“Just gonna make this harder.”

She breathes out, slow and controlled. She’d been practicing. Same stuff Logan had tried to teach her all those years ago that she’d never taken too seriously. Expectantly, Logan waits.

“Sorry,” she whispers. “I’m nervous.”

Rogue had tried this conversation every which way in her mind. Had practiced in front of the mirror. Every intro flips past like a flashcard: I’m sorry I’m asking this, I promise this isn’t about some boy, I’ve missed you, I understand if your answer is no, I can just pretend this never happened if you say no, I know this is inappropriate, but…

What comes out of her mouth is, “The world is looking really not good, Logan.”

She stares at him. Scruffy, handsome, unspeakably sad. When he sighs, bowing his head, she catches a glimpse of the nightstand behind him. A pair of glasses and a little bird sit under the lamp, both cast in red. Her heart aches.

“I’m not fightin’ anyone,” Logan sighs. “I love ya. But I’m done with that. As much as I can be.”

Rogue’s mouth goes dry. “No, no, um. It’s more. It’s personal.” Heart racing, sweat squeezing out of her pores. “Can you just — I just want ya to know I’m sorry that I’m even bringin’ this up. I know — I know that you just wanna be left alone. Which is fine. And I’m honestly feelin’ like a complete yellow-belly right about now, but I came all this way, so I guess I can’t just not ask, or — I mean I could, but…”

The knot in her throat swells up. She wants to cry. Logan growls in annoyance.

“Spit it out.”

Rogue bites into her lower lip. She stares down at her own black boots, scuffed at the tip. The visions that she’d played with, alone in bed in the dead of night, wherein Logan holds her hand, squeezes her shoulders, and lets her rest her head on his chest, feel ridiculous in hindsight. The fantasy that he might even like what she’s about to ask him feels completely childish.

“Um,” Rogue says. Stubbornly, she forces herself to look him in the eye. “I wanna have sex before I die.”

Rain drizzles onto the window. The seconds tick by. Logan stares at her, confused. It takes Rogue a long moment to realize that the complete lack of response means he probably hadn’t understood her in the first place. Humiliation flushes her cheeks bright red.

“Okay,” Logan says. He stands up and digs a plastic cup out of one of the cabinets. “And what, you need my permission?”

Logan turns to her, raising an eyebrow as he holds out the cup. Rogue shakes her head no.

The tap twists on. Rogue watches as he fills the cup, the bare remnants of a logo nearly scratched off the sides. His throat bobs as he swallows, a thin stream of water meandering from the corner of his lip and into unkempt facial hair. Rogue’s jaw flops up and down like a fish.

“No, I mean — with you.”

He chokes. Water backsplashes into the cup. More spills from his mouth, dribbling onto his already-damp shirt. Rogue can’t help but flinch.

“Ha. Ha.” He slams the cup down on his counter. The look he shoots her is genuinely terrifying. “Very funny.”

This may be the worst decision Rogue has ever made.

“I’m not joking?” She doesn’t mean for the words to upturn with hesitation. Biting into her own tongue, she wishes she’d gone for sarcastic, instead. Sitting there quietly, silently begging for his approval, can’t possibly be helping. She leans back, squares her shoulders, and tries again. “I’m not joking.”

Logan’s staring at her like she’s grown a second head.

Raindrops tap on the window. Rogue bites into her own lip, tilting her chin up as she holds Logan’s befuddled gaze. No going back now.

“Why?” Logan asks. His gaze flicks down to Rogue’s gloved hands, her turtleneck, down the length of her gloved legs. “I thought you…”

Lips pressed into a thin line, Rogue nods. “The cure. Yeah. Got about three months outta that.” She laughs, the sound dry and humorless. The look Logan gives her is unreadable. “Hell in a damned handbasket, that was. Don’t know about the others, but when my powers came back — it was like I was a teenager again. Lost all the progress I’d made before.”

She remembers the way Bobby’s lips had gone stiff under hers. The agonizing seconds that had ticked by, chills running down her spine, before she’d realized what was happening. Sobbing uncontrollably over his bed in the basement infirmary. By the time he’d woken up, nearly two months later, the last vestiges of him had finally been fading from her mind.

Rogue had been the one to break up with him. At least another month of crying had followed. The conversation had barely even been necessary — just formalizing what they both had already known.

“I’m sorry,” Logan says.

She’s staring at the floor again. Logan’s wet shoes stare back at her. She had never spoken aloud any of the things she’d learned about Bobby from the facsimile of his consciousness floating in the back of her mind. She’d kept it to herself, even when he started dating Kitty a few months later. The secrets tucked away in the corners of Bobby’s mind weren’t things she was ever supposed to know. They were just a few unspoken bullet points at the end of a long list of Rogue’s regrets.

“Thanks,” Rogue says. “It’s not — it’s not fine, but I’ve made my peace with it.”

Slowly, he crouches down. Ever so slowly, he’s dripping onto the floor.

“Marie,” he says. His voice is rough and steady, painfully serious. Once again, Rogue flinches.

“No, don’t call me that.”

A laugh. “Okay, Rogue.” He holds his hand out. Gently, she places her fingers into his. The leather of her gloves squeaks as he squeezes her. “I hear what you’re saying. And I get what it’s like to be lonely.”

Guilt bubbles up in the pit of Rogue’s gut. He doesn’t need to say that part.

“But you’re young. You’re gonna find someone. You don’t need — ”

Silently, she shakes her head. “It’s not about finding someone, Logan. I’ve found guys. It’s about not killing ‘em.”

More silence follows. Rogue’s hand is shaking in his.

“I mean. You don’t have to touch someone to — “

Her gaze snaps up to his. Sarcasm spills out of her. “Logan,” she says. At least he has the decency to look sheepish. “Don’t gimme that. It’s not the same. And you know it.”

“It’s not a good idea.”

Frustration overtakes her. “You think I don’t know that? This is fuckin’ humiliating!” She rips her fingers out of his, scowling at the look of surprise that flashes across his face. “I’m an adult. I say fuck now. Don’t act so shocked.”

The corners of Logan’s lips twitch as if resisting a smile. “You were an adult the last time I saw you, too.”

She remembers. Logan had stood with her at the entrance. She’d almost wanted him to tell her to stay, to tell her how to think. Instead, he’d trusted her to make her own decision.

“I know,” she says. Abruptly, she stands up. Squished up against the cabinets behind him, Logan quickly follows suit. “I’m an adult. So I can make my own decision. And you can say no, if you want. But I’m asking.”

He’s over a head taller than her. Chest to chest, Rogue finds herself tracing out the throb of his pulse as it wanders up his throat. Logan doesn’t say anything.

“Which is — I wanna have sex. With you.” When Rogue’s gaze flicks up, Logan’s peering down at her like a hawk would a mouse. She quickly averts her gaze. “So I don’t die a virgin.”

“You’re not gonna die,” Logan growls. His hands jerk up like he’s going to grab her by the shoulders. Then they stop, falling back to his sides. “Soon. You got time.”

Rogue snorts. “Dunno how much you’ve been payin’ attention, bud, but things aren’t goin’ too well out there. People die every day.”

At the Professor’s funeral, she’d never imagined the following years of her life would be characterized primarily by a series of battles. His headstone had been accompanied in quick succession by Scott’s, and Jean’s. She’d thought the whole affair had been a life-shattering low point. In reality, it had just been foreshadowing.

“I’m not comin’ back,” Logan hisses.

Rogue scowls. She crowds into him, two hands pushing hard on his chest until the cabinets behind him stop the movement. “I’m not asking you to.”

He won’t look at her. She doesn’t know if it’s guilt or shame or just plain embarrassment, but in the moment, she doesn’t particularly care. A rabid sort of desperation knots her fingers up in the damp fabric of his shirt.

“I just want you to fuck me.” Up on her toes, her mouth hovers only an inch from his chin. So close, but not yet touching. “So I don’t die without knowing what it feels like.”

The warmth of his palms soaks through the thin fabric of her sleeves. To Rogue’s chagrin, he only pushes her away.

“Listen to me,” Logan says. He looks her dead in the eye. Shame makes Rogue’s shoulders curl in on themselves. She’d thought that this many years later, with the curse of an even more extensive library of hurt and grief behind her, Logan wouldn’t make her feel so small anymore. “You do not want that.”

A flash of anger sends Rogue’s fist thumping lightly into his chest. He looks down at her leather-gloved hand, confused.

“Fuck you,” she hisses. She’d been able to taste Remy’s fear every time they kissed, counting down from ten like some perverted version of stop-and-go. “You don’t know what the hell I want.”

Deadpan, Logan meets her eyes. He even bends down just a little so they’re closer to eye level. Rogue wants to slap him.

“You don’t know what you’re signing up for.”

He squeezes her shoulders tightly. She bites her tongue, clenches her fists, and tries to keep her anger in check. It isn’t until she does that it finally occurs to her: at no point during this conversation had he said no.

“Stop trying to convince me to back off.” A strand of white hair swings between them on a pendulum. “I left the others for this. For three months. Dunno how many of my friends are dead now, or if I could’ve saved them if I wasn’t here. I knew that, and I know that now, and I’m here anyways. Because I want this once before I die. So just tell me yes or no.”

Logan is silent. Rogue wants to kill him — as if that’s even really possible.

“Or ask me a fuckin’ question or something. Anything.”

A sigh. “I dunno.”

It’s strange, the way her lips quirk into a grin. “That’s not a no,” she points out.

Logan says nothing. He looks conflicted. Later, she’ll feel guilty — but for the moment, she has to fight not to stamp her feet in glee.

“I’ll just — m’gonna sleep on it.”

He leans forward. It’s just an inch or so, but enough for Rogue to understand that he wants her to step back.

She doesn’t. Instead, she wraps her arms around his chest and squeezes him. He’s damp and warm, chest expanding beneath her cheek as she breathes in. “Thank you,” she says. “For thinking about it.”

“You’re — I’m not gonna say you’re welcome.” Slowly, Logan hugs her back. He smells like sweat. “This is weird.”

With a grin, Rogue replies, “Don’t care.”

—

The next morning, she wakes up to the sound of metal clinking and whispered swearing.

Humidity sticks to her cheeks. The stale, earthy smell of smoke clogs her sinuses. Pinpricks of light shine through a canvass of burgundy. Her back aches from the sunken spot in the middle of the mattress where the springs had long since collapsed.

In one swift motion, she sits up. Long strands of dark hair tickle her shoulders. The blankets fall from around her face, caress the bare skin of her arms, and finally pool in her lap. Logan’s already staring at her, tin mug clutched in his hand. The coffee pot spits and bubbles.

“Sorry. Was tryna…” He pauses, gaze flicking down from Rogue’s face. He turns back to the counter and clears his throat. “Was tryna be quiet.”

Her brain still fuzzy with sleep, Rogue absentmindedly digs her fingers into the stiff muscles in her shoulder. Her palm drops a moment later, tip of one finger catching in the hem of her sports bra. She blinks, remembering all at once that she’d slept in her underwear last night. Her wet clothes are hanging in the shower.

Logan still won’t look at her. When she glances down at herself, her nipples are visible through the thin fabric. She resists the urge to roll her eyes.

With a yawn, Rogue stretches. “Logan?” she asks.

“Hm?” He’s staring at the counter. Trying and failing to act normal. It pisses her off — just a little. It’s hard to imagine Logan acting this way with any other woman. Maybe his mother, or his sister. If he even has either of those.

“Could you grab my duffel? Should be in the backseat.”

Rogue stands, stretching. She turns her back to Logan and spends a long, leisurely moment with her back arched and arms stretched above her head. Trying to give him permission to look. Perhaps it’s selfish of her, but she wants him to think she’s beautiful. More than that, she wants to be able to tempt him.

When she finally bends to pick up her keys from the bedside table, she’s careful not to disturb the shades or the little bird. She turns quickly, lobbing the fob in Logan’s direction. He catches them in the center of his palm even though his gaze stays fixed on the countertop.

Rogue tilts her head. She wonders how good his peripheral vision really is.

“Got it.”

He practically runs out the door. Maybe she should lay off. Give him some space. She had been his student. They’d met when she was seventeen. He’d done his best, for at least a couple of years, to step into the gaping hole the separation from her parents had left. That’s not the kind of relationship that time or distance washes away. Rogue knows, as much as she might want to, she can’t just wish it away.

Crouching down next to the side table, she fixes Logan’s mementos in her sight. If she’s being honest, she doesn’t want her relationship with Logan to change. Suspects he doesn’t want that, either. The sun reflects off red lenses. She knows they aren’t Scott’s real glasses — the coating isn’t nearly opaque enough, and the Ray-Ban logo on the side is an obvious giveaway. And the little red bird — a Robin, Rogue thinks — doesn’t seem like something Jean would ever have owned. They’re just tokens. Reminders.

Logan doesn’t want to forget. She understands.

The door creaks open, followed closely by the thump of her bag onto the floor. Rogue turns. Logan’s pulling the carafe out from the machine.

“Coffee?” he asks. “Black’s the only option.”

The smell makes Rogue’s mouth water. She unzips her bag. “Yes, please.”

Logan had insisted that she take the little twin mattress and Logan would sleep in the truck. Rogue had protested — she could sleep in her car, or curl up in the little chair by the table if that was too cold. Logan had muttered that he wasn’t gonna be sleepin’ much, anyway, before leaving the camper. The door had slammed behind him.

The process of getting dressed is always somewhat elaborate for Rogue. Briefly, she considers changing her underwear, but — Logan would probably just book it again.

Her shirt goes on first, thumbs hooked through the holes at the end. Collar rolled up to her jaw. Thin tights from her toes up to her knees, then jeans over that. The billowy ends of her shirt get tucked in. Tighten her belt to keep everything together. She pulls on a pair of ankle socks. Then, finally, she slides on her gloves.

Logan is watching her now. He leans against the counter, sipping his coffee. She re-packs her bag until only her clear makeup bag is left. It sits in her lap for a moment before she raises it up to her chest.

“Am I using this?” she asks.

Logan stares. “Huh?”

She huffs. “It’s makeup, darlin’.”

“I know what it is.”

Rogue puts a hand on her hip. “Great. So, am I wearin’ some?” When she doesn’t immediately receive a response, she continues. “Because I don’t need to get dolled up to enjoy the company of my Honda Civic.”

Logan’s jaw is tight. He continues sipping at his coffee anyways. “You don’t need to do anything on my account.”

“Logan.” Rogue glares. She snatches up her hairbrush, running it through the length of her hair a few times. It feels like he’s playing games with her. “Are we fucking or not?”

He manages to keep the drink in his mouth this time. Only coughs, setting the mug down onto the countertop. This time, Rogue actually allows herself a quiet snicker.

“Just — “ Logan sighs, rubbing at his face. He points at the chair. “Come sit down.”

She does, but not before grabbing her coffee cup. She lets her shoulder brush up against him and swears she feels him shiver.

The single chair creaks underneath her. She stares up at Logan and tries to hold onto her own confidence. This is going to work, she tells herself. There’s no way she came all this way for nothing. Logan had always been a softie.

“This isn’t because of some boy.”

The question makes Rogue laugh. It isn’t even phrased as a question, she realizes, but it sounds just like something Logan would’ve said to her years ago. “No,” she says, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I haven’t been with anyone in three years.”

Logan nods. “The cure,” he starts. It occurs to Rogue that he’d probably spent last night coming up with the questions, preparing to rattle down the list. The thought makes her want to roll her eyes. “Know it’s hard to get now, but you could — “

“It only works once,” Rogue says. The coffee is so acidic it makes her salivary glands seize up. She swallows anyways. “I’ve tried. And don’t even think of saying anything about the fact that I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity. I know.”

In fact, she’d tried. She’d held hands with Bobby every day, kissed him at every opportunity, told him she was ready. Rogue had wanted to live her life. At the time, she’d attributed Bobby’s reluctance to the fact that they had all the time in the world. Rogue had thought that she was rushing things. She wouldn’t find out otherwise until she nearly killed him.

Logan hesitates before delivering the next question. Rogue is grateful for the moment to try and counsel herself out of her own bitterness. It’s not like Bobby had known those few months would be her only chance.

“Have you actually tried to make this work. With some guy who’s not…” Logan trails off, gesturing wordlessly.

Rogue fills in the blanks. Somehow, leaving it unspoken is worse. “My former teacher? And lowkey father figure?”

As soon as the words leave her mouth, she immediately changes her mind.

Logan defates like a balloon. His lips form a thin line. “Yeah?” he says.

Buying time, Rogue takes another sip of her coffee. She pretends, desperately, that this isn’t weird. “What do you mean, make it work?”

Logan’s face is red. From his nose to the tips of his ears. It won’t be until a long while later that she’ll recall this moment and understands the way Logan forges ahead as a testament to how much he loves her. In the moment, she’s just mortified.

“You understand that you can. Like the — Jesus fuckin’ Christ. You know what a condom is, right?”

Initially, Rogue wants to ask Logan if he’s stupid. Instead, she lets the question hang for a long moment. Takes another sip of bitter coffee. “They never let you teach sex ed, did they?”

“God, no.”

More coffee. It almost overpowers her own bitterness.

“That’s good. Yes, Logan. I know what a condom is. It doesn’t work like that.” Briefly, she considers going into detail: exactly what parts of a man’s body covers, the humiliation of attempting to expose only the most intimate parts of herself, the way fabric or latex would shift between two moving bodies. She keeps her mouth shut and spares both of them. “Are we done with the fifth degree, now?”

Embarrassment stains her cheeks. Logan isn’t faring much better.

“I just — I need to ask. I know you’re smart. You just gotta let me ask.”

His knuckles are white where he grips the countertop. She tries to keep a lid on her own excitement as she processes Logan’s words. Briefly, she imagines what it would feel like to have those broad palms wrapped tightly around her hips.

“Fine,” she says. Another sip of coffee. Logan seems to have completely given up on his.

He takes in a deep breath. “This isn’t some — “ he starts, before giving up. She can’t recall ever seeing him look this nervous. “If we do this. After — we’re gonna pretend it never happened.”

The if is spoken quietly. Rogue feels her pulse quicken. “Obviously.”

Logan’s tongue is pink on his lips. “You can’t come back with feelings later.”

Rogue narrows her eyes. The mug sits defensively in front of her mouth. “You can’t come back with feelings later.”

Silently, Logan’s thick eyebrows furrow in doubt.

“Now you see how ridiculous that sounds.”

This is not, apparently, the response that Logan is hoping for. He crosses his arms, expression shifting from an open anxiety to stern disapproval. The kind of look a teacher gives a student. Rogue’s heart drops into her ass.

“I’m not an idiot. I know you had a crush on me.”

She bites her lip. “When I was eighteen. You were my — you saved my life. Multiple times, depending on how you look at it. And even without that, it would’ve been normal. At that age.”

She sounds defensive. Panic snakes through her veins.

“And that’s not why you’re doing this now.”

She sets the half-empty mug down on the table. A fat drop of coffee sloshes over the edge and streams down the side. Embarrassing honesty time, she supposes.

“Logan,” Rogue says. “I’m a person. I know you’re hot. And obviously the fact that you saved my life, and were nice to me, and looked out for me, and gave a shit about me when I was a kid makes me like you more. But it also makes this exponentially more weird. This is weird. I’m embarrassed. If I had literally any other options, I would take them.”

The urge to cry takes her by surprise. She wants to whisper to herself that it’s not a big deal. She wants to walk out the door of Logan’s little trailer, get in her car, and never come back. She wants for the first time she runs into him to be a few years from now, when mutants can live safely, when he’s come to terms with the state of the world, when she’s unlocked the key to controlling her abilities that the Professor had always assured her must be locked away inside her somewhere.

Rogue wants that future. The one where she could hug him and thank him for always believing in her. They could drink a beer and remember the good old days. But she knows by even asking, she’s ruined that — let alone if she actually survives the next few years.

“It’s like — it’s not the romance. Or the loneliness.“ She starts talking without Logan even asking for more. She doesn’t even look at him. “Like, I’ve had romance. It’s nice, you know, but it’s kind of hard to lose yourself in that when you know they’re always afraid you’re gonna kill ‘em. And then, like, you’d think it was about the orgasms, at least, but — “

Tears cling to leather-tipped fingers as she swipes them under her eyes. As mortified as she feels, Logan stays serious. She laughs.

“I know how to get myself off. Very well, thank you. It’s literally just the experience. Like, I don’t feel like I have to. I don’t feel like I’m incomplete without it.” She sniffs, loudly. All at once, she’s grateful she hadn’t put any makeup on. “Life just fucking sucks, you know? I just wanna get laid once before I die. Without bein’ afraid I’m gonna send some poor fuck to an early grave.”

Rogue feels sick. She stares down at the table, unable to bring herself to look at Logan. She’d managed to hold it together last night. It’s mortifying, how much she cares about this. It feels almost like she’s guilt-tripping Logan, one of the only people in the world who could ever give her this, except for the fact that the tears that fall down her cheeks are completely genuine.

She’d given up on casual intimacy, then on dating entirely. Giving up on having sex shouldn’t be the hardest part. Perhaps it’s that part of her feels like Bobby stole her one opportunity to have this. Or perhaps it’s just symbolic — one last sacrifice in a long line of sacrifices.

Pathetically, Rogue sniffles. Logan remains silent. She wipes at her own tears. Logan must think of her as even more of a child, now. Crying over the idea of being rejected. Unable to deal with the reality of disappointment. A sharp flare of indignation lashes at her tongue.

“Dude, if you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to search for some excuse!” When she finally glances up, Logan’s expression is much softer than she had imagined it would be. A sage kind of sadness crinkles the corners of his eyes. “You can just say if you don’t want to. I get if it’s too weird, or you’re not attracted to me, or taking some sad girl’s virginity just — sounds like a bummer! It’s fine. Just tell me — “

“Stop.”

Rogue does.

Logan drops to his knees in front of her. He pulls her hands away from her face. A protest rises and quickly dies when she sees his thumb approaching. Muddy, unrefined empathy sloshes across the open connection between them. The dull ache in her back fades.

His presence lingers even as he pulls his thumb away, slick with her tears.

“Not good with words,” he says. The warmth of his fondness radiates through her like a hug. As it fades, Rogue squeezes her own elbows, desperate for more. “You get it?”

She nods.

Logan’s thumbs are damp on the inside of her knees. “There are conditions,” he says. “If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do it my way.”

Rogue sniffles. Logan reaches over her and places a small stack of napkins next to her elbow. Humiliated, she blows her nose.

“Kinda selfish, isn’t it?” She’s trying to joke.

Logan glares at her.

“I mean, how many times have you had sex? A few hundred?”

His eyebrows raise, lips quirking up. “Try thousands.”

It’s funny, at least a little. Rogue doesn’t know why, but the thought makes another sob shake through her. “You motherfucker,” she hisses, laughing at herself even as tears spill over her lashline. “I should call you a slut or somethin’, but hell if I’m not jealous.”

Logan actually laughs this time. His thumb traces out little circles on the inside of her knee. “Just means I know what I’m doing.”

“Yeah, regular cock in the henhouse.” Rogue rolls her eyes and ignores the confused look Logan gives her. She wipes her nose again. “What’re the conditions?”

Logan clears his throat. “Well, I gotta be gone by tomorrow morning. So we’re gonna do it today.” He leans back, scratching at the back of his neck. There’s something strangely endearing about how hard he’s thinking. “I can’t really take you anywhere.”

He doesn’t have to elaborate. Rogue already knows. Mutants aren’t safe these days, and Rogue doesn’t quite blend in. Instead, she asks, “Why would you need to take me anywhere.”

A flicker of frustration flashes in the quirk of Logan’s lips. “It’s your first time. Gonna feed you first. At bare minimum.”

Rogue can’t help but laugh. “I’m sorry, what happened to no romance?” Logan looks at her like she’s stupid. Maybe she is. Blithely, she decides she doesn’t care. “Or do you always take your floozies out to dinner before you let ‘em take a ride?”

She keeps cackling even as Logan continues to glare at her. “‘S’not romance. It’s common decency.”

“Whatever you say, sugar.” She raises her hands. “Your choice. I don’t care ‘bout that part.”

“What part do you care about?” Rogue frowns in confusion. “What — I mean, is there anything that you wanna do?”

“Oh,” Rogue says. Logan’s sitting on the floor now, embracing the absurdity of the situation. She lets herself admire him. The curvature of his chest, bulge of his arm muscles, the way his waist narrows down so thin it almost looks delicate. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t attracted to him. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought about him plenty of times before. She wouldn’t be here, otherwise. “I want you to be on top.”

Logan’s jaw drops. It only takes him a second to get his composure back, teeth clicking shut, but the initial shock had been impossible to miss. “That is not a good idea.”

She frowns. “Why not? That’s, like, the most normal way to have sex. The guy goes on top.”

Rogue knows this because she’s seen it in movies, primarily. She only realizes the words sound ridiculously uncouth as they come out of her mouth. Thankfully, Logan completely ignores that. “Because if I pass out, I weigh three hundred pounds. You’re not gonna be able to get me off.”

“I will,” Rogue laughs. She watches the gears turn in Logan’s head. “Get your mind outta the gutter. You forgot how my powers work. How do you think I got you in my car?”

Logan freezes. “Oh,” he says. “That does — yeah, that does make sense. Okay.” He stands, remarking almost absentmindedly to himself, “I mean, you’re only gonna do it once, might as well do it every which way, right?”

The comment catches her completely off-guard. Rogue imagines herself perched atop Logan’s lap, bent over like a dog in front of him, her back pressed up against the windows, her legs wrapped around his hips while he —

A broad, bare palm in front of her face. “Touch me.”

“Huh?” Rogue asks.

Logan wiggles his fingers. “Gotta know how much I can take. Come on.”

“Oh,” she says. She starts to peel off her glove. “Most people can take about twenty seconds before they pass out. Thirty seconds before they — well. It’s bad.”

She hesitates. Her fingers hover over his.

“I’m not most people.”

Logan doesn’t hesitate as he interlocks their fingers. He barely even reacts, the veins on his forehead throbbing as the connection flies open like a floodgate. She sees herself through Logan’s eyes, feels herself try to focus on the counter backsplash only to find her attention drawn right back to the one place she’s trying to avoid. The fabric of her green sports bra stretches over her chest as she arches, replaced by her own narrow waist, long legs, heart-shaped ass when she turns. She bites into her lip, cock twitching as she tears her gaze away.

A smile cracks across Rogue’s lips. With Logan flooding her mind, she dives deeper.

In the recesses between her blinks, she sees visions of herself. Beneath him, on top of him, beside him, feels the disembodied sensation of a woman stretching around his cock, all echoed through the walls of memory and imagination. The guilt comes in secondary. The details are fuzzy, staring down at the top of her little green hood with a younger version of herself curled up against her chest. The memory of the child she had been throbs painfully in her mind like an open wound, protectiveness and arousal and the insidious gnawing of self-hate —

Breathless, Rogue’s gaze flicks up to Logan. A thin stream of sweat meanders down his temple. Other than that, he looks fine.

“Have you been keeping count?” she asks.

“Three minutes,” he says. His voice is a little rough. “Thought you said you got stronger.”

She can’t help but laugh. He grins back. The connection swings open wide, the essence of Logan trickling over her skin, her muscles, her bones. She breathes in and hears the wind rocking between the trees outside, feels the camper sway side to side, smells the earth dried in the treads of Logan’s boots.

“I’ve been practicing.” Carefully, she stands up. She squeezes Logan’s hand like a vice. The acrid, bitter aftertaste of the coffee suffuses her mouth. She wrinkles her nose. “Can’t believe you drink that stuff with super taste.”

Logan squeezes her hand back. More firm than he ever has before, Rogue thinks, but the pressure doesn’t even approach the point of pain. “I got super taste?”

Surprised, Rogue laughs. “Guess you’d never know any different, would you?” She inches closer in the narrow space, pressing the back of Logan’s hand between her breasts. “Think about me?”

She’d only ever received flashes before. The impression of herself through Bobby’s eyes, the itch in Remy’s fingers to touch her. But Logan’s thoughts are almost perfectly crystallized as they shudder from his body and into hers. She can match them to the movements of his eyes: a fierce rush of protectiveness as their eyes meet, just a favor as he stares at her mouth, a whispered but that dissolves into dogged arousal as his gaze skates over the line of her shoulder.

A soft noise of pleasure threatens to rise in the back of Rogue’s throat. Her heart is pounding as she leans forward and nuzzles her cheek into Logan’s chest.

He wants her. Rogue’s free hand twists into the fabric of his shirt. His arousal reverberates clearly through the caverns of her mind, touching even the deepest parts of her as she soaks him up like a sponge. The pangs of guilt and uncertainty only make it feel that much more real.

“Logan.” She speaks into the fabric of his shirt. It isn’t until the words reach her ears that she realizes how desperate she sounds.

The arm that wraps tightly around her waist, pulling her impossibly closer, is more than enough reassurance that she’s fine.

“Feels good,” Rogue mutters. She could lose herself in this. Imagines standing there forever. She could linger in the warmth of Logan’s arms, the safety of being protected, the satisfaction of being wanted.

“‘Sposed to.” Logan’s lips are warm against her scalp.

It isn’t until a gnawing pain starts to rattle down the connection that she snaps back to reality.

Rogue jumps back, and the connection slams shut like a door slammed in her face. Her back hits the chair with enough force to send the whole camper rocking.

“Why’d you stop?” Logan asks. He’s sweating.

Rogue’s mouth opens and closes like a fish. Logan’s still inside of her. Might be forever, with that amount of contact. She has no idea if it’s a function of time or the life force or something else entirely — the soul. Memories of herself flicker across her mind’s eye, crystal clear.

“You were hurting.”

Much less defined, a flash of red. A smile. The fierce burning of love in the pit of her stomach. An ache that rattles her bones.

The silver of Logan’s claws flashes in the morning light. “I’m always hurting.”

Breath knocked from her lungs, Rogue can only stare. She watches Logan’s veins retreat back into his arms, pallor quickly following suit. She hadn’t absorbed as much of him as she would’ve someone else. The memories are easy to push to the back of her mind.

“You get people’s memories, too, right?”

It isn’t until Logan speaks that Rogue realizes she’s been staring off into space. Logan’s still settling inside of her.

“Kind of,” she says. “Usually it’s — they’re more like feelings. And I can ignore it if I need to. Like a voice in the back of my head.”

Logan nods. His claws are the last to retreat, slotting back into his knuckles. She searches for the memory and, for a split-second, feels the fullness of her own forearm. Her eyes go wide.

“You okay?” he asks.

She laughs. “I should be asking you that.”

“I’m fine. I could go longer.” Logan shakes his head. “Try again in a second.”

Rogue nods. The phantom sensation of her knuckles splitting open slices down her arm — very deliberately, she pushes the thought away. She thinks about herself, instead. Logan’s palms on her knees. Wiping away her tears.

“How long does it stay?” Logan asks.

“Huh?”

He crouches down on the floor in front of her. “Me.”

“Oh,” she says. The warmth of him pulses in the back of her mind. Skin to skin, she wants to touch him again. Arousal throbs low in her stomach. “Depends, but — usually for a while.”

“Anything you see — “

She looks down at her own knees. “I know. I won’t tell anymore, or — ask you about it.”

Logan exhales sharply through his nose. She can feel the way the air moves across her bare hand. “You might see some bad shit. Things you can’t handle. Don’t go lookin’ for it. And if — “

“I’ll tell you to stop,” Rogue says. “If I need.”

Silence hangs. “Good,” Logan says eventually. “Yeah. Good.”

Rogue watches his face. Chapped lips pursed in a frown, crow’s feet pinched in worry, eyes fixed unwaveringly on hers. The old, broken essence of him settles into the back of her mind.

“Try again?” he asks, extending his bare palm to hers.

Rogue hesitates. She bites her lip, then asks, “Kiss me?”

Quietly, Logan snorts. Rogue almost feels embarrassed, wondering if the request is too romantic. His fingers run through her hair, then brush the shell of her ear before curling around the nape of her neck. Rogue’s anxiety settles like sand on the beach.

Once again, it’s Logan’s touch — dry lips against her own — that reassures her. Everything is fine.

Chapter Text

When Logan returns, he throws a pair of thin pleather gloves onto the table in front of Rogue.

The scene is strangely domestic. Rogue’s freshly showered, all dolled up in her only set of normal clothes, mascara weighing down her eyelids. She’d been sitting there, bemoaning the lack of cell signal while eagerly waiting for Logan to return.

“What’re those for?” she asks. Logan sets a large paper bag down onto the counter. It’s the only space available, other than the floor.

“Yours don’t fit me,” he says. “Only ones I got are work gloves.”

Rogue’s still confused, but she doesn’t press. She rests her cheek in her hand as Logan empties the contents of the bag onto the counter. The procession of items is completely baffling: cigarettes, a cheap bottle of wine, a rolled-up umbrella, a bottle of lubricant, a blue-and-green medication box, and two styrofoam takeout containers.

Once empty, he folds the bag and shoves it under the sink. “Chicken or steak.” He turns to glance at her over his shoulder after a moment of silence. “I dunno what you like to eat.”

“Oh,” Rogue says. “Chicken is good.”

The pair of gloves is quickly replaced with one of the styrofoam boxes. Logan sets a real fork and knife on top. He starts washing the same mugs from that morning in the sink.

Rogue hums. She stares at his back. Anxiety rolls off of him in waves.

She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t feeling it as well. She remembers what it had been like to kiss him for minutes on end: the heat of his tongue sliding against hers, his arms wrapped tight around her waist, her bare hands slipping under his shirt to trace out the contours of his muscles. And all the while, Logan’s attraction was radiating through her body. The cascade of emotions that had followed when her thumbs grazed over his nipples had been both frustrating and exhilarating — the sensation of blood rushing to his cock, the restrained desire for more, the shame, the guilt, the growl rising in his throat, the mounting sense of being sucked dry —

Logan had finally pulled away, face pale and arms trembling. Sunken eyes had glanced up at the clock. “Nine minutes. Eight forty-five. Somethin’ — “ he had gasped. “Somethin’ like that.”

And then reality had snapped back into place. For a horrific moment, she had snapped back to being a teenager, to having Logan hold her on that train and promise to protect her. To understanding that he was her family now.

“Kinda early for wine, ain’t it?”

The same shade as her lipstick, it glugs from the bottle and into her same mug from that morning. By her estimation, it’s about noon. She wonders if those are the only cups that Logan has.

In response, Logan leans over her and draws the blinds shut. The camper plunges into near-darkness. The mug thunks onto the table. A click from under the microwave mounted above the stovetop, and yellow light floods the room.

“Eat,” he says.

She doesn’t. She’ll wait for him. Or at least look him in the eye and live inside their shared discomfort together. He unravels the strap around the umbrella and shakes it out. Not an umbrella at all, Rogue realizes. A fold-up chair. She laughs. Logan barely glances up at her.

Distance and time gives reality the opportunity to set in. Logan fusses with the chair, muttering angrily to himself as he tries to get the loose joints to snap into place. Rogue’s gaze drifts over to the counter. The half-empty bottle of champagne looms over the gloves, the package of cigarettes, the little box. She squints, trying to read the text on the side.

“Oh my fucking god,” she gasps.

Logan’s gaze snaps up to her. Rogue’s neck cracks as she does the same. Truthfully, she’d look anywhere but at the counter right then. Plan B, the box had said. Plan fucking B.

“What?” Logan’s voice is frustrated, confused.

Rogue’s cheeks turn red, her jaw flopping open before clicking closed. He hadn’t bought condoms. He’d bought Plan B.

“Um,” she manages, finally. Logan’s frustration is starting to melt into worry. Each corkscrew of arousal is accompanied by a sour shot of disgust. Followed quickly by self-hatred. “That’s a chair.”

Logan freezes. Looks at her, then the chair, and then back at her. “Yeah?”

He’s going to cum inside of her. Rogue crosses her thighs over one another and throbs.

“I thought, um — “ she swallows. As the initial disgust fades, she’s only left with the shame of her own arousal. Logan wants to cum inside her. Or at least thinks it might happen on accident.

He was her teacher. That shouldn’t be so hot.

“I thought it was an umbrella.”

The personality always goes first. Logan’s confidence had lasted long enough for her to pick out her outfit and apply her makeup. The powers will fade next. Hours later, although she can still feel his healing factor tingle in the crescent moons her nails dig into her own bare palms, his heightened senses have nearly returned to baseline.

“Oh.” Logan looks down at the chair for a long moment.

Rogue bites into her own lip, gaze raking over his body. She is tortured by the thought of him stretching her out, fingers digging into her hips, panting and throbbing as he spills inside of her.

She leaks into her panties. Humiliated, Rogue wonders if he can smell it.

“Yeah. I guess that makes sense.” He stares at her, eyebrows furrowed. “You okay?”

“Right as rain!”

Rogue grabs the mug and takes three generous gulps of wine.

Logan raises his eyebrows. The fold-out chair occupies the entire space of the walkway. He sits, the fragile thing sagging underneath his weight, and tops off her mug.

“I’m sorry,” she squeaks. The words leave her mouth without her permission.

Logan hums. He opens his takeout container in his lap. There’s not enough room on the table for both boxes. “For what?”

“I have no idea,” she lies. Her heart is racing.

Over a wall of styrofoam, Logan stares at her. She shoves slightly too much rice into her mouth and subsequently chokes. Logan’s lips quirk up like he’s trying not to laugh at her.

“Breathe,” he says.

Rogue swallows. Closes her eyes. She inhales and holds it in her lungs until it burns.

“Out, too.”

She lets her lungs go with a laugh. “Oh my god.”

Her voice cracks, but she has no idea whether it’s with laughter or with tears. The scent of her own arousal hits her a moment later. Embarrassment turns her ears red. Logan can definitely smell it.

“Logan,” she says. All at once, she feels like a kid again. “This is weird.”

She’s not expecting him to laugh. Even more, she doesn’t expect herself to follow suit.

“Breathe,” he says again. She watches him take a bite of something green. The sight feels foreign. “Think for a second. Then tell me what you need.”

“Okay.” Rogue closes her eyes.

She clasps her hands in her lap, bare skin on bare skin. The skirt, black-and-red plaid, ends almost six inches above her knees. Her mom had bought it for her a few weeks before her powers had manifested. It had never looked good with tights underneath — even the skin-colored ones. Her chest shakes as she breathes in.

More breathing. “You’re fine,” Logan says. She knows.

He’d shaved his beard before he’d left. She’d watched him as she stared down at all of her clothes. Logan had said he wouldn’t pay attention. She’d wanted it to be a surprise. “Like a wedding,” he’d commented, quickly followed by, “That was weird. Forget I said that.” Rogue had told him that he didn’t need to shave if he didn’t want to. Logan had laughed. “Believe me, you’re gonna want me shaved.”

He hadn’t taken that part back.

“Okay,” Rogue says. She opens her eyes.

With only a little smirk, Logan stares back at her. “Better?”

She nods. “Just gotta — embrace the dissonance.”

He nods. She watches him raise a half-eaten hunk of steak to his mouth and tear off a ridiculously large bite. Mouth closed, she laughs. The silence stretches out, uncomfortable.

“Can I put on some music?” Rogue picks up her phone before Logan can respond. “That’s what I need. You like, um — “ No signal. Which means no Pandora. Or Youtube. She scrolls through her iTunes, passing My Chem, Linkin Park, OneRepublic, Justin Timberlake, and Panic! before a completely different sort of panic overtakes her. “Jazz?”

Brows furrowed, Logan shrugs. She taps on the album before slamming her phone face-down onto the table. Bossa nova fills the camper.

Logan doesn’t react. Just keeps eating. He’s staring at her. Rogue takes another deep breath. She’s fine. Everything is fine.

“Met Stan Getz once,” Logan says. “Long time ago.”

Rogue blinks. “Who?”

Logan raises his eyebrows. He glances at her phone. “The saxophonist.”

“Oh.”

Perhaps all roads lead to her looking like an idiot, and she should have just embraced the chaos of playing Linkin Park.

“My dad used to play this album when I was a kid,” Rogue says. She can feel herself sweating. Logan nods in response. “You know, my real one.”

He glares at her. Rogue hadn’t meant to say that.

“I ain’t your dad.”

A nervous giggle bubbles out of her. She knows. He’d said so himself, years ago. I’m not your father, I’m your friend. She takes another thick gulp of wine. Silently, Logan follows suit.

If he were her dad, she wouldn’t have loved kissing him so much.

For the next few minutes, they eat in silence. Soft music fills in the gaps. Rogue’s heart rate finally starts to slow. Something about eating, she thinks, or maybe the wine finally hitting her. Or maybe she’s just finally settling into the feeling of having her legs bare.

Something taps on the roof. Both her and Logan look up in perfect sync. He gestures for her to peel back the curtain. The sun stings her eyes. Another spatter of rain hits the window.

Rogue pushes the curtain back. “Just the devil beatin’ his wife.”

Nose wrinkled in confusion, Logan asks, “What?”

Slowly, Rogue takes another sip of wine. “Oh, I see. You’re out here with all your ain’ts and your poorly-placed don’ts and whatever, but you wouldn’t know a real southernism if it bit you on the behind.”

Logan doesn’t need to repeat himself. The what? is written all over his face.

“It means a sunshower,” Rogue explains. “And I’m callin’ you out for being a Yank.”

“I’m Canadian,” Logan says.

Rogue waves her hand. “Northerner. Same shit.”

Logan laughs. “Now who doesn’t know shit?”

Another few minutes lapse in silence. Logan drops his silverware in the sink and shoves both of their takeout containers into the trash. For a long minute, the two of them sit, staring at each other.

Discomfort settles over her skin like a blanket. Logan sighs, scratching at the back of his head. The absolute lack of chemistry crackles through the air.

“This is weird,” Logan says. He stands, folding up the chair. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Rogue says. “Honestly, it’s probably good that we don’t — get along.”

Logan grumbles while he folds up the chair. Rogue finds herself wondering if he does this for all the girls he takes to bed, but she already knows the answer is firmly no. Logan is probably a gentleman most of the time. But this kind of setup, negotiation, artifice — it doesn’t ring true.

He’s spontaneous. Rogue’s request had been anything but.

While Logan once again fights with the collapsible chair, Rogue slips her gloves out of her shirt pocket. It’s a long-sleeved button-down, the top two buttons popped open in an attempt to make it feel a little more normal. Without thinking, she unfastens a third and quickly slips on her gloves. The music thrums softly in the background.

“Logan?” she asks. When he turns, she already has her hand extended. “Dance with me?”

He sighs. Rogue almost flinches, taking it as annoyance. Instead, Logan grabs her hand and pulls her close. “Shoulda thought’a that.”

Rogue laughs. “I’m not a very good dancer.”

She leans into Logan anyways. They sway gently back and forth. Rogue rests her cheek on his shoulder and relaxes into his palms on her lower back. Careful not to touch him, her fingertips wander along the hem of his shirt.

“You smell good.” Rogue presses her lips to Logan’s shirt. She breathes in — something woodsy, laundry detergent, sweat. “M’lucky you’re hot.”

Logan acknowledges her with an amused exhale. One of his palms slides up her spine and comes to rest between her shoulder blades. “You’re beautiful.”

Rogue rolls her eyes. She leans back just far enough to look into Logan’s eyes. “Wow, so gentlemanly.”

Logan quirks an eyebrow at her sarcasm. “What, you want me to be less gentlemanly?”

Once again, Rogue rolls her eyes. She pushes back on Logan’s chest, but he doesn’t let her get too far. She watches his gaze slide down the bare length of her neck to the open collar of her shirt. She clicks her tongue.

“I want you to treat me however you treat the other girls you sleep with.” Logan’s gaze flicks back up to her face. He’d been looking at her breasts. The knowledge fills her with confidence. “However many thousands of them.”

The amused expression on Logan’s lips is the last thing Rogue sees before he spins her around. His chest against her back, his fingers intertwined with hers, he leans down to whisper in her ear only a hairsbreadth from touching her.

“Fine,” he says. “Then you’re sexy.”

A shiver rattles down Rogue’s spine.

Logan’s palms press flat against her stomach. She stares down at herself, watching his middle finger catching on each fastened button as he moves slowly upwards. Her own gloved fingers squeeze desperately at his.

“Were you trying to tease me this morning?” Logan’s breath is humid against her skin.

Lungs full, Rogue nods. Logan’s extended thumb and pointer finger follow the underwire of her bra. The lacy blue edge peeks out from beneath the open collar of her shirt. “Was tryin’ to tease ya right now.”

Logan’s lips brush against the side of her neck. His mind crashes into hers with a force that makes Rogue whine. He aches with emotions Rogue can’t even name as he bites into her throat and snaps open another one of her buttons, and another —

“Not nice to tease, you know.”

The connection snaps shut when he speaks, a tease in its own right.

“Is it teasin’ if I actually follow through?”

Logan is careful about touching her. Deliberate. The open line of buttons reveals a gash of skin from her neck to the patch of hair below her belly button, but he doesn’t touch her yet. He pulls the tails of her shirt out from the waistband of her skirt and drags his palms slowly, deliberately up her stomach, the only barrier between them that thin layer of cotton.

“Guess not.”

Rogue jumps when he bites into her neck. The bite turns into a kiss, the rough touches over her shirt replaced with the lightest of touches below her belly button. Rogue gasps, hands jerking up to clutch at the collar of her own shirt — ridiculous.

Logan laughs. He kisses her neck again, broad hands moving hers to wrap around his neck. An aching sort of sadness rolls through her. Two of Logan’s fingers trace out triangular figure-eights around the lacy edges and underwire of her bra.

“Anyone ever touched you like this before?”

His fingers slip beneath the band wrapped tight around her ribcage. Logan’s desire and confidence swarms her mind. He unhooks the clasp of her bra like it’s second nature. Jealousy lashes in the pit of her stomach.

“No,” she says, shaking her head. She realizes that Logan is teasing her, knuckles bouncing up and down her ribs. “Just over my clothes.”

Five seconds isn’t enough time to do much of anything.

Logan hums. She can feel his amusement, tinged with well-meaning condescension. Rogue’s jaw clenches as she twists her fingers in his hair. The echoes of other women swell in her palms: shy under the cover of the smoky bar but unbridled in bed, demurely avoiding Logan’s eyes while begging to be fucked harder, confidently parting Logan’s jaw and spitting into his open mouth —

“Shut up,” Rogue mutters. The scratch of the music against her eardrums is impossibly satisfying.

“Didn’t say anything.”

“You thought it.” He thinks Rogue is cute. Childish, inexperienced.

“Did I?”

His thumb and forefinger have replaced the underwire of her bra. The scratchy fabric shifts across her nipples. Taking his time, still teasing. In frustration, Rogue turns and drags her teeth over his jawbone.

It turns him on. She’d think the sharp exhale was a laugh if she couldn’t feel the bulge of his cock against her back and the reverberations of his arousal ripple through her. In retaliation, his fingers squeeze firmly at her breasts before pinching roughly at her nipples.

“Fuck,” Rogue gasps.

Logan’s touch quickly turns gentle even as she twists her fingers violently into his hair. He likes that, too. She feels herself pushed face-down into the mattress, growling as a delicate hand twists violently into her hair. Logan’s thumbs brush across her nipples, squeezing at her breasts as he drags his teeth down her neck, a growl rumbling in Logan’s throat, Rogue is so —

“So sensitive.”

He’s in her head. She pushes his consciousness away.

She only has to use the force of a feather to pull Logan’s head to the side, twisting in his arms. “But not childish.”

“Don’t think you’re a child.”

Rogue pushes him back into the counter, slotting herself between his legs. He slides the open shirt down her shoulders and tosses it onto the table behind her, followed quickly by her bra.

He leans back. Knuckles curl around the edge of the counter. His gaze sweeps up and down her body, openly appreciating her bare breasts. Rogue blushes.

“Yeah,” Logan says. “Definitely not.”

“Good.” Rogue twists her fingers in Logan’s shirt. Through the fabric, her fingers brush over his nipples. The bare tips of her toes nudge the inside of his boots as she pushes herself up onto the balls of her feet. “‘Cause I’m not.”

Their teeth click together as Rogue’s mouth crashes into his. The music finally comes to a quiet, contented halt. Rain splatters onto the roof. Logan takes control of the kiss as Rogue tugs his shirt up and off. He drags teeth along her lower lip, his tongue sliding along hers, his ratty wifebeater dropped to the floor.

Rogue whines into Logan’s mouth. An ocean of skin stretches between them, breasts and belly flush against Logan. She can’t even remember the last time she’d touched so much. Counterintuitively, the waves of Logan only lap placidly at the edge of her mind.

“Feels good,” Rogue mutters. She couldn’t stop the way her hands roam over Logan’s muscles even if she wanted to. The swell of his shoulders, well-built chest, the brick wall of his abdominal muscles beneath that thin layer of fat. She mouths at his neck, tips of her fingers circling mindlessly around his nipples.

“Good,” Logan says. His hands glide down her back. The urge to cry wells up in her throat. She’d wanted this for so long, and this will probably be the only time she gets to do it — the preemptive loss already eats away at her. “S’posed to.”

Logan squeezes her ass over her skirt. Shoots her a cheeky little grin as he does so.

Rogue squints at him. She plunges her hands down to Logan’s waistband, her breasts pinned against his chest as her palm slides past his belt to hover over the bulge of his —

The crook of Logan’s neck is hot. His chest shakes with amusement, ripples of fondness kissing at her toes. She squeezes over his jeans.

“You can try — “

“Shut up,” Rogue snaps. Logan’s still squeezing her ass. Teasing her.

She wades into the ocean of his thoughts, initially hoping she’ll find some jolt of confidence or something scathing to quip back at him. Instead, she finds bright green eyes staring back at her, snickering against her mouth, squeezing and stroking at the length of her cock through stiff denim.

Rogue imitates the movement, mirroring Jean across the eye of Logan’s mind. He stops laughing.

A wash of blood pulses in her ears. She’d done this with Remy, too. Felt him rock up into the heel of her palm, moaning softly as he'd complimented her.

Logan feels different. He’s not desperate. As the outline of his cock swells up to meet her hand, he only breathes a little more loudly. Rogue kisses the line of his neck, fingers wandering until she finds the root, chasing all the way up to the tip.

“Oh,” Rogue says. Oak whorl stares back at her. “It feels big.”

Logan doesn’t respond. She stares at the cabinets, completely entranced by the feel of Logan’s cock beneath her hand. Thick, too, she realizes, springing back when she squeezes it, nestled in the crook of his thigh and his hips. She hadn’t thought Remy was small, but Logan feels massive by comparison.

He pushes her back by the hips. Tacked sweat clings to her breasts as she stumbles back. Veins bulge across Logan’s temples.

“Need a break,” he wheezes.

“Oh!” Rogue takes another half-step back. Her butt hits the table. “Sorry.”

Logan shakes his head in disagreement. He turns his back to her, breathing heavily. Rogue admires the arch of his spine while she waits. “Sit down.”

Without much thought, she does. Her nakedness sets in a few beats later. She finds herself clutching at her own breasts. Logan slides on the gloves before he finally turns back to her — and laughs, when he does.

“You’re gonna be a dead man if you keep doin’ that.” Even as Rogue threatens, she doesn’t fight as Logan pushes her hands away from her chest. Embarrassment tingles like fire beneath her skin.

“Nothin’ I haven’t already seen,” Logan points out. Cheap pleather sticks to her skin as Logan drags fingertips over her shoulders, down her arms, and finally over her breasts.

Rogue turns away. Insistent fingers pull her back by the chin. Unwavering brown eyes pin her in place as he teases at her nipples.

“And nothin’ to be embarrassed about.”

A moment later, Logan drops to his knees. His fingers snake around her ankles, gently perching her bare feet on his thighs. Gentle fingers slide up the backs of her calves, over her knees, down the outsides of her thighs. The lack of skin-to-skin contact feels almost seamless.

“You’re really okay?” Rogue asks. They’d spent a long time testing — too long, in Rogue’s opinion — fingertips to palms to clasped forearms, timing how long it took for Logan to bounce back each time. Logan had explained that his healing factor always takes a bit of time to warm up. She should trust him, but the guilt gnaws away at her regardless.

Logan nods. “‘M fine.

He hooks his thumbs inside her knees and pulls her legs open. Rogue’s knuckles go white gripping the seat of the chair.

“Wider,” Logan says when he feels Rogue push back against him. He keeps pushing until the tendon in the crook of Rogue’s thigh protests, leaving her spread wide.

The front panel of her skirt obscures the crotch of her panties, but it’s embarrassing regardless. Logan teases circles into the sides of her knees, creeping slowly upwards. Rogue can feel herself trembling, her clit throbbing pathetically against the scratchy material of her panties.

Logan doesn’t speak. Just stares her down, fingers teasing at her inner thighs, squeezing out the strain of her muscles, thumbs carefully raising the edge of her skirt.

With a hollow pang, Rogue feels how unfair it is that she never got to do this when she was young. A noxious cocktail of embarrassment, anxiety, and fear squeezes around her throat at the sensation of Logan’s fingers stroking up and down her covered slit.

Conflicting urges to push him away and pull him closer go to war inside of her when his thumb leaves her panties rasping against her clit. The material clings to her, humiliating. Logan strokes her, up and down over her underwear, just like she’d done to him a few minutes ago, and she doesn’t know whether it’s more embarrassing for him to look at her face or her —

Gloved hands push her thighs impossibly wider, guarding his cheeks as he leans forward to press dry lips against her humid panties. Her toes curl, thighs trembling, Logan’s tongue sliding from between his lips, his gaze boring holes into her own and she looks away, looks anywhere but at him.

The cheery little Plan B box stares at her from the countertop, more intensely than Logan ever could. Rogue gushes.

A gasp spills from her lips when she feels Logan’s gloved finger slip between her panties and her skin. With an agonizing slowness, one of his claws slips out, slicing a thin hole in the knuckle of his glove. The crotch of her panties snap apart without an inch of resistance.

And then he’s just staring at her, her clit already peeking out from between her folds. She wants to close her eyes, to cover her face, to snap her legs shut, but — she doesn’t.

Logan tilts his head up. “Anyone ever done this for you?”

Wordlessly, Rogue shakes her head no.

One side of his lips quirks up. “Good.”

Logan breathes in deep. And then he licks his fucking lips.

Rogue screams when he sucks at her clit. The feeling itself is intense, alarming — unexpectedly cool and slick, like their tongues gliding together — but even moreso is the flood of Logan’s soul into hers.

The rush of his power, his arousal, his thoughts completely washes Rogue away. Bare, broad palms pull her forward, barely-there stubble scratching at the delicate skin of her labia and inner thigh, his tongue circling roughly around her clit, and he fucking loves it. Loves eating her out. Loves the pathetic little noises that she’s making, upper lip catching on her clit as he descends to slide his tongue inside of her, rough but deft. Rogue doesn’t hear herself moan, just feels it, and completely lets herself go.

Her pussy nearly eclipses her face as Logan stares up at her, palms on her hips. She’s smiling, braided red hair tossed over her shoulder as she straddles Logan’s head. You want this, don’t you? she asks. No shit, Logan replies, his eyebrow raised sarcastically. He doesn’t give her a chance to reply before he pulls Jean down onto his mouth, drags his tongue ravenously along the seam of her cunt, feather-light teeth against her lips, arm curling around back so he can slide two thick fingers into her —

Sweating, panting, orgasm quickly building, Rogue jolts back.

“No,” she hisses. Her hips are kicking in Logan’s grip, no idea how long it’s been while she was lost in that memory. Fuck, that had been Jean. She wasn’t supposed to have seen that, Rogue thinks, but the thought slips through her fingers as she tries to get her hands to push Logan away rather than pull him closer. “Not yet, don’t wanna — cum yet — “

He pulls away himself, mouth slick with laughter.

“Stop — “ Rogue gasps. She pulls her hand back to smack the top of Logan’s head before the thought even fully forms. Her fist thumps against his skull with enough force to make her knuckles ache for one brutal second. Logan doesn’t even flinch. “Stop laughin’ at me.”

“If you’re funny, I’m gonna laugh.”

“What — “ Rogue hisses, breath hitching when she feels Logan’s fingers slide into her. She grits her teeth, refusing to give up even as he starts to finger-fuck her, clit throbbing and twitching in Logan’s face. “What is so fuckin’ funny ‘bout — ?”

Logan kisses her clit again. Calculated, the tip draws out circles.

“What’s funny,” he says, his lips teasing her even as he speaks, fingers filling her up, stretching her out and Rogue moans, “is that you think I’m only gonna make you cum once.”

Rogue’s thighs snap tight around his head when he latches onto her again. Logan doesn’t seem to mind, flattening his tongue to drag it up and down her slit, impossibly wet and messy.

The image of Jean’s hand in Logan’s hair, pressing him viciously down into the mattress while she grinds her cunt across his flat tongue overwhelms Rogue’s mind again. In more detail than Rogue has ever experienced, the shock of her green eyes, hard clit grinding against him, soft and needy noises filling his ears, the bony apex of her mound crashing into Logan’s nose with every stroke, the musky scent of sex in his throat.

Rogue holds Logan’s head completely still as she humps his tongue.

She mutters something to herself, crushed under the weight of Logan’s mind, ruthless joy and anger rising in her like a hurricane as she chases her orgasm. Logan’s hands on the small of her back go almost limp and she has to put in even more work, hips jerking erratically against the too-soft plane of his tongue, growing more and more sloppy as the seconds tick on, prickly sensation of stubble and flimsy cartilage of his nose punishing her clit before she finally manages to cum.

With her ankles locked around Logan’s head, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, Rogue rides the memory. The flood of slick in her mouth, Jean trembling as she cums in Rogue’s mouth, throwing her head back with a grin, tits shaking and Rogue wishes she could squeeze them —

When her thighs finally relax, Logan’s head slides out and hits the edge of the table with a loud thunk.

“Oh my god!” He’s pale, blinking slowly. “Are you — ?”

“‘M’fine.” Logan’s voice is hoarse. His eyes are sunken. He does not look fine. “Just need a minute.”

The shallow surface of his soul blooms in the back of her mind like an orchid. Fickle, frustrating. Annoyingly beautiful.

Rogue’s forehead hits the table next, a hairsbreadth away from hers. “You did a good job,” she says, softly. It doesn’t feel like her, but she knows it’s the right thing to say anyways.

Logan grunts. The color starts to return to his skin.

One side of Rogue’s mouth curls into a half-smile. She chooses to believe that the twitch of Logan’s is an attempt at smiling back.

Chapter Text

“Y’know you don’t have to do this, right.”

Rogue is crouched between Logan’s open thighs, her knees cradled in the sunken spot of the mattress. Logan is leaning against the wall, single pillow propping up his lower back. By his elbow, the pair of red Ray-Bans glare accusatorily at Rogue.

“I might not ever get to do this again. I’m gonna try everything.”

She finds herself rifling through Logan’s memories. It’s strange to imagine that no one had seen Scott’s eyes in years. She’d always been able to imagine a judgemental expression peering out at her from behind his visor. Logan had, too. In the back of her mind, Rogue watches Scott’s back as he clears one of Logan’s whiteboards. The words don’t quite come to her, but he’s criticizing one of Logan’s lesson plans. Shockingly mundane.

“Everything, really?”

When Rogue turns back to Logan, he’s got a perverted little smirk smeared across his lips. With a scoff, Rogue smacks his thigh. She does it gently, this time.

“Within reason.” Carefully, she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. Her gaze falls to Logan’s belt. “Sucking dick is extremely within reason.”

In seeming agreement, Logan grunts.

She shouldn’t be looking through Logan’s memories. They’ll fade again after — truthfully, she doesn’t know how long. Years later, Bobby still hadn’t completely faded. But this fresh, they come to her unprovoked.

“Okay.” Rogue’s gloved hands start first at his knees, working slowly up. He probably can’t feel much between the denim and the leather of her gloves. Is there even any point in teasing? “I’m gonna — “

Logan’s staring down at her. Anxiety rattles through her. She can’t even be mad at him, though — he has nothing else to stare at.

“I’m gonna. I’m gonna use my gloves at first, and then I’ll take them off when you’re — you tell me when to take them off.”

A knot balls up in her throat. It had taken Logan nearly ten minutes to recover from his stint on the floor. In retrospect, she’s impressed he managed to keep his tongue flat enough for her to grind on while he hadn’t been able to hold his own head up. Embarrassment floods through her as she remembers.

He had done a good job. Too good, even.

“And — “ Rogue clears her throat. She strokes at the insides of Logan’s thighs. He’s not hard like he was before, and she doesn’t know what to do. Still topless, she feels like the nudity has lost its allure. Logan’s staring down at her with his eyebrows raised. He’s not laughing, but he’s amused — she can tell. “And then I’ll.”

Anxiety rips through her like a rocket. She squeezes Logan’s inner thighs and bites into her lips hard enough to draw blood.

“You gonna get it out,” Logan starts. His healing factor fizzles across her lip as soon as she tastes blood. “Or you got somethin’ on your mind.”

It’s not a question. Rogue digs her fingers into his hips. “What if I’m really bad at it?”

“You’ve never done it before,” Logan replies. “You’re gonna be bad at it.”

Immediately, Rogue smacks him. She’s not as careful, this time. “Thanks for the reassurance!”

Rogue doesn’t need to use her powers to know that, internally, he’s laughing at her. She narrows her eyes, scowling as he tries not to grin. With a frown, he clears his throat.

“Can tell you what to do if you want,” Logan says. “But bein’ shitty at givin’ head the first few times is kinda part of the experience.”

As a teenager, Rogue had never really conceptualized Logan as a ladies’ man. It’s an aspect of his life that feels quite obvious, in retrospect — and, truthfully, one of the reasons she’d even considered asking him to do this for her. But in that moment, the self-important charisma that sloughs off of him leaves Rogue feeling more than a little resentful.

“It has its own charm.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you’d know all about that.” Rogue bets he can’t even remember his own first time.

She’s about to say as much when Logan reaches over and brushes his thumb under her cheek. The gesture is meant to be calming. Tender. Truthfully, Rogue expects for it to be as well.

Logan’s skin brushes against hers. The connection between their minds opens up once again, parasitic and one-sided. The copy of Logan sequestered in the back of Rogue’s mind thrums in sympathy with the real one, Rogue’s neurons sparking, impulses arcing throughout her brain.

She does not expect to recall, in vivid detail, the memory of Scott’s thin lips wrapped around Logan’s cock. She doesn’t expect to recall the feeling of Scott’s throat spasming around her as he sinks down to the root, smooth and skilled, expressionless visor buried in Logan’s wiry pubic hair. More than anything, Rogue does not expect to be graced with the sight of cum splattering across that thin red lens, followed quickly by Scott complaining about it getting into all of the cracks —

Jaw slack, Rogue tries not to laugh.

Logan’s hand drops to the mattress. He’s not just a ladies’ man, Rogue supposes.

“You good?” Logan’s eyebrows are raised.

“Fine!” The answer comes a little too quickly.

Rogue had said she wasn’t going to ask about anything. She won’t. As furious as she’d been to learn all of Bobby’s secrets, she fully intends to take them to her grave.

With more than a hint of embarrassment, Rogue glances over at Logan’s side table. It does answer a few questions, in retrospect. About Logan’s relationship with Jean, and about —

Logan’s staring at her. Rogue swallows. Scott’s face flashes across her mind’s eye, lips parted and chest heaving.

“What if I can’t make you cum?”

The words tumble out of her without permission. Rogue immediately slaps her hand over her mouth.

Confused, Logan responds with equally as little thought, “You don’t hafta.”

“But I want to.” She’ll remember this for the rest of her life.

“Okay,” Logan says. “So you want me to tell you what to do, then?”

“No!” Rogue scowls. “I just want…”

She trails off. What does she want? For her life to have been different, maybe. To have been able to fuck Remy for real. To not be in the process of fucking the man who’d served as her father figure for most of her adult life, siphoning off his memories of fucking her dead teachers. More than anything, she wants for this to be easy.

“I just wanna be good at it.”

The phrasing sounds petulant, even to her ears. The corners of Logan’s lips curl as he tries not to smile.

“Okay,” he admits, after a tense second passes. “Now, you do sound like a kid.”

Rogue hits him again, her knuckles thudding into Logan’s sharp hipbones. Logan doesn’t flinch — and a moment later, she gives in and laughs at herself anyways.

Carefully, Rogue runs her palms over the zip of Logan’s jeans. She considers trying the same thing she had before — stroking Logan’s cock through his jeans, like she’d seen Jean do. When she thinks about it, anxiety slices through her gut.

“If I want you to tell me what to do. I’ll ask you.”

Logan raises his hands. “Okay, all you. Have fun.”

Cheeks burning, Rogue snaps the button up. The pull of the zipper slips between her fingers, slightly too delicate for her gloved hands. Logan helpfully raises his hips as she pulls both his jeans and his underwear down. An increasingly dense trail of hair stretches down his stomach, his hips, until finally giving way.

Rogue swallows. His dick, still mostly soft, sits nestled in the crook of his hip with the elastic waistband tucked under his balls.

“It’s big.” Bigger than Remy’s. She’d only seen his once, admittedly. Definitely bigger than Bobby’s, although she supposes she’d never actually seen his —

“Gets bigger.”

Rogue squints at Logan. “Shut up. Stop fuckin’ with me.”

Logan snorts. He raises his hands and, sarcastically, mimes zipping his own lips. Rogue rolls her eyes.

Intimidated, she turns to Logan’s dick again. The head is wrapped in wrinkly skin that reminds her of one of her turtlenecks — foreskin, she supposes. She’d never seen one like that before. And now she can’t even ask Logan about it.

Rogue mindlessly tears up the inside of her lip. The slow, tingling feeling of Logan’s healing factor sets her mind at ease. She’s going to miss that.

“Okay,” she whispers to herself. As she stares, Logan’s cock shifts, rolling against gravity and up towards his stomach. The pink head nudges past his foreskin. He’s getting off on Rogue just looking at him. With her nose wrinkled, she shoots him a glare.

Logan doesn’t speak. He only widens his eyes, rolling them sarcastically. She imagines he would say something like, What, you want it to stay soft?

Rogue lets out a little huff of frustration. In one swift movement, she reaches out and places one gloved thumb at the root. His skin clings to the leather as she traces out the most prominent vein.

Logan clears his throat. When Rogue looks up at him, he’s staring pointedly at the bottle of lube at the floor by the mattress.

“Oh, right.” He’d mentioned that. Rogue picks it up, clicks the top, and immediately squirts a small puddle onto Logan’s cock. The head retreats like a turtle’s head into its shell. She doesn’t need to look up at Logan to know that she’d used far too much.

Cheeks red, she forges ahead anyways.

Lube streams down the sides of his dick as she grabs it. Rogue strokes — perhaps a little too rough, at first — from the root to the tip. The thought occurs to her that the lube might ruin her gloves, but she supposes it’s far too late now.

A few seconds lapse in silence. Rogue strokes at his cock, feeling it grow more firm in her hands. The slit peeks out from behind the foreskin, the outer layer staying soft even as the center firms up beneath her fingers, and she realizes —

“Oh,” Rogue says. “It really does get bigger.”

Logan snorts. Rogue doesn’t dignify it with a response.

It doesn’t feel like she had expected. She can feel it pulse in her grip, skin sliding smoothly over ridges and bumps in the stiff core. She’d thought it would be smooth. When she squeezes his balls, the hair rasps beneath her fingers.

The foreskin slides up and down the head of his cock before finally slipping over the ridge of the head. Rogue jumps. Logan exhales.

It’s all very — strange and alien.

Rogue should be embarrassed. And she is, to be fair. But when she glances up, Logan’s head is leaned against the wall, eyes half-closed not in pleasure but soft affection. It doesn’t make her feel quite as annoyed, this time.

“You can talk.” She strokes her thumb up the length, stopping at the wrinkled line of his foreskin. “Sorry.”

A dry smile. “Do it with your hand.” Rogue opens her lips, about to protest that she’s supposed to be using her mouth. Logan continues before she has the chance. “Without the glove. Feels different.”

She peels the leather away by the tip of the middle finger. The contact between her palm and the velvet-soft shaft of his cock is like knocking back another shot of Logan.

A quiet moan escapes through her nose. She lets Logan’s thoughts escort her through the maze of his mind, opening the door on Jean peeling off thin yellow gloves, unbuckling his belt, stroking the length of his cock while she bites her lip, muttering something that starts with, Scott doesn’t know…

Soft. Rogue can’t believe how soft the skin is, slick beneath her fingers. Logan sighs as she starts to stroke him in earnest. In her mind’s eye, Jean presses dry kisses along the column of her neck, hand sliding up and down over the head of Logan’s cock.

It’s different than how Rogue is doing it. Stroking from root to tip feels painfully slow. She wraps her gloved hand around the root and realizes, with a dull sort of awe, that the head and nearly an inch of the shaft clear her two stacked fists.

“Oh.”

Logan doesn’t say anything. When Rogue glances up, his head is tilted back and his eyes are closed. Rogue knows he’s thinking about Jean even before allowing herself to be swept away into the stream of his thoughts.

You like that, don’t you, baby? Jean keeps her palm flat on the head, using her other hand to roll Logan’s cock in circles. Right on the edge, Rogue growls back in Logan’s deep voice, Please, Jean. Fuck.

Rogue does the same. Logan’s precum is slick against her palm. Slowly, his hips roll against Rogue’s hands.

Oh, you’re twitching. Jean laughs. She strokes rapidly at the head, twisting her wrist. Rogue mirrors the motion, lips parting in surprise when she feels Logan’s cock twitch against her palm. You wanna cum, Logan?

Rogue laughs. Red, come on.

She can feel how much Logan likes it. Stomach muscles fluttering, palms pressed flat against the wall. Rogue’s eyes flutter shut and bright green eclipses her mind’s eyes. Beg me. A single finger playing with the slit of Logan’s cock, thumb rubbing circles just under the head, white-hot overstimulation burning in the fibers of her muscles. You want it, don’t you? Want me to make you cum? Just like Scott?

“Jesus fuck — “

Rogue’s eyes flick open. Logan’s breathing hard, his head tilted back. There’s a certain indignity in knowing that he’s thinking about another woman. But another, much more insistent part of her, is still thinking about Jean’s lips. Demure pink lipstick parting across white teeth. A vicious grin contorting her features as she teases Logan’s cock and whispers, Last night, when Scott was inside of me, I couldn’t stop wishing it was you —

“Feels good, doesn’t it?”

Logan’s eyes fly open. He’s staring down at Rogue, chest rapidly rising and falling. Rogue’s toes curl in embarrassment. She would’ve never imagined that Jean had such a dirty mouth.

“Use your mouth.”

Logan doesn’t touch her. He lets Rogue go at her own pace — but she doesn’t take her time. There’s no room for second-guessing when she presses her lips to the tip of Logan’s cock and, like a flood, his confidence and experience wash away her embarrassment.

She slides her tongue over the head. The musky, salty taste leaves her nose wrinkled, but disgust isn’t the emotion at the front of her mind after she’s guided once again to the memory of Scott on his knees, mouth open while she smacks the heavy head of her cock against his tongue. Without even thinking about it, Rogue does the same.

Logan moans. The past and the future bleed together in her mind. She watches Scott bob up and down on the head, Rogue’s stomach tightening with fierce, undeniable arousal. Scott, with all his overserious anxiety, bobs up and down on Logan’s cock with a series of soft, wet clicks.

Rogue surfaces to catch her breath. Logan’s staring down at her, fists twisted up in the ratty sheets. The split second she meets Logan’s unsuspecting gaze for is enough to send shivers down her spine.

She’ll never say anything to Logan about it. Or anyone else, for that matter. It’s the absolute least she can do.

Scott sinks down, brow furrowing in concentration. With her heartbeat racing, Rogue tries the same, closing her eyes and sliding down the length of Logan’s cock. His hands knot in Scott’s hair and Rogue does the same, squeezing Logan’s fingers as she guides them to the back of her head. She’s rough with Scott, pulling him down into herself, but Logan is gentle. Thick fingers card through her hair, nails scratching comfortingly at her scalp. She bobs up and down anyways, sliding her tongue along the underside, the head nudging up against the roof of her mouth, and even though the root of her tongue and the back of her neck start to ache the pleasure that rolls from Logan and into her makes her crave nothing more than being good at this.

Further and further, breathing in through his nose, wet and heavy sound of Scott’s swallowing rings in her ears. Rogue does the same, feels the head of Logan’s cock nudge against the back of her throat. She closes her eyes and eases herself forward, expecting the glide to be smooth and controlled — just as easy as Scott makes it look — only to be completely jerked out of Logan’s mind by the sensation of her own gagging.

Frustration overcomes her. If her mouth weren’t otherwise occupied, she would cuss and grind her teeth. Instead, Logan pulls her gently back by the hair.

Brows furrowed, she glares at him. Jean holds Scott’s head with two hands, whispering in his ear so quietly that Logan can barely make it out. Be a good boy and suck Logan’s dick for me. He’s bobbing up and down, setting a rapid pace, and then Jean knots her fingers in the hair at the back of his head and pushes him down, down, down until his nose is buried in Logan’s pubic hair and his throat bulges out, a single tear slipping out from beneath his visor —

Rogue gags. She forces herself down. Leather touches her lips just as she gags again, stomach rioting.

Staging a rescue, Logan’s fingers pull her roughly up. A frustrated noise spills from her lips along with a hot, thick glob of spit. Rogue grimaces. Logan doesn’t even flinch.

“Oh, what the fuck,” Rogue hisses. She stares down and realizes that her gloved hand had migrated. Sitting a full inch above the base, the length above her gloved hand is well under four inches. “That’s not even half.”

“That’s normal.” Logan pushes a strand of her hair behind her ear.

Rogue’s about to snap back that Scott had been able to swallow the entire fucking thing before she catches herself. “I wanna take the whole thing.”

This time, Logan’s laugh is loud. The furious expression on Rogue’s face doesn’t seem to help. As the seconds tick on and Rogue doesn’t join in, his expression grows a little more serious.

“Rogue,” he says. “Don’t try that. I’m serious. You are going to throw up.”

The part of her with a need to be taken seriously puts up a fight. It isn’t until she wraps her lips around the head once again that the open connection to Logan guides her sharply to a memory of that exact thing happening.

Rogue jumps back. Her eyes closed, as if that would shut out the unfortunate sight of some beautiful woman retching onto Logan’s cock.

“Okay,” she says. “I get it. Okay.”

A heavy moment of silence follows. “Are you — ?’ he starts. Another few seconds pass in silence. Rogue glares at Logan’s dick. “Nevermind.”

In the process of attempting to estimate the overall size — the breadth of her palm is probably what, three inches? — in an attempt to assuage the part of her that’s still frustrated in her lack of ability to take the entire length into her mouth, Rogue’s next thought occurs to her with a dull sort of horror.

“Logan?” she asks. He grunts in acknowledgement. “How is that gonna fit inside me.”

An exasperated exhale. “Don’t worry about it.”

The response only makes Rogue’s anxiety spike. “Is it gonna hurt?”

“Doesn’t usually.”

Rogue does not find herself filled with confidence. “I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to hurt, like. Ever.”

“Did you think I was fuckin’ with you when I said it’s big?” Perched between Logan’s spread legs, the intimidating length of his cock bobbing between them, an answer isn’t required. “And with my healing. You’ll be fine.”

Silence. Rogue knows she will be. She’s just nervous. More than anything, it’s Logan’s dismissal that frustrates her — the reminder of her own inexperience stings in the back of her throat. She reaches for his cock again, fully intent on showing him exactly how good she can be at this, when Logan interrupts her.

“Hold on.” Rogue glares. “Need a break.”

A loud, frustrated noise spills from Rogue’s lips. “I’m supposed to make you cum.”

The words don’t feel dirty. At her core, Rogue feels petulant, ignorant, and stupid. She remembers how confident Jean had been in Logan’s memory, how easy everything had felt for him — and it pisses her off.

“Just wait a minute. Don’t get your panties in a twist.”

Rogue scowls. “I can’t,” she says. “Because you cut them.”

Logan looks away from her, like he’s trying not to laugh. She had owned exactly one pair of matching underwear. She doesn’t tell Logan this. Instead, she throws herself back against the foot of the mattress. Her shoulders thud into the thin metal wall which separates the bedroom from the bathroom. Petulantly, she crosses her arms and glares at Logan.

Aggressively, she starts rifling through Logan’s memories. The urge initially comes to her out of pure spite — it’s not Logan’s fault that her mutation did this to her, or that Bobby fucked up her one chance to experience this normally, or even that Rogue wants it so fucking bad. And Rogue would be lying if she said she wasn’t vicariously enjoying Logan’s own escapades. Less genuine than the real thing, but through the lens of Logan’s mind, his confidence, his overwhelm, his pleasure all feel like they originated from her own skin.

Pleasure is not what greets Rogue when she cracks open Logan’s mind.

The first memory she experiences is of being burnt alive. The knowledge of what’s happening hits her first, then the disjointed vision of bubbling fat, Logan’s black-burnt skin curling up before completely disintegrating. And then the pain. Wordless, sightless, Logan’s howling and the roaring of the fire, Rogue’s mind collapses into a series of animalistic impulses — scream, fight, run. She stumbles back and falls onto damp grass, looking up to find herself under the aegis of Jean’s speckled gravestone. She clutches at Logan’s chest, dull pain arcing up her arms as icy adamantium splits her skin, foreign muscles and tendons locking and loading, the strongest material on Earth embedding itself in the mud as if she could claw Jean back from death. When she pulls her hands up, they’re small, dusted in black, a pickaxe at her feet. She can’t remember anything, only wishing to be gone, and feels herself start to cry —

Eyes wide, sweat dripping down the back of her neck, Rogue slams the door to Logan’s mind shut.

“You good?” Logan asks.

None the wiser. Rogue sucks in a deep breath and nods. Logan stares at her, suspicion crinkled in the folds of his eyes. She’d walked the halls of Bobby’s mind in and out, in the weeks she’d thought she had killed him. It had never been like that.

Slowly, Rogue’s gaze falls to the keepsakes on Logan’s bedside table. The bird, the glasses — stubborn to the core, Rogue keeps her eyes open as she opens the door to Logan’s mind again.

The speakers are blasting Girlfriend by NSYNC.

Rogue knows this. Logan doesn’t. There’s an ice cold beer in their hand. Shirtless, Scott is reclined on the other side of the bed. Surprise doesn’t even factor into the mental landscape.

“You have shit taste in music.”

She takes a sip of the beer, then leans across Scott to clink their bottles together. Scott does not follow suit.

“You have — oh.”

Scott cuts himself off when Jean emerges from the bathroom. She’s wearing a little pink babydoll. The fabric whispers about her hips as she approaches the foot of the bed. It isn’t until she stands directly under the dim light of the ceiling fan that Logan realizes the fabric is completely see-through.

“Having fun, boys?”

Her areolas are visible, interrupted by the hemline. Jean crosses her arms before rounding the foot of the bed on Scott’s side. Logan takes another sip of his beer.

“You’re beautiful,” Scott says. Wet peels of the label crumble off under his thumb. Beer wobbles halfway up the neck. Logan resists the urge to roll his eyes.

“I know,” Jean says. Scott’s visor stays angled at her face, but his cheeks are bright red. “Why did you pick this song?”

A beat passes in silence before Scott responds. “Hm?”

Logan snickers. He takes another sip of his beer.

“We’re engaged.” Jean leans forward, lowering herself to Scott’s eye level. Her breasts hang — teasing. Logan isn’t shy about looking. “Or did you forget?”

“No, nope. Definitely didn’t…” Scott takes in a deep breath. He’s such a loser. “Didn’t forget.”

Jean makes meaningful eye contact with Logan before crawling over Scott’s feet and onto the foot of the bed. “You remember the rules, right?”

The question is directed at Logan. Jean stretches her arms over her head. As Logan nods, he takes a second to appreciate the curve of her waist and the contours of her thighs. Her panties — a matching, but tragically opaque, shade of pink — bite into the fat around her hips. Logan licks his lips. He wants to bite her.

“No touching me.” Jean continues anyway. She’s grinning, glancing back and forth between the two of them, as she lifts the little transparent skirt.

“Right,” Logan says. Scott remains completely silent, save for the heavy breathing.

Jean’s fingers hook beneath the waistband of her panties, slowly pulling them down. Logan couldn’t tear his gaze away from her even if he wanted to. The fabric slides from her hips down to her thighs, revealing her mound shaved bare. She keeps her thighs demurely closed as she slides her panties over her knees.

Logan takes another sip of his beer. Scott had been the one to ask him to do this, hands clasped stiffly in the small of his back while Jean hovered a few paces behind him. Would you like to engage in an activity with me and Jean tomorrow evening? Logan had raised an eyebrow, and Jean had taken over from there.

Scott’s fingers twist in the sheets as Jean starts to touch herself. Thumbs circling her nipples, palms rasping down her stomach. She leans back, head hanging off the edge of the bed, knees curled to reveal the folds of her pussy peeking out from between her thighs.

Between parted legs, Jean’s fingers curl into herself. She starts with three, groaning just a little bit at the stretch. She’d always liked it when that first stretch hurt just a little, pushed her right up to her limits. Logan’s big enough for that. Not like Scott — Logan had never seen the two of them fuck, but he’d seen Scott fisting that little thing while he’d watched Logan and Jean, and there was no way it was big enough for —

“But yourselves,” Jean says, a little grin slicked across her lips, “or each other. That could be another story.”

Scott lets out a soft, breathy little moan. It takes a moment for Logan to catch up. He stares at Jean, eyebrows furrowed.

She shrugs. “If you want.”

Logan blinks. “If we what?”

Rogue licks her lips. “Scoot back.”

She barely waits for Logan to bend his knees, brow furrowed, before she starts playing with her own nipples.

Logan exhales sharply in surprise. Rogue closes her eyes. In the moment, it feels impossible to categorize her reaction to that memory. She barrels forward instead, clinging to the echo of Logan’s arousal as she toys with the fabric of her skirt.

There are a lot of things, truthfully, that Rogue would be far better off not contemplating.

Slowly, Rogue spreads her thighs. She’s naked beneath her skirt, having tossed her ruined panties into the garbage soon after Logan had recovered. She dares herself to stare into Logan’s eyes while her fingertips slide across her own wet folds, only to experience some strange combination of satisfaction and frustration when she finds Logan staring right back into her own eyes.

“Logan.” Rogue had always called him that, even when he was still her teacher. Everyone had. For some reason, with her thighs spread and the tips of her middle and ring finger stroking herself over the hood of her clit, it feels dangerously inappropriate. “Look.”

He bites into his upper lip. Some war Rogue isn’t privy to wages inside of him.

“Pretend it isn’t weird.” This doesn’t seem to convince him. He keeps staring into her eyes, arms crossed, breathing heavily through his nose. Nervous. Dry lips scrape across Rogue’s teeth as she grins. “Don’t be such a loser.”

A beat passes in silence. Logan only speaks when it becomes apparent Rogue isn’t going to.

“What?”

She keeps her clit sandwiched between two fingers as she tugs up and down. All indirect pressure, she feels herself leak. “I said, don’t be such a loser.”

He’d been so confident. So chastising of Scott, embarrassed to look at his own girlfriend. And yet, here Logan is, embarrassed to look at Rogue.

“Come on, you can look.” She tries to keep her voice low. Sexy. Like Jean’s had been. “Know you want to.”

That does it. Logan’s gaze snaps down and Rogue feels herself throb.

She teases at her clit. Her toes curl at the sensation, almost too intense. Her eyes flutter shut when she finally slides two fingers inside of herself, the harsh grind of her palm against her clit making her spasm. A satisfied little sigh leaves her.

Logan’s staring at her. Not at her eyes, anymore. He doesn’t know that Rogue’s thinking about the way he’d wanted to sink his teeth into Jean, the plump curve of her hip and the fold of skin between her waist and hip. Rogue wonders what he’s thinking about her.

She pumps her fingers in and out of herself. The motion is slow and deliberate. He could be thinking about fucking her. Or eating her out, or how she’d looked sucking his dick. How she’s going to start doing that again soon. Could even be that he’s thinking about how fucking wrong this is, and that thought should make Rogue feel guilty but it only turns her on even more, her hips kicking up into her own fingers, soft little moans spilling out of her as she gets herself off for Logan.

His eyes meet hers again. Rogue moans.

Reflexively, she reaches for that memory of Jean again — thighs spread, touching herself, clenching around her own fingers, Logan squeezing his dick through his jeans, the slick noise of Jean fucking herself on her own fingers filling the room only for Rogue to find herself wet.

She’s shivering. Shoulders shaking, eyes burning. Rain beats against the back of his shoulders as he stares down at Jean’s grave. Scott’s gone. Her funeral had taken place that morning, long since past — it’s pitch black, now, moon buried beneath the clouds, earth sucking him up by his stupid fucking dress shoes, the frown of Jean’s gravestone turned upside-down into a smile. The reality of her death still buzzes around Logan’s head like a fog, an idea, but as the seconds tick on and Ororo’s unnatural rain beats down on him and Jean’s fucking gravestone stares lifelessly up at him the truth strikes him like a goddamn brick.

Jean is dead.

She rips off one stupid pointy shoe after the other, throwing each into the distance as hard as she can. Jean is dead. Scott is gone, solidifying his own spineless cowardice in Logan’s mind for all eternity. Jean is dead, and Logan doesn’t even have the luxury of stealing Scott’s fucking car. Jean is dead and Logan doesn’t have the luxury of following her Jean is dead the loneliness bearing down on him and then the rage bad fucking shit happens to every person he cares about —

“Come here,” Logan says.

He’s smiling, gesturing sweetly at her. Rogue’s movements come to an abrupt halt. She lunges forward, landing on top of Logan with a thud.

His hard cock is pinned under her hip. Rogue doesn’t care. She feels like she’s going to be sick.

“Woah.” With their bare chests pressed together, Rogue feels his concern and arousal and affection for her even as the dull pain of her touch sets in. “You okay?”

Rogue breathes in. He smells like pine and sweat.

“I’m fine.” Her voice is tight. Dread overcomes her. More than anything, she doesn’t want to go back there. “I’m going to suck your fucking dick.”

Hesitantly, Logan pats her on the back. “Okay?”

The seconds are ticking away. Rogue immediately chokes on him, this time, but the way her body revolts only makes her more determined. Logan thinks of Rogue again, her baby face and round cheeks grinning up at him, and then Jean as she bobs up and down on the first few inches of his cock. She’s hovering over him, kissing up the hair on his belly, the length of his shaft — teasing him.

Rogue strokes at Logan’s cock. She moves fast, squeezing her fingers tightly around the head. It’s the same motion she can see Jean making in her mind’s eye, breasts hanging low. He thinks about Rogue, teasing him in her underwear, teasing at her nipples.

Rogue moans. She shuffles forward, arching her back at the right angle to slide Logan’s cock between her breasts. She keeps stroking, spitting onto her own fingers when the friction builds too high. The head leaves wet kisses against her sternum.

“You like my tits, Logan?”

He’s breathing heavily. For once, he’s thinking about her — deliciously complex emotions of guilt and arousal, the sick contrast between the emotion he’d felt when she’d laughed at him as he’d tried in vain to understand her pre-calculus homework and the one he feels now, watching the head of his cock slide across Rogue’s breasts as she jerks him off.

She laughs, grinning maniacally. He doesn’t even need to answer. “I know you do.”

His cock throbs in her hand. The teasing lights some dormant violent impulse, his urge to twist his fingers in her hair, to scrape his teeth over her breasts, bite into her nipples until she yelps, feel her throat spasm around his cock or pin her down to the mattress, thrust into her, feel her squeezing tight around him.

Rogue goes down on him again. Up and down, fast over the head, one hand pumping the rest of his shaft. Both hands twist in her hair, not pushing or pulling but balling into fists as he shakes.

“Fuck, Rogue, I’m gonna — “

She chokes when his cum hits the back of her throat. Rogue pulls back, coughing even as she keeps stroking Logan’s cock, doing it just like she saw in Logan’s memory.

And then the taste hits her.

Rogue gags. Cum spills from her lips and down the shaft of Logan’s cock, and then yet another streak leaves her choking as it hits the back of her throat. Her eyes water as a burning sensation pricks at the back of her nose.

Logan’s breathing hard. “You good?”

“It’s in my mouf,” Rogue says. And down her chin, her upper lip, in her throat. She’d never thought cum would taste so bitter.

“Spit or swallow, don’t just leave it in there.”

With a whimper, Rogue swallows. The last few drops of Logan’s cum slide down her throat like a slug. She sticks her tongue out in disgust only to get even more in her mouth, salty and thick.

“It’s in my nose.”

Logan’s trying not to laugh.

“That was so fucking gross — “

“There’s mouthwash in the bathroom.”

Rogue’s already on her feet before Logan even finishes the sentence. Out of sight, she tries to ignore the sound of his laughter.

—

Logan wraps her in the paper-thin sheet before beckoning her into bed.

The mattress is far too small for the two of them. Logan rests with his chest to her back, threadbare fabric carefully hooded up to protect his forehead from the back of her head. His arm is curled around her waist and his breath is humid on the back of her neck.

When Rogue had realized that Logan was spooning her — a rather tender, romantic sort of action, at least to her — she’d questioned why. Logan had simply responded that this was part of the package.

It’s nice, Rogue has decided.

Logan’s chest swells and collapses with a thoughtless sigh. An easy afternoon drowsiness tugs at her eyelids. She’d assume it’s afternoon by now, at least. It’s hard to tell with all the windows shut.

“So how’d you rate sex so far?”

Rogue’s eyes flutter open. She hadn’t even realized she’d been dozing off until she struggles to wake up.

“We haven’t even done it yet,” she grumbles.

It can’t be that late in the afternoon. She rubs at her eyes, sighing at the way Logan tugs her closer against his body when it feels like she’s about to slip off the edge of the mattress.

Logan scoffs. “No, that was definitely sex.”

Rogue frowns. “You didn’t even put it in yet.”

She licks her lips. The thought is as arousing as it is intimidating. She’d only ever taken her own fingers. Remy had tried to get her to use a dildo once, but the whole thing had felt uncomfortably sterile. No amount of sleazy southern French could have convinced her to try that and call it her first time.

The wet sound of Logan’s tongue wetting his lips is loud in her ear. “It, huh?”

Once again, frustrated embarrassment rolls through Rogue’s body. She’s about to smack Logan in the hip — the only part of him that she can reach without disrupting the delicate sheet equilibrium — when he slots his crooked nose in the crook of her neck.

“You mean I haven’t fucked you yet.”

His beard scratches against her through the sheet. With a groan, she responds. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”

An amused exhale tickles the back of her neck. “Still sex,” Logan growls. “That’s why I said so far.”

Rogue rolls her eyes. Not like Logan can see it anyways. She leans back against him and mutters, “Squeeze me tighter.”

He complies. A little moan leaks out of her. Not the sexual kind, but one of satisfaction. Logan had been right about cuddling being part of the whole experience. She hates it when he’s right.

“Hated your cum.” Rogue sighs. “Liked everything else.”

Logan laughs. “Well, now you’ll know for — “

He cuts himself off. Rogue squeezes her eyes shut. She almost reaches out to lay her own hand over Logan’s before she catches herself.

“Yeah. There’s probably not gonna be a next time.”

It’s shocking how easy it is for her to forget.

Logan doesn’t respond. They both lapse into silence. Rogue listens to the sound of the wind whistling through the trees. She thinks about her car, sitting parked in the grass outside. The thought is jarring. For the last few hours, at least, it’s felt as if the world doesn’t extend beyond the confines of Logan’s little trailer.

Some part of Rogue wishes that she could stay here forever.

The facsimile of Logan in the back of her mind calls out. Rogue closes her eyes and circles in on it, brushing up against the edges of him and allowing her own consciousness to dissolve into the edges of Logan’s.

It’s hard to move through Logan’s memories in any meaningful way. His mind is like a strange, foggy maze. There’s no roadmap, no logic. Turning one corner could reveal a wonderful memory or send Rogue spiraling into the depths of hell. Trying to prune the thing back or force it to bend to her will makes it hiss and spit like a feral cat.

Bobby’s mind had been organized like file drawers. The little snippets she’d caught of Remy’s had always felt chaotic, feelings and thoughts exploding in the back of her brain like fireworks. Even Cody, still a whisper in the back of her mind, had been as easy to read as flipping through a textbook.

Logan’s mind is another animal entirely. It’s not malevolent. There’s no desire to dominate her thoughts or otherwise disrupt the workings of Rogue’s own mind. But it is watching her. Every time she brushes up against it, she can feel its hackles raise, ready to pounce.

She wonders if this is how Logan experiences his own mind. If he sees his own memories as the same hostile thicket of thoughts and feelings shrouded in an unchartable fog. The idea sends shivers down her spine.

When Rogue opens her eyes, the little red bird stares back at her.

It’s as if Logan’s mind takes a deep breath in and relaxes. Instead of a feral cat, hissing and spitting, she imagines it as a house pet curling up in her lap. Rogue closes her eyes and doesn’t fight the memory as it comes.

The weight of Jean’s head against her shoulder washes through Rogue like waves against the shore. Water trickles down the stream behind the mansion, wind rustling through the leaves on the ancient tree looming over them just as Jean’s fingers, drumming out an uneven tattoo, compel dead leaves at Logan’s feet to dance.

“I’m not going to leave Scott.”

The pang of grief that leaves Logan’s chest feeling hollow is fully expected. Logan had already known this. It doesn’t make him hurt any less.

His arm curls more tightly around her. The scent of her shampoo reminds Logan of lilies. He tries to commit it to memory even as he plots out his escape. He can’t stay here, can’t keep feeling like this, can’t keep being pushed and prodded and played with. The late afternoon sun pierces his eyes as it sets behind the tops of the trees in the distance. All things end, good or not.

Her lips are warm through the fabric of his shirt. She kisses his shoulder, his collarbone.

“But maybe that’s not a bad thing,” she says.

Logan tries not to think about it too hard as he leans in and kisses her, all passion, frustration, confusion —

“You’re going to live a long time, Rogue.”

Logan’s voice snaps her out of his memory and into her own. The gaping hole the Professor’s death had left behind, the young mutants she’d seen die in front of her, impending loss and the guilt that walks hand-in-hand with her very presence here.

She hates the reminder of how selfish this is.

“You don’t know that. Things are — “ Rogue cuts herself off. Ultimately, she chooses to pull the punch. “They’re bad.”

She can’t bring herself to use heavier words. They get stuck in the back of her throat.

“Not anything out there worth dying for.”

Rogue balks. The words shock her. Not only is she unshakably certain that Logan would lay down his life for someone else if that were truly possible, she’d seen enough of his mind to know he was also frequently willing to die for no reason other than grief.

His grip around her tightens, chest swelling as he breathes in. Rogue fights it. She twists in his grip, about to give him a piece of her mind — there are plenty of things in life worth dying for, and Logan knows that.

When Rogue’s hand accidentally brushes against Logan’s shoulder, she’s crushed beneath the weight of hundreds of gravestones. Her lungs give out, a weak breath scraping its way out of her throat, and for one terrifying moment she’s looking out across the lawn of the mansion, her fingers on the banister slick with Jean’s blood and the whisper of the leaves in the wind contorting into the sigh of the last breath leaving her body as she’d died in Logan’s arms, as Logan had fucking killed her, he’s never wanted so badly to fucking kill himself —

Rogue snatches her hand back. Her shoulder knocks into the nightstand. The bird clinks against the foot of the lamp, glasses rattling. One of the arms slides off the edge. She catches them before they can fall.

She doesn’t realize her hands are shaking until she stares down at them. They didn’t even belong to Scott. This is all Logan has left to remember them by. She tries to set the glasses back onto the table, but her hands don’t move. Her chest barely moves as she breathes, rapid and shallow, she’s standing in front of Scott’s grave and digging her fingers into the wet dirt, the kind of aching shame, a grief that can only be acknowledged under the cover of night, dirty palms scraping tears from her cheeks.

“It’s okay.”

A sad, pathetic noise works its way out of Rogue’s mouth.

Logan doesn’t touch her as he pries the glasses from her hands. They didn’t even belong to Scott. The top drawer rattles open, the bird clattering against the lamp. That’s all Logan has left of him.

“No.” Rogue protests as Logan begins to lower the glasses into the drawer. His expression is perfectly neutral as he looks at her. She’d been so angry when she’d realized he’d left them. “Please don’t put them away.”

Carefully, Logan folds the arms of the glasses in on each other and sets them down on the nightstand. It isn’t until Rogue sniffles that she realizes that she’s crying.

Unmarred palms scrape tears from her cheeks. Logan throws the sheet over her shoulders. She’s crouched on the floor, a small beast cradled in Logan’s arms. His palms are flat and gentle on her back.

She pulls the sheet over her own face before she starts to cry into his shoulder. She rides out the twists and turns of her own thoughts as Logan holds her, the furious self-loathing of wanting to not be a mutant, the warmth of Ororo’s fingers twisting into hers and the sick irony in her reassurance that death is a natural part of life, her panic that Bobby was falling out of love with her and the knowledge that she could never be enough for him as solid as a rock in her fist, the bright sun at Xavier’s funeral laughing as it clawed at her pupils, the desperate desire to stay for the kids standing in perfect parallel to the need to leave and never look back.

“Hey.” Rogue is shaking. “You’re okay.”

Rogue fights her way out of the sheet and presses her skin to his. All his warmth and love and concern fills her like an empty cup. Her skin tingles with the sensation of healing, Logan’s mind folding in on itself, collapsing back into a manageable shape. She breathes, chest shaking with one final sob, as she remembers what it’s like to miss Jean and Scott as an insistent ache and not as a gaping wound.

“You really — “ Rogue stops. She doesn’t know how she wants to finish the sentence, words like love and need and cherish rattling in the confines of her closed mouth. She can’t bring herself to speak any of them. “Sorry.”

Logan stays silent for a long time. His touch is dire against her.

“I’m sorry,” he says, eventually. They both know what she saw. They both know the feelings that she’d felt. Guilt pours into her. “Know I said we don’t talk about it. But if you — “

Rogue shakes her head. “I’m okay.”

She wraps her arms around Logan’s waist and holds him, digging her nails painfully into his skin. Logan had really loved them. He still does.

He sighs. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

Rogue shakes her head. She loves Logan. He loves her too — it’s different than the kind of love he has for Jean, for Scott, for any of the other people he’d lost. But it’s still good. She loves him, too.

“It’s just when it’s…” Rogue breathes in, hating how shaky her voice sounds. “It’s all fresh. I can push it back when it’s — but when I’m actually touching ya, it’s like it’s happenin’ to me right now.”

Logan doesn’t verbalize the apology. He doesn’t have to.

“It’s okay.” She turns up to him, smiling. Her fingertips trail along the small of his back, tracing out the ripples and contours of his muscles. “Will you think about me?”

He does. It’s not sexual. His most prominent memory of her is her round-cheeked teenaged self, the futile desire to spare her from the same loneliness he’d been cursed to, the secondhand aspiration to see her grow into contented adulthood, however unlikely it is.

Rogue’s classmates had always teased that Logan was a simple man — probably thought about nothing but being angry and drinking beer and running around the forest like a madman. But Rogue had always known, even before she’d sucked out some of his soul that first time, that there was more to him. He was complex. She cradles the little embers of her teenaged crush on him and slowly, carefully kisses up the column of his neck.

This is different. When Rogue was younger, she’d had idle romantic fantasies where Logan held her hand and kissed her softly and called her baby — all hilariously ill-formed, in retrospect.

As a woman, Rogue is allowed to experience the full breadth of his emotions. She lets herself sink into Logan’s paternalistic desire to protect her, the friendship that leaves him wanting to comfort her, the guilt he feels for hurting her, the shame of his attraction, the joy of affection. For the first time, Rogue finds herself grieving not for how she’d ruined their relationship, but for how long she had completely lost it.

She kisses him again, and again, and again. She suckles on his neck and squeezes him tightly, her bare breasts against his chest, and it’s not romantic or sexual, but she doesn’t need it to be. The ruined tatters of their relationship are far more meaningful than anything she could have imagined at nineteen.

“We really don’t have to do more. If you don’t want to.”

His palms caress her back. He knows she’s not going to back out, but he needs to say it anyway. Rogue hums into his skin.

“It’s the whole reason I came here.”

Logan sighs. “I know.”

He isn’t disappointed in her. Rogue’s shoulders sag in relief. She realizes that he’ll always be her dad, just a little bit — as fucked-up and contradictory as that may be. Logan might be completely incapable of having normal relationships, and Rogue —

Well, she doesn’t think she’s all that different.

“Just think about good things until I leave, alright?”

She likes it when he thinks about her. Complex, messy, guilty, fierce. More than anything, she wants to treasure these last few hours she has to spend with him. She hadn’t thought about it before, but this may be the last time she ever sees him.

“I’ll try my best.”

The stubble nestled in the corner of his jaw tickles at Rogue’s lips as she kisses him. “All I could ever ask for, darlin’.”

Chapter Text

“Honestly, I can’t believe you own tea.”

Rogue clutches the same mug from that morning in her hands. She’s wearing one of Logan’s overlarge wifebeaters and nothing else. He hadn’t protested when she’d raided his closet — just tried and failed not to look fond as he watched her.

“I own lots of things.”

Rogue scoffs. “You have, like, eight things. You have one chair.”

“Had,” Logan points out. “Bought another.”

He stands in front of the sink and watches her. A few minutes earlier, she’d watched him scarf down an entire cold chicken breast in about three bites while standing in front of the open fridge. Rogue had politely declined when he’d offered her something to eat. She wasn’t hungry anyways.

“Point stands.” Rogue takes another sip of her tea.

When she stares at the speckled pattern, she distantly recalls drinking whiskey out of it while crouched beside a campfire. She’d stopped in town for the bottle earlier that day, but as the sun sets, she resigns herself to the fact that it won’t last her more than a day.

“How many chairs do you own?”

A beat passes before Rogue laughs. “Got me there.”

She wonders if Logan is proud of the way he lives now. He used to have far less than this.

With a sigh, Logan bends his knees and sits on the floor. Rogue laughs again. “Not gonna get your other chair out?”

With a distant look in his eyes, he shakes his head no.

After a moment, Rogue slips off the edge of the chair and sits next to him. She takes another sip of her tea. Logan doesn’t comment. They stare at the closed curtains. Rogue doesn’t think about anything.

“Tell me about your boyfriends.”

The words make Rogue choke. “Excuse me?”

As the seconds tick on with Logan only continuing to stare out the window, forearms resting on his knees, Rogue’s embarrassment fades. She tries again.

“Kind of an inappropriate thing for a teacher to ask his former student.”

Logan scowls. “Shut up.”

“What, you just want to know how big of a virgin I actually am?”

She receives a shrug in response. The bitter bite to her tone only becomes obvious to her as the words repeat in her own mind. Rogue snorts, trying to calm down.

Her next words don’t help. “What, you wanna hear about all the wild monkey sex me and Bobby had?”

Logan furrows his eyebrows and turns to look at her. Rogue bites her lip, turning away before she takes another sip of her tea.

After a long few moments pass in silence — Rogue drinking her tea, Logan staring at her, and neither of them knowing what to say next — Logan chooses to fill the silence. “No, not…no.”

He doesn’t question the obvious. Rogue bites her tongue in an effort to contain her anger, but thinking about Bobby only spins her up even more.

“Good, ‘cause we didn’t actually have any.” She takes a large gulp of her tea. The worst part is that she doesn’t even really have the right to be angry at him. “Barely even kissed. Let alone knocked boots.”

A thoughtful silence follows. “Weren’t you still together after you took the — ?”

“Yup,” Rogue replies. She pops the P aggressively between her lips before grinning politely at Logan. When he stares back at her in confusion, she elaborates with an accompanying eye-roll, “Not my fault that dog don’t hunt.”

Confused silence. For a moment, Rogue regrets letting that slip. It isn’t until Logan replies with a quiet, “Little old at that point to be takin’ your damn time,” that Rogue realizes he’d completely misunderstood the metaphor.

She sighs and quickly changes the subject.

“Had another boyfriend for a year or so. But the whole no-touching thing is like — turns out that’s hard as hell even when your boyfriend is really into ya.” She stares down into her tea. “Harder, even.”

Logan scoffs. “You shouldn’t take the shitty opinions of two dumbasses to mean much. We’re mutants. We all live different.”

Thoughtfully, Rogue hums. She briefly contemplates telling Logan that she doesn’t want to live differently — she has a more intact sense of being a mutant than she had before, but rarely does a day go by that she doesn’t resent her particular set of circumstances. But she knows Logan resents his, too. She’d felt the weight of his curse and it had nearly buckled her.

“Yeah, different.” A frown tugs at her lips. It’s a quaint way of saying worse. Logan knows it, too. She should appreciate the fact that he wants her to stay positive. It’s sweet. “You can put your boots in the oven, but that don’t make ‘em biscuits.”

A beat passes. “What?”

Rogue doesn’t explain. She takes another sip of her tea, staring blankly at the legs of the chair.

“I was the one who dumped Remy, actually.” She only has a few sips of tea left now. She tilts her head back and swallows it all at once, cold and unappetizing. Fitting, really, for the conversation. “He was good to me. Just hard to watch someone you love be unhappy.”

She turns, reaching up to set the empty mug by the sink. Logan is staring at her, upper lip raised and eyebrows furrowed in an expression of disgust and confusion.

Rogue jumps when he says, a little too loudly, “Remy — fucking gumbo?”

Equally confused, Rogue stares back at Logan. “Lebeau. Uh, yeah. You know him?”

With a scowl, Logan replies, “Yeah, I know him. He’s a snake. And a thief. And a fucking — philanderer.” Rogue can’t help but giggle at the word choice. Every once in a while, Logan actually manages to sound his age. “And a stupid fuckin’ accent.”

Rogue grins. She sets her chin on the palm of her hand. “I liked it.”

Logan growls. “And he’s too fuckin’ old for you.”

She barely manages to hold back a laugh. “And how old are you?”

Completely defenseless against Rogue’s raised eyebrows, Logan turns away. “That’s different.”

Rogue hums. “Oh, I’m sure.”

Logan continues to growl.

“What, you gonna call him a scoundrel next?” Remy hadn’t been a cheat, whatever Logan thinks. He had really liked her, whatever story Logan’s in the process of making up in his head. When she glances over, he’s scowling into the distance with his arms crossed over his chest. “Oh, calm down. You’re actually makin’ me feel like you’re my dad right now.”

She’d expected a rather explosive reaction to that statement, but Logan almost completely brushes past it. “You deserve better.”

A resigned sort of sadness washes over Rogue. Her lips pressed into a flat line, she leans her head back against the cabinets. The handle digs into the back of her head.

“No,” she says, eventually. “He deserved better. I just deserve to be different.”

Judging by the silence, Logan doesn’t have anything to say to that. The seconds tick by, perhaps even stretching into minutes. She tries not to remember how insistent Remy had been that he had cared about her, that they could make things work, that he didn’t care that he couldn’t touch her. That he wasn’t unhappy.

How could he not have been?

Rogue leans her head onto Logan’s shoulder. A thick sheet of hair protects his skin from hers.

“Logan?”

He acknowledges her with a grunt.

“Will you kiss me?”

He doesn’t speak. Just gently does as she asks, turning her chin upwards. The touch of their lips together sends sparks scuttling up and down her spine.

Muddled thoughts and feelings tumble mindlessly downwind of their connection. It occurs to Rogue, with a very un-muddled sort of certainty, that both her and Logan deserve to be different.

Rogue is the one who deepens the kiss. She slides her tongue between Logan’s lips, tracing out the line of his lower teeth and twisting her fingers into his hair.

The movements are clumsy and foreign to Rogue, but Logan doesn’t complain. He lets her lead, supporting her lower back as she crawls into his lap. She tucks Logan’s sadness, anger, and loneliness inside of her own and, for one awe-struck moment, becomes only a container of memory. Thought and feeling and sensation fill her up, the prick of Jean’s lips against her cheek, the unassuming joy of Remy calling her chère, vindication melting into violation as Jean whispers of course Scott knows, he’s my fiance, the pain of the thousand times Rogue had watched Remy pretend it hadn’t hurt to kiss her.

When Rogue pulls back, Logan rests his face in the crook of her neck. His facial hair scratches spindly patterns into her skin, immediately erased by Logan’s borrowed power.

“You ever feel like we’re cursed?” she asks.

Not even a beat passes before Logan mutters, “All the goddamn time.”

Rogue laughs. She runs her fingers through Logan’s hair, leaning in to kiss him again. Logan follows her lead, matching her action for action. He returns every lick, every bite, every one of Rogue’s moans met with a sharp exhale.

All of Rogue’s relationships had been miserable. A hundred thousand little disappointments, opportunities never taken, empty regrets that buzz in her mind at night. She refuses to let this moment be as well. She’s going to experience one island of unabashed joy before she dies.

Logan’s back hits the ground with a thud.

“I wanna fuck you on the floor for my first time.”

She sits perched atop Logan’s hips. He’s still wearing his stupid jeans. Completely bare besides the borrowed wifebeater, she rocks her hips against the rough texture of the denim.

Logan raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t comment on the way she moans.

“Not much different than the mattress, honestly,” he quips.

Rogue doesn’t laugh. “Touch me.”

Her skin burns as Logan does exactly as she asks. She doesn’t even have to tell him how — it feels like he has a window into her mind as he rakes his nails up the length of her thighs, squeezes her ass, her waist, her tits, as he lifts the shirt up over her head.

She bends forward. Logan twists his fingers into her hair, squeezing tightly before resuming their exodus across her body. She whines as fingers travel down the length of her neck, then knuckles dragging over her nipples, reverent palms cradling her ribcage, thumbs circling her belly button, strong grip on her hips easing her as she rocks forward against the bulge of his cock beneath his zipper.

Logan loves a woman who knows what she wants. Rogue basks in his want.

“Tell me I’m beautiful,” she says.

Logan raises an eyebrow. “Beautiful,” he asks, “or sexy?”

His hands leave her for only a moment, the movement of her hips faltering as he snaps open the button of his jeans and kicks them off. The kiss of cotton against her cunt has her insides clenching up.

“Whatever’s true.”

She’s grinding on him again. Rogue doesn’t know what’s come over her. Logan helps her circle her hips against him, the fabric clinging as it slowly soaks through.

“You’re gorgeous.”

Rogue is certain that this is what she wants. Logan pulls her down to kiss at her collarbone. His arousal nourishes her own in a feedback loop.

“Sexy as all hell.” He’s grinding up into her as well, one palm on her lower back keeping her pussy pressed up against him. He drags his teeth over her collarbone and she moans, whimpering when he squeezes her breasts and pinches her nipples.

Rogue grabs Logan’s wrists and slams them back against the floor. He doesn’t put up any resistance, but Logan’s surprise still gives her a rush.

“Do you wanna fuck me?”

She already knows the answer. Can feel it radiating through her, in the memory of his hands on her hips, in the hard line of his cock beneath her. She wants to hear it anyways.

Logan stares thoughtfully into Rogue’s eyes. “Yeah.”

She would tease him for how long he’d taken to answer if she didn’t already know why. She had asked him to be truthful, so he had thought about it. The sentimentality of it all makes her smile.

“Take them off.”

When Rogue releases his wrists, he obeys. She gasps when she feels his cock slap against her thigh, shifting until it slides through her legs to lay flat on Logan’s belly.

Rogue lowers herself again, hands flat on Logan’s chest. She’s more than wet enough for the length of his cock to slide across her folds. Toes curling as she grinds down again, Logan’s hands reappearing on her hips to guide the movement, she squeezes Logan’s cock between her pussy and his own stomach. Her whole body shudders when she feels him throb against her.

“Fuck, I’m goin’ to hell for this one.”

Rogue shakes her head. She doesn’t turn to look at Logan, too focused on the way his cock twitches, precum leaking from the tip. His hips kick when she peels back the foreskin.

“I want ya to wanna.”

Fuck her, that is. The thought comes out half-formed. She’s riding the waves of Logan’s want as she continues to grind down into him, painfully slow and deliberate, teasing, enjoying the way her clit drags against him on the downstroke. His grip on her hips grows more and more tense, but he doesn’t try to rush her.

Logan’s going to fuck her. The anticipation makes her flush.

“You didn’t get condoms.”

Logan raises his eyebrows. “You got one chance to fuck and you wanna do it with a rubber?”

Slowly, Rogue shakes her head no. She keeps grinding down on him, fast and shallow.

“You got Plan B.”

Logan’s pulling her hips down now, fingertips pressing into her skin with a bruising pressure. It feels good.

“Not gonna get you pregnant, that’s — “

The rest of Logan’s sentence is cut off as Rogue is launched into a memory of Logan’s face pressed into the crook of Jean’s neck, the weight of two people pressing him down into the mattress as Scott’s cock pulses alongside Logan’s, rutting desperately into Jean using what little leverage he can get until he finally topples over the edge.

Rogue slaps her open palm over her mouth. She moans, her whole body shuddering under the memory of that particular climax.

For a moment, she’s completely overtaken by that thought. Inside of her, both of them, at the same time — Logan’s planning on cumming inside of her —

“Not planning, shit just happens — “

Rogue blinks. She freezes. Her thoughts ricochet between the realization that she’d said the last part of that thought out loud and her own complete lack of care.

“What if I want you to?”

Logan’s voice is tense. “Rogue.”

She scowls in annoyance. She doesn’t understand why he has to baby her all the time. “Logan, I’ll take the pills!” She starts grinding against him again, as desperate as she is frustrated. “Just wanna feel what it’s like — “

“No,” Logan says. When Rogue finally meets his eyes, his skin is grey and his veins are bulging. “Need a break.”

“Oh,” Rogue says. Logan’s pushes her upwards. Switching gears takes a few seconds. “Oh!”

With a frustrated groan, she stands and starts to furiously dig through her bag. Logan stays stock-still on the floor, presumably recovering from having Rogue leeching off his life force.

Hands shaking, Rogue pulls on a pair of tights before perching on Logan’s hips once again. She moves to touch his chest only to realize that she can’t. Her palms slam violently into the cabinet and the flimsy sliding door to the bathroom. She rocks back and forth on his cock, grinding her teeth at the fabric separating the two of them, and thinks about the feeling of Scott’s cock throbbing against his, base to tip, the sticky sensation of his cum as Logan kept thrusting into Jean, the two of them spilling inside of her together.

Rogue is going to be fucking damned if she doesn’t get to experience that before she dies.

She glares daggers into Logan. “I want you to cum in me.”

Logan smacks his lips. “Rogue. You understand that the damn pills aren’t a hundred percent — “

“Don’t care,” she hisses.

“ — effective, and they’re also probably gonna make you really — “

“Don’t care.”

“Sick.”

She wants to know what it feels like. Her fingernails scrape against the textured glass door. Logan carefully pulls up the waistband of her tights before he grabs her hips and helps her grind down against him again. She squeezes Logan’s ribcage between her knees. The friction makes her feel like she’s on fire.

“What happened to me being on top?”

Trying to change the subject. “Don’t think I’m gonna forget,” Rogue hisses. The corners of Logan’s lips twist in amusement. “And I still wanna. But we can try this first.”

Logan hums. “First, huh?”

He slides his palms up and down the length of Rogue’s thighs.

“You’re the one who said ya weren’t just gonna make me cum once.”

He’s rough when he squeezes her ass. “Guess I did say that.”

“You did.” She bites into her lip.

“Probably better this way. Gonna be easier for you. ‘Cept your legs might get tired.” Logan’s voice is rough. Rogue feels like she can’t wait any longer.

“You good?”

Logan laughs. “Probably gonna need another break, but — yeah.”

In the moment, Rogue doesn’t care. She stands, peeling her tights off before she collapses back onto Logan. The rush of his skin on hers fades as the weight of his cock in her hand settles in. Rogue bites her lip, hesitating with the head at her entrance.

The clamor of Logan’s thoughts lets her know how mundane this act is for him. Flashes of the thousand other times he’s done this before flip past her mind’s eye like stills from a scrapbook. It pisses her off. She doesn’t need or even want this moment to be romantic — but she still wants it to be special.

With gritted teeth, she shuts out Logan’s thoughts and focuses on the sensation of him flowing into her. Eyes closed, she can feel the way her power siphons off some piece of his soul, filling her up. With a slow exhale, she slips the head inside herself.

The sensation is immediately different than that of her own fingers. Warm and soft, she can feel Logan’s cock react with little twitches as she inches further down, squeezing and relaxing around him as she tries to get a feel for the sensation of being full.

It really is big. Rogue bites into her lip, wrinkling her nose against the stretch. She almost vocalizes the thought, but doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction. Logan’s hands are rubbing soothingly against her lower back. His breathy sighs sound almost like a comforting shh.

The way it feels for him is enough to make her throb. Warm, tight — satisfying. Feels like he’s scratching an itch deep inside of her, and she slips even further down, wincing against the stretch. She keeps going anyways, shoulders starting to shake with pain, only backing off when she feels the head brush against her cervix. It’s not painful, no force to back it up, but the sensation leaves her skin breaking out in ice-cold goosebumps.

Frustration makes tears well in her eyes. “It’s too big.”

Logan does shush her this time. One palm rests comfortingly in the small of her back while he fumbles at the foot of the mattress for the bottle of lube. He snaps the lid open, a few slick droplets sliding down his fingers before he touches her clit.

Rogue groans. She lets Logan guide her hips. The fingers on her clit don’t move as he has her rock her hips back and forth. The angle of his cock shifts inside of her, the glide of her clit on his calloused fingers leaving her pulsing around him on every downstroke.

She whines, bracing her palms on his pecs. It starts to feel good again.

When she tries to angle her hips down, Logan’s palm hand slides under her ass and pulls her back up.

Only half of his cock inside of her, Rogue growls. “I want the whole thing in, Logan.”

He chuckles at her. “Don’t get greedy.” His hand is on her hip, encouraging her to grind down on him in little circles. “Just give it a minute. Enjoy how it feels.”

Rogue scowls, but she still does as he asks. She grinds down on him in little circles, the motion jerky and unfamiliar. Her nails dig into his skin.

Logan’s inside of her. The thought makes her throb. The only reaction Logan gives is to exhale, but as she saps away his energy she knows how fucking good it feels to him anyways. Even as he tries to make it about Rogue, make sure she feels good, he wants to thrust up into her, wants to push the hair out of her eyes and bite down the column of her neck and press her full breasts up against his chest as he fucks up into her.

A moan parts her lips. She slips further down onto Logan’s cock.

“That’s it.”

Logan starts teasing her clit, now. His middle finger traces circles around it, stroking up and down the hood and squeezing it lightly between his fingers. Rogue keeps rocking her hips, finding just the right angle to make it feel good, the stretch at her entrance moving from a sharp pain to a dull, satisfying ache.

“Just like that. Take it slow.”

He’s not even thinking about the fact that he’s talking. Logan’s watching his own cock disappear inside of Rogue, watching her use him not just to get off, but to try to fill this gaping hole in her life. Rogue blinks, the unkindness of the framing shocking her until the following wave of Logan’s arousal rocks through her.

The idea of being used turns him on. Rogue smiles.

Jean’d had a hard time taking him, too. She’d tried to hide it, but she’d been just as shaky as Rogue the first time, rubbing furiously at her own clit as she rode him, snapping at Logan that he better not cum before she was done with him —

Frowning, she grabs Logan’s nipples and pulls. The surprise makes his hips kick, sheathing another half-inch inside of her before he settles again.

“Stop,” she hisses.

Logan’s brow furrows in confusion. He starts to pull his hands back, only for Rogue to grab him by the wrists and place his hands on her hips.

“I mean, stop — “ Rogue had said she wouldn’t bring it up. “Think about me.”

A beat passes before a wide-eyed expression of total mortification slashes across his features. Thinly, he mutters, “Sorry.”

Rogue groans as she starts circling her hips again. She doesn’t know whether it’s arousal or frustration or both. She doesn’t care if Logan wants to think about Jean later, but right now, it should be all about her.

“‘S’fine.” Experimentally, she leans forward just far enough to allow Logan’s cock to slide out of her as she moves her hips. Her jaw drops, eyelids fluttering as she slides him back in. “Just tell me I’m special.”

Logan’s attention is fully on her, now. He keeps his hips glued to the floor even as she starts rocking back and forth on his cock, fucking herself slow and shallow. She sinks down as far as she can, groaning in frustration when she starts to ache before bottoming out.

“You’re special.” Logan’s voice is set to a low growl. It’s not something he would’ve ever thought on his own, but it’s not an untrue sentiment.

“Why’s your stupid dick so fucking big?” Rogue grinds her teeth as she continues to fuck herself onto him as quickly as she can tolerate.

A breezy laugh leaves Logan’s lips as he slows her pace, keeping her from pushing herself too hard. She hates how he knows even without being able to see into Rogue’s soul, hates that he feels like every fucking woman he’s been with is special, hates that he cares more about Rogue than nearly all of them anyways.

“Goddamn fucking playboy.”

Rogue doesn’t really think about it before she speaks. She feels herself smirk when Logan laughs. His cock keeps rutting shallowly into her, but he allows the pace to increase.

“Tell me — “ Rogue already knows. But she wants to hear him talk anyways. “Tell me I feel good.”

Her palms hit the floor on either side of Logan’s head. Eyes locked, both of them breathing hard, he’s inside of her.

“Feels — “

She shakes her head. “Say it dirtier.”

Logan laughs. He’s into this, into her — can feel it in the way his cock trembles inside of her, in the way he can’t take his mind off the idea of finally bottoming out inside of her, in the reverberations of his soul inside of hers.

“Tight little cunt feels so good around me.”

Rogue’s toes curl as she squeezes him. Involuntary, at first, and then purposeful. The crescent moons Logan’s nails leave on her hips tingle for a split-second before the pain completely washes away.

He wouldn’t talk like that if he didn’t fucking love this. Rogue knows. He barely talks at all.

She wants more.

“Tell me you wanna — “

“Wanna fuck you.”

It feels just a little feral, the way he shakes beneath her. He won’t lose control, Rogue knows, can feel that iron grip he keeps on his own instincts. But the presence of it in his mind, the wild urge to take her like an animal, the scent of sweat and lust and sex overwhelming them.

Long strands of hair tacking to Logan’s neck, Rogue nods.

Logan smirks. Rogue’s thighs are shaking. He squeezes her waist tight, holding her still, and mutters, “Good girl,” as he thrusts up into her.

It doesn’t hurt. Rogue’s jaw drops as she feels his hipbones dig into her. He pulls back, the motion shallow but controlled as he fucks up into her again, and again, not just straight thrusting but a circular motion that sends reverberations through her clit.

“Good?”

Wordlessly, Rogue nods. Her arms shake as she tries to hold herself up. It’s not a lack of strength — she feels like she could collapse Logan’s ribcage between her thighs if it weren’t for his fucking metal skeleton — but her building orgasm, distant and building painfully slow.

Logan releases her hips with a grunt. The motion of their fucking, slow and shallow, immediately becomes sloppier. His palm on the small of her back steadies her.

“Come on.” His voice is quiet, the sound of Rogue’s rapid breath nearly drowning him out. “You too.”

She starts to move her hips in tandem with his. Back and forth in a rocking motion, they find a rhythm. Moving together, the motion isn’t as shallow anymore, the pace quickly increasing, the slap of their hips together filling the trailer, Logan’s balls tensing as they brush against her, noses nearly brushing as they stare into each others’ eyes, and Rogue is going to cum around him —

Forcefully, Logan pulls her down on his cock. “Need to break soon.”

Rogue’s nails scratch down his chest. “No,” she hisses, even as she knows that’s not an option.

“Givin’ you a warning.” He strokes his fingers across her forehead, clearing sticky strands of hair away. “Not gonna rush your first time.”

With a whine, she circles her hips around Logan’s cock. It feels so fucking good inside of her. Why had she never tried this before, even with a toy? She doesn’t want to let him go, but when she starts to feel the insistent thrum of Logan’s pain, the connection sputtering like the last sip through a straw, she stands up.

Logan slides out of her, cock slapping against his own belly with a wet, slick noise. She clenches around the phantom sensation of him, stumbling back to find her leggings thrown haphazardly over the table. She slides them back on, the wet spot at the crotch cold and uncomfortable. She grabs her gloves while she’s thinking about — damned if she won’t be able to touch him again.

“Come here.”

Logan’s still on the floor, gesturing with two hands. She steps carefully over him, moving further forward at the insistence of his fingers hooked around her calves, until she’s straddling Logan’s face.

“Turn around — yeah.”

Rogue lowers herself without having to be asked. She tugs her gloves on as Logan’s lips find the mound of her cunt beneath the fabric. He can’t slide inside of her like this, but he can use his teeth, dulled by the flesh of his lips, to squeeze at Rogue’s own.

Knees shaking, she slides gloved hands down his chest. She thumbs at his nipples as he does the same to her clit, slick leaking through the fabric within a matter of seconds. Abdominal muscles clenched, her fingers trace out the grooves beneath a thin layer of fat, hair rustling between her fingers as she finally reaches his cock.

Unthinkingly, she grinds down against his face when he sucks at her clit.

“Sorry,” she hisses.

Logan shakes his head in disagreement. Gripping her hips tightly, he rocks her into his mouth. She doesn’t protest, missing the texture of his tongue on her but loving the friction anyways, squeezing his cock between her fingers. She’s shocked at how hard it is, absolutely no give to it as she slides her first loosely up and down the length.

She only raises her hips — to Logan’s apparent displeasure, if his low growl is any indication — when she feels herself about to cum.

Logan tries to pull her back down. Rogue doesn’t have any trouble resisting, laughter filling her chest.

“Words,” she teases. “Use your — “

“Wanna make you cum like this.”

Rogue keeps stroking his cock, fanning the flames. He can’t be that far off himself. “Absolutely the fuck not.”

His head surges up, lips teasing at her clit for a split second before Rogue raises herself further, ensuring her clothed cunt is completely out of Logan’s reach. His fingers dig painfully into her thighs.

“Gonna cum while we’re fuckin’, Logan.”

She lowers herself onto his face again, grip on his dick slipping as Logan licks ferociously at her pussy again, inhaling deeply through his nose pressed up against her entrance, flesh-dulled teeth imprisoning her clit while the tip of his tongue teases her through the fabric.

At the edge, she pulls her hips up again. Logan moans, the back of his head thunking into the floor.

Rogue’s panting. “You really like doin’ that, huh?”

Logan doesn’t respond verbally. He turns his head to kiss at her thighs. She thinks she can feel him nod his head in agreement.

The way his words seem to have failed him makes her laugh. She drags three fingers up the wet length of his cock, sandwiching it between her digits and his own stomach. A yelp leaves her when Logan yanks her down onto his face again, catching her by surprise.

The force of his lips against her clit almost makes her cum.

With more than a little force, she rips herself out of his grip.

“Fuckin’ stop,” Rogue hisses. She grabs both of Logan’s nipples between her thumb and forefingers and pulls them up as far as they’ll go. His hips lift desperately off the ground — not the outcome she had intended. “Not gonna cum right now.”

His breath is hot on her thighs, his teeth insistent. “Same position,” he asks. “Or you wanna switch?”

She knows he still needs another minute. She feels too empty. Desperately, she wants the seconds to tick by faster.

“Dunno,” she says. Rogue can’t think past the novelty of having Logan inside of her. And when she lowers her hips, completely subconsciously, the way Logan’s lips pluck at her clit doesn’t help. “What do you wanna do?”

He laughs. “Not my first time.”

Rogue doesn’t know how to respond to that. Logan’s tongue circles her clit — not teasing, but rough and ferocious. She moans, her cunt starting to squeeze and contract around nothing, deeply unsatisfying even as her body wants to spill over the edge.

Violently, she rips her hips away. “Cut it out,” she hisses, smacking Logan in the chest.

It isn’t until she hears the heavy thud of her fist over his heart that she realizes how hard she’d actually hit him. She winches as she pulls away to reveal an angry red mark, lips poised around the words, shit, sorry — when Logan moans.

A beat passes. Rogue laughs. “Wow, alright then.”

“Shut up,” Logan hisses.

“I will if we can start again.”

Logan bites at her thigh, teeth sharp and painful. She yelps, about to snap at him before she realizes that they’re probably about even now. Logan’s healing factor washes the pain away in an instant, leaving only the satisfying memory behind.

Distantly, she understands why he might like that.

“In a minute.”

He pulls Rogue’s hips down again, hands pulling insistently until she settles almost her entire weight on him. Logan moans, the sound muffled by her folds. Even as a blush works its way across her cheeks, she can’t deny how much she loves the way that Logan catches the fabric between his teeth like he’s going to rip through just to get at her cunt.

She finds herself rocking down against his tongue, his lower lip, feels his palms grope greedily at her ass through the fabric. It’s hard to remember that he’d been so hesitant about this, so shy about enjoying her body, she’d wanted him to enjoy her, to do this for real, and he is, and she’s so grateful —

With a whine, she tries to pull herself away as she approaches the edge. Logan resists, catching the thin fabric between his canines and ripping right through her leggings.

Logan’s hot, warm lips against her clit, the way his tongue immediately squeezes inside her, the rush of animalistic desire to make her cum over and over and over again is almost enough to make her do just that.

Instead, Rogue grunts as she stands. Without thinking, she kicks Logan in the shoulder. “Fuck you.”

His fingers twist around her ankles, a stupid grin on his face. His lips, his chin, his cheeks, and his nose are all shiny and slick. He’s about to say something when Rogue cuts him off.

“And stop ruinin’ my fuckin’ clothes.”

Logan laughs. She peels her leggings off and drops them directly onto Logan’s face before straddling him again.

She doesn’t hesitate before sliding Logan’s cock into her again. The full length slides into her without a modicum of resistance. Her body pleads for an orgasm, the effort to hold her hips still as she tries to calm down, to cum when she’s actually getting fucked, making her tremble.

“Tell me when you’re ready.”

Logan’s waiting patiently. His thoughts ricochet around her mind, difficult to keep at bay when she’s so distracted. His hands wander up to squeeze at her tits right after the impulse rockets through Rogue’s brain, the same thought about her ass, trying to stay still so she can have what she wants, and he wants to make her cum, wants to make this worth it for her.

“Hard,” she breathes. Logan’s cock twitches inside of her. “Want it hard, please — “

Logan doesn’t hesitate. He grabs her waist and jerks her up like a toy, fucking into her so rough Rogue can’t help but scream. She can’t keep track of the words that spill from her mouth, some string made up of curses, Logan’s name, and disbelieving oh my gods.

Not even a minute passes before Rogue cums. It starts deep inside of her, a tension coiling tight around Logan’s cock from root to tip, slowly spreading up through her chest and down her limbs, the brush of Logan’s cock against her cervix straddling the line between pleasurable and painful.

“Fuck, it keeps happening.”

Her eyes are screwed shut, Logan’s palms on her ribs, and he keeps fucking her not at his pace but at hers, matching the pace that she squeezes around him, rattling through her like an earthquake.

“That’s right.” Logan growls. Rogue twists her fingers in his, circling her hips as she rides the last dregs of her orgasm out. “Cum on my cock.”

It’s like something out of porn. She’d laugh in another circumstance, but instead she just feels herself pulse around Logan, her core shaking and giving out.

It occurs to her, as both her and Logan finally stop moving, that he’d been right. He is good at this.

Rogue bites her lip and tries not to resent him for it.

She isn’t sure when Logan’s knees had risen up, but she leans back against them, unable to support her own body weight.

“You good?”

Breathlessly, Rogue nods. Shaky, clumsy fingers comb strands of white hair away from her eyes. Logan’s still hard inside of her. It isn’t until she’s caught her breath that the disappointment hits her. Logan hadn’t cum inside of her. She frowns, fingers scrabbling at Logan’s hairy thighs until she finds his knees.

Her limbs feel like jelly. Even so, she tries to push herself up.

“Woah, woah.” Logan’s hands pull her back down. He holds in a moan, exhaling through his nose. “Give it a minute.”

She whines. She keeps contracting around Logan involuntarily, his arousal reverberating down the connection. He’s still thinking about her, about how beautiful she is, the tight squeeze of her cumming around him, sweat on her skin, the race of his healing as she saps away at his soul.

Already, Rogue finds herself rocking back and forth. “Want more.”

Logan smirks. He’s happy to oblige.

He moves quickly. Pulls Rogue’s mostly-limp body flat against his chest, flipping the two of them in one swift movement. The snap of her head against the metal flooring is cushioned by Logan’s hand.

Slick with sweat, Logan’s forehead rests against hers. He sets the pace slow, shallow, and Rogue shakes her head.

“Faster.”

Logan does as she asks. She doesn’t have much leverage in this position, relying on Logan to set the pace. She’s not as sensitive as she was before, but it’s not worse. Just different. She bites into her lip as Logan’s gaze bores into her, his strokes long and thorough, her knees squeezing around his waist.

One of his arms wraps around her waist. “Tell me how you want it.”

Rogue’s baffled until she feels the angle shift. She wrinkles her nose, murmuring some negative response. Logan tries again, and she hums at the satisfying feeling of being full, nodding her head — she thinks that’s what he’s after until he tilts her hips even further, back arched at an almost comical angle, and she feels his cock slip even deeper inside of her, fingers digging into the back of his neck.

“That’s it.”

Rogue has no idea which of them is speaking. Logan’s body is pressed flush to hers as he starts fucking her in earnest, no longer stretching her out but filling her up. Just this side of pain, tears prick in the corners of Rogue’s eyes as she bites into his neck until she tastes blood.

For a moment, his consciousness completely engulfs hers. She sees herself out of his eyes, feels the pressure of her hands on his neck and her thighs on his hips and the warmth of her cunt around him. Her fingers knot in his hair, pulling his head up until she meets her own brown eyes. Ill-formed thoughts flutter through her mind’s eye, disbelief and shame and affection, their lips crashing together, and for one moment Rogue understands herself as a receptacle, receiving every part of Logan and fucking loving it.

She feels it when he’s approaching the edge. Pounding into her, fast and brutal, he’s going to pull out and cum on her stomach. It doesn’t even feel voluntary when she locks her ankles in the small of his back, whimpering no, no, no against his lips.

She’s strong enough to keep him exactly where she wants him. Regardless, Logan doesn’t put up a fight anyways. He’s gasping into her mouth, the embers of another orgasm lighting in the pit of Rogue’s gut as she whispers, “Do it inside, cum inside me,” over and over again, Logan setting a punishing pace, snarling into her ear as he finally reaches the edge.

She hadn’t expected she’d be able to feel it when Logan came inside of her. His thrusts are staccato, the pace uneven, his cock twitching and spitting, his cum impossibly warm. The surprise of it is just enough to push Rogue over the edge as well, her whole body shaking as she cums a second time, so intense it aches in the core of her bones.

She whines when Logan slides out of her. He hisses as he does so, mouthing mindlessly at the column of her neck as he leans back just far enough to sink four fingers inside of her, calloused thumb dragging over her clit. The friction ignites her orgasm anew, aftershocks rattling through her, her core completely giving out as it tries to clench up again, wordless whines spilling from her lips as Logan finger-fucks her through her second — or third, she doesn’t know, doesn’t care, holy shit — orgasm.

It isn’t until she’s twitching with overstimulation that he pulls out.

“Fuck,” he says.

Rogue opens her mouth to respond only to find herself completely incapable of forming words. Her mind is a mess. Logan’s still coiled tight around her. Like a hug.

Logan’s shame doesn’t set in until the silence does.

He leans back, collapsing onto his ass with a few inches of clearance between him and Rogue. She watches him rub at the bridge of his nose with his clean hand. The other is shiny with slick. And his own cum.

Rogue doesn’t even bother to hold in her moan when she pushes and feels a hot, thick glob of it slide out of her.

“God fucking damn it.”

Logan’s gaze is fixed between her legs. It might be embarrassing if Rogue weren’t so fucking exhausted. She uses what little energy she has to kick at his shin, receiving a shot of arousal and anxiety as she does so.

“Stop it,” she mutters. “‘S’what I wanted.”

Logan doesn’t respond. His anxiety crackles through the air. It doesn’t occur to her until Logan’s own consciousness, running rampant through Rogue’s own, suggests on the back of a whisper that this may not be the first time Logan has made this mistake to disastrous consequences.

A laugh rolls out of her. It shouldn’t. It’s not funny, but —

“Stop stressin’. Too late now.”

Carefully, she pushes herself up onto her elbows. Logan’s expression has receded into mere annoyance. She grins at him.

“And, you know what?” He grunts. His gaze only flicks up to hers for a second before settling back between her legs. Rogue licks her lips. “Means there ain’t no harm in you doin’ it again.”

A beat passes. Rogue can hear his heartbeat speed up.

“Holy fuckin’ shit.” He laughs, rubbing at his cheeks. A giggle rattles Rogue’s chest. “You’re a menace. Just — you know that, right?”

“Well,” Rogue says, “I do now.”

Chapter Text

Her footsteps echo cavernously through the garage.

She’d been looking for him all day. He’d been around, she knows — a little shake of Ororo’s head, Rogue’s lips in a thin line as she pointed down the hall, Kurt’s innocent elaboration that he hadn’t seemed like he was feeling very well, Piotr’s extremely transparent misdirection as he led her in the opposite direction.

It’s late at night, now. She’d been able to hear the kids rustling in their dorm, whispering quietly. Rogue’s voice had stood a little more clear than the rest, softly encouraging a younger student to return to bed after a nightmare. Someone had asked if she’d been having any of her own, and her response had been barely audible from down the hallway — don’t we all?

Futile regret nips insistently at her heels. It only manages to sink its teeth in when her footsteps finally come to a halt.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Scott doesn’t turn when she speaks. The tone is deep, rumbling unfamiliarly through her chest. The wrongness of it, the broad palms at the edge of her vision, the prick of hair under her tongue as she licks her lips, is almost jarring enough to snap her consciousness into place.

Scott sighs. “Please go away.”

The wave of righteous anger washes her under the wake of the memory. “No.”

Not even the booming echo of her voice is enough to get him to turn around. His shoulders are slumped, this sad little picture of a man. She can’t stand him.

“Look at me.”

The anger that bubbles up in the pit of her gut is irrational and all-consuming. Scott’s lips are a thin, emotionless line as she forcibly twists his shoulder. His body rocks against the force, eyes hidden behind his visor. She sees red.

“Where the fuck have you been?”

It’s been a month. They’ve barely spoken, stern little nods in the hallway and Scott’s head turning to acknowledge her whenever she peers at him out of the corner of her eye. She’d wanted to give him time, but it’s become clear now that Scott is avoiding her.

“I’m right here. Doing everything I need to do.”

She hadn’t. She doesn’t need Scott to point that out. She’d stumbled in through the foyer at nearly six in the morning yesterday, reeking of booze. Everyone thinks Scott is handling it like a champ. As if the death of your fiance is the kind of thing anyone should be able to handle well.

She’s the only one who knows the truth. She knows that Scott reserves his disappearances for the wee hours of the night. She can smell the exhaustion on him even when his visor hides the bags under his eyes. She knows he doesn’t cry, and doesn’t visit the grave, and threw all of the items she’d kept in his room away within the week.

“Really?” She asks. She’s trying to ignore the fact that he’s sitting on the hood of Jean’s car. It had spent the majority of its life cloistered in the garage. Jean had always had Scott drive her around. “Cause from where I’m standin’, feels like you don’t give a shit that Jean’s dead.”

She feels so empty. Scott’s shoulder is warm under her palm. It makes her rage spit and hiss. She’d almost thought they’d had something besides Jean. Years of thorny rivalry and hatred budding into something new. She hadn’t thought it would make her happy, but she’d thought it would be something, something real, something meaningful only for Scott to completely snuff it out like nothing had ever been there. To snuff Jean out like she had never been there, erasing everything that reminded him of her, trying to act like everything is normal when it’s not, it’s not —

Scott’s gaze, obscured and impassive, turns as if to meet hers.

“Fuck you.”

She makes the first move. Yanks Scott’s fragile little body off the hood of her car and throws him into the floor. There’s no other action, no other reaction that’s even possible. She slams him into the ground when he tries to get up, feels him struggle beneath her but just holds him down.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Scott’s hissing, pushing futilely up against her chest. He’s weaker than her. She doesn’t care.

“I’m the one who’s acting fucking normal.” She grabs the collar of his shirt and gets right up in his face, spittle flying at him as she speaks. “Not like some emotionless fucking robot.”

“What the hell do you think you know about me, you fucking animal?”

Scott throws a punch. It lands on her cheek. Barely even hurts, but leaves Scott cradling his bruised knuckles under his chin. He’s such a fucking bitch.

She grabs his hair. “I know that if the way you’re fucking acting is how you actually felt about her, you didn’t deserve her for a second.”

Scott laughs. “Rich coming from a guy who spent all his time with her scheming how he could get her in bed with him.”

“You don’t know shit about what I wanted.”

She’d wanted more. Would have settled for just about any version of that. But she’d wanted more than sex.

“I know you don’t respect her now and you never did.”

Words die out. She wants to kill Scott, but she won’t — as much of a scumbag as he is, he doesn’t deserve that. She does sock him in the gut, lets him punch her until his knuckles crack and bleed, lets him twist his fingers in her hair and drag her down and have their mouths collide in a pit of teeth and blood aching memory.

She lets herself melt into it.

It occurs to her, in some deep and terrifying part of her mind, that this is what she’d wanted. That this is what she had needed. That the abyss of loneliness that lies in wait beneath the rage isn’t just borne of so many hurts piled atop one another that she can’t even remember where they began, but in the fact that Scott doesn’t fucking want her anymore —

“Jean made her choice.” Scott’s panting. His chin is covered in blood, his lips swollen. “And it was a noble one. She’s gone, nothing’s going to change that, and there are people who are still fucking alive who need me, and I don’t want to talk about this with you!“

His voice doesn’t even crack when he speaks.

Something inside of her aches. More than anything, in that moment, she hates herself.

“Yeah, ‘cause you just want to fuck me, right?” Scott’s lips twist into some unrecognizable expression. “Just needed Jean’s permission. Just needed mommy to make you choke on my fucking cock. I know that wasn’t her idea, Scott, I fucking know.” Nothing more to it. Never was. “I’m nobody. Just the guy who tried to steal your fucking girlfriend, right?”

Scott swallows. “Fiance.”

His voice cracks this time.

The laughter that boils out of her burns her on the way out. “As if you didn’t fucking love it.”

They’re grinding on each other. She doesn’t know who starts it, just feels Scott’s little dick straining up against hers. She’s nothing. She’s nobody. She wants to bash Scott’s head in for being such a fucking pussy. She knows he cares about Jean, she knows, but she’s not fucking okay —

“You think you’re acting normal, but you’re not.”

She misses Scott. Misses when she could take his shit just to piss him off, embarrass him in front of the kids, whisper some dig about his tiny little dick as they passed each other in the hall, knees brushing as they sat next to each other on the footboard bench in Jean’s room.

“You are fucking unstable.”

He’s hard against her, hips grinding furiously against hers.

“You have to fucking grieve or you’re going to fuckin’ snap.”

Hands clasped in the nape of her neck drag her down. “Yeah, and I’m sure you’d know all about snapping.”

She wants to suck Scott dry, wants to leave him a fragile little shell of a person, wants to —

“Yeah, I would.” It weighs on her every day, leaves her shaking in the middle of the night, a curse she’s going to carry with her forever. “You’re the one who doesn’t know shit, slim.”

“I. Am. Fine.”

Scott’s spit lands on her cheek. She laughs in his face.

“And I’m a pretty fuckin’ princess.”

When Scott lunges up to kiss him, she immediately pulls back. He rolls like a doll in her hands, barely any force required to slam his wrists into the concrete. They’re both breathing hard, the sound echoing off the slick metal flat walls. Scott arches his back like a fucking whore.

In his ear, she growls, “Now who’s the one who just wants sex?”

They’d never fucked before. Not like this, at least.

It’s not the first time she’s fucked a man. The mechanics aren’t wholly unfamiliar to her, but the way Scott’s body writhes under her feels alien regardless. His jeans slide down narrow hips soon as she loosens his belt. This isn’t how things are supposed to be. It’s not how this is supposed to happen.

She doesn’t care. Her spit provides just enough give for her to be able to slide her cock into Scott. She holds his wrists down and he whines that it fucking hurts — perhaps the first time she’s ever heard him say that.

Tears are streaming down his cheeks.

She hates him. She hates that he whimpers underneath her, complaining that it hurts just as often as he begs her not to stop. She hates that he’s even fucking talking in the first place. She hates that this is the first time she’s seen him cry since it happened. She hates that he wants to martyr Jean, make her some symbol for his continued existence instead of just being sad that she’s fucking gone. She hates that he can’t deal with his own feelings, and she hates that she wants him, hates that she needs him.

She hates that they can’t have anything without Jean.

Vulnerability pulses in her chest. She hates herself. She wants to say something, say anything, but the words fail her. Hate and rage roil in her stomach, hips pistoning into Scott without a hint of finesse, growling and spitting and biting into his back until he bleeds. She’s just an animal. She knows it.

Scott’s head lolls in her grasp. He’s sobbing now, muttering her name, contorting himself as he tries to grasp at her hips, her shoulders, anything.

She wants to tell him that she loves him.

“Cry harder,” she says instead.

She buries her face in the crook of his neck, chest shaking, and pretends she’s not doing the same.

The lights go out, and she falls.

She can’t breathe.

Torn up by frostbite, her feet are two slabs of meat which barely support her as she runs. Icy air burns in her lungs. She’s running, her screams dissipating into empty air. If a man dies in the forest, and no one’s there to see it, was he ever really alive in the first place?

That night with Scott had been one of her biggest regrets.

She runs so she doesn’t have to think, but it’s not enough anymore. She’s alone, and she always will be. Weeks of avoiding each other had stretched into months had stretched into years. The heat of Scott’s criticisms had been reduced to a half-hearted simmer before he’d finally abandoned the pretense completely.

They didn’t speak. Scott didn’t look at her. One day, she’d given up hoping that he ever would again. She’d convinced herself that everything she’d loved about them had come from Jean. However batshit, however illogical, she would’ve done anything for Jean — even convinced herself that she loved Scott.

The wolves howl. Sleet stings her face. She’s naked. She still remembers the hot press of Jean’s body against hers in the medbay. Remembers how she’d felt the same — the slope of her shoulders, the warmth of her lips, the press of her breasts as they’d kissed.

Years later, she still doesn’t know what had tipped her off. Maybe the look in Jean’s eye, the way she’d smiled, her coy need for control replaced with predatory submission. Perhaps it was just the certainty, solid as her hand curled around Jean’s warm wrist, that Scott was dead and Jean had killed him.

She stumbles, pins and needles gnawing their way up her ankles.

She had been wrong. The weight of Jean and Scott’s twin gravestones, nestled next to one another behind the mansion, had weighted exponentially heavier than just one.

Logan thought Scott was a coward for years after he’d died.

It felt like picking up pieces of Scott’s mess. Logan had put Jean down while Soctt, a coward until the very end, had gone up in smoke.

But Logan found himself wondering what it had felt like for Scott to kiss Jean that last time. If losing himself completely within her had been like returning home. If Scott had wanted for her to swallow him whole, if his bones had ached with the same unspeakable loneliness that Logan’s had. If Logan had said I love you and not cry harder, Scott might have turned and lost himself in Logan, swallowed him whole instead of having to gut her, screaming as he fucking ended her, Jean’s blood dripping from his hands, her hands, save me, —

The bird is staring down at Rogue when her eyes flick open.

The sharp sound of Logan’s claws sliding back into his skin cuts across the sound of his breathing. Her left shoulder is lined with goosebumps, save for one spot about the size of her palm. Warm and sweaty, she can still feel the phantom touch of Logan’s skin against hers.

Slowly, eyes wide, Rogue pulls the sheet back over her bare skin.

Logan lurches over her, a thunder of limbs in near-darkness. Rogue shakes under the sheet, trying to get her own panicked breathing under control. Her chest burns. Toes curl around the loose fabric of her socks. In the front of the trailer, something heavy hits the floor with a thud. Logan’s heavy breathing makes her feel like she’s still in the dream.

Slowly, she sits up. Her arms are bare. She’d worn one of Logan’s wifebeaters. A mistake.

She gropes for the light. Scott stares up at her. That hadn’t been a normal dream. As if that had been in doubt. Seconds ticking by marked by the rapid pace of Logan’s breathing, the details only grow more and more concrete. Rogue shivers.

Her feet whisper across the floor. The textured glass digs into her bare shoulder. Irresponsible. She sniffles.

Light creeps past her ankles, over discarded clothes, and up the hunched arch of Logan’s back. For a moment, she considers walking up to him. Her heartbeat races. Between blinks, she can still taste Scott’s blood on her lips. Her stomach churns. Her throat burns with nausea.

It’s not surprising when Logan lurches towards the door. The trailer rocks. He growls, hand on the flimsy handle. What’s more surprising is that he hesitates.

Logan’s arm goes slack at his side. He must know. That must be what he’s reacting to. Distantly, Rogue wonders if he’d been able to feel her in his mind. She breathes, biting into her lip.

“Sorry.”

His voice is ragged. She doesn’t respond, leaning her head onto the glass. The word could’ve been meant for her, himself, the memory of people long dead. Even if the apology had been meant for her, it’s not necessary.

“Always wish it went the other way, too.”

It’s a lie. Rogue had never thought about it before. She’d never had any reason to, before now. Perhaps it’s just the lingering fog of Logan’s personality in her mind, but she can’t find the right words.

Logan glances at her out of the corner of his eye. Rogue reaches out her hand. His gaze flicks to the floor.

Rogue’s hand retreats. She wishes Logan could hear what she’s thinking. She wishes she could be something more than a parasite, an empty cup, a silent ghost watching others’ lives play out. Instead, she sits with affection and grief and anger and a reckless lack of fear trapped under her skin.

“I’m not judging you.”

The words are wrong. Rogue knows this as soon as they leave her lips, the image of Scott writhing and begging and crying beneath her flashing across her mind. It’s one kind of violation to witness Logan’s memories or joy, intimacy, grief. As inappropriate as it probably is for Rogue to know the details, it’s all expected. But Logan’s regret, his shame, the inherent vulnerability of disappointing himself — it had been different for Rogue to see that.

“I’m sorry,” Rogue says. Her mouth is dry. “We’re not gonna talk about it.”

It had been different for Bobby, too. Rogue had wound her way around the hope and love and hatred Bobby had felt towards his family, then through the contorted mess of denial, affection, self-hatred, and fear that had gone into his decision to date her.

There are knots of emotion, twisted and tangled, that she would never willingly share with anyone. Rogue’s have built on each other. She’d nearly killed her first boyfriend. She'd been with Bobby for years and hadn’t realized he was gay until she nearly killed him, too. If she’s honest with herself, she has no idea whether she dumped Remy because he was actually unhappy or because she was terrified that he could be and Rogue would never know.

All she’s doing now is adding another layer to that.

Logan’s staring at her. His expression is dark and unreadable. Rogue walks up to him slowly, hand extended. She’s not afraid when she touches the back of his neck. It’s all waves of pain, the ache of regret, the desperate longing of not knowing whether you need someone as a friend or a lover or a shoulder to cry on and receiving none of it.

Logan holds her. Standing in the recessed step before the doorway, he’s the right height for Rogue to bury her face in the crook of his neck. He smells like loneliness.

“Don’t take this the wrong way.” Rogue’s voice cracks, tears welling up in her eyes. “But I love you.”

For once, Rogue doesn’t feel like something toxic. She holds Logan, who holds her back. Life, painful and unstoppable, buzzes under his skin. She doesn’t steal it or soak it up. For one moment, Rogue’s chest shuddering as she cries into the stiff line of Logan’s neck, regret is something they share.

She doesn’t expect a response from Logan. Doesn’t need one.

But it still matters. Rogue squeezes Logan just a tighter, cries just a little harder, feels just a little less alone when he finally whispers, “Love you too.”

—

“We slept through the whole afternoon, huh?”

Logan grunts. He leans over her to crack open the window above the table. A cool gust of air whips at the curtain.

They’d intended to take a nap. It’s nearly eight now. Her fingers beat out a steady, nervous tattoo against the surface of the table. She mumbles along with the music blaring from her phone speaker, tha’cha loathe, watch me corrode like a beast in repose before cutting herself off, licking restlessly at her lips.

Logan had not, in fact, cared when she’d started playing MCR.

She’s delaying the inevitable. A lighter flicks. The sweet scent of cigarette smoke fills the trailer. Rogue takes in a deep breath, sighing as she sags into the surface of the table.

Trying not to get too upset, Rogue asks, “When do I need to leave?”

Eyebrows furrowed, Logan pulls the cigarette out from between his lips. “Six.”

Rogue stares back at him. “It’s eight.” Past, actually.

“In the morning.” Logan takes another drag. He runs fingers through his hair, staring out the open window. “Ten hours.”

“Oh.” Rogue blinks. Silence stretches on. “You want me to spend the night?”

Staring up at Logan, she feels small. Crickets chirp. She doesn’t want to leave yet.

“Up to you.” Logan shrugs. “It’s your thing.”

Rogue nods. She tucks the white strands of her hair behind her ear. “I mean, I just figured — with, you know, what just happened, you probably wouldn’t want — “

She cuts herself off, grateful for the interruption, when Logan scoffs. It feels like Logan’s nightmares should fall firmly into the category of things he doesn’t want to talk about.

“Stayin’ the night don’t mean sleepin’.”

Heat creeps across Rogue’s cheeks. Defensive, she mutters, “It could.”

“If you’re a kid.” Guitar blares next to her ear. She doesn’t understand how this can still be so goddamn embarrassing. “Thought you were all grown up now.”

Hiding her face in her hands, Rogue mutters, “I’m gonna kill you.”

Logan chuckles. She likes him. “Ten hours, whatever you wanna do. Including sleep. If you really want.”

“I don’t.” Her voice is muffled in her palms. “Just gimme a minute.”

Whatever Rogue wants. She braces her palms on her temples, pulling her eyes back as she tries to think. Ten hours. The song switches over. Did Logan just imply that he could have sex for ten hours? That doesn’t feel right. The breaks must be implied. Surely she’d get sick of it all before —

“So this is like…” Logan trails off thoughtfully. A few seconds pass in silence. “Goth?”

It takes a moment for Rogue to process the question.

“Oh my god.” She starts laughing, the sound reverberating through her entire body. “You’re so old.”

Logan doesn’t respond. It only makes Rogue laugh harder, frantic little giggles shaking her chest. She thinks about Logan and Scott, Jean, Bobby, Remy, her parents, the Professor, and for a split second she expects to dissolve into tears.

She doesn’t. The laughter continues, strange and free and undeniably stupid. She remembers that she’d narrowly avoided crying the first time she’d ever listened to Welcome to the Black Parade. The realization that the same could be said about this interaction leaves her stitches.

After at least a minute, Logan finally mumbles, “Least I’m not a damn brat.”

Rogue only laughs harder.

—

Logan is a very spontaneous person.

It’s one of the many things Rogue likes about him. Rogue likes a lot of things about him.

She likes that he doesn’t talk much. It makes what he does say feel important, even when in reality he’s just being a bit of an asshole or making a deadpan little joke.

She likes that he’s secretly a little vain. He thinks that it’s a secret, at least. He’d always been reluctant to wear anything other than his jeans and his white tanks, often accessorized with a massive belt buckle. Rogue had seen him in a flannel or a leather jacket on occasion. More than once, she’d caught him fussing with his hair in the early hours of the morning — certainly she couldn’t have been the only one.

More than anything else, Rogue likes that he’s kind. In some greater philosophical sense he might not be. She thinks about the way he’d looked at her out of the corner of his eye when they’d first met. He’d really wanted to leave her on the side of the road. Wanted to want to, she supposes. Couldn’t, ultimately. He’s got this strange need to be kind even when he doesn’t want to be, which Rogue has grown to find both amusing and charming. That very quality is the reason Logan had agreed to this at all. Rogue’s under no illusions.

In that moment, however, with Rogue’s knees hitched in the shallow notch above his hips, Logan’s spontaneity is not a quality she particularly appreciates.

“Like this?” he asks, for probably the fifth time in a row. Her hips are tilted up, her lower back perched on thick thighs. The pace he sets is shallow and quick, not particularly rough, and it feels good.

Rogue sighs, letting her eyes flutter shut. She doesn’t say no, just lazily nods her head and squeezes her thighs around Logan’s hips.

She doesn’t manage to fool him.

“I don’t know what you want,” he growls.

The problem is that Rogue doesn’t know what she wants, either.

“It’s fine.” Logan glares down at her. She wouldn’t need to be touching him to know that he finds that answer completely and totally unacceptable. Closing in on her own tolerance threshold for annoyance, Rogue extends her arms out and gestures. “Just — come back down here.”

She had asked for Logan to fuck her rough. The images that immediately flickered through his mind — hand squeezed around a woman’s throat while the sharp pressure of his nails digging into her breasts draws blood, tip of a blade slicing W H O into his chest and unhesitatingly through his nipple on the letter R, the first shocked scream followed by a series of whimpers as his cock squeezes painfully into her ass — were more than enough to assure Rogue that she and Logan have very different ideas of what that means.

“Stop being so — “

Logan’s forehead kisses hers. The mattress creaks beneath them. It feels good, but it’s not what she wants. Harder, faster, rougher, meaner — none of it is correct. She thinks about the way that Scott had writhed underneath Logan, the choked up feeling of needing him, fucking him, resenting him. Rogue knots her fingers in Logan’s hair and for a moment all she wants is the polar opposite of that.

“So what?”

Logan’s frustration is mounting. She combs her fingers through his hair.

“So — I don’t know.”

Jean presses kisses down the length of Rogue’s neck. Trepidation rolls through Rogue like a wave, but she breathes in and peeks through the narrowly cracked door of Logan’s mind.

Nails and hair and lips, red and sharp. Jean offers a tease — Logan wants her so bad. Her palms slide down Rogue’s chest. It hurts, deep and steady, in a way that feels completely foreign.

An irritated chuff tickles her ear. “Sorry,” Rogue mutters, mindlessly.

It isn’t until she’s rocked under another wave of Logan’s irritation that she realizes this isn’t a stream of his continuous thoughts. Logan is thinking about Rogue. How small she is beneath him, how inscrutable, how to twist himself into the correct shape to ensure this is enjoyable for her, how to make up for dumping a hundred years of toxic sludge directly into her brain. Rogue is the one thinking about Jean.

She hates it.

“You seemed like you knew before.”

The dialogue is distant and fuzzy. He’s so mean to Scott. Logan had spanked him the other day, in one of the classrooms — it doesn’t matter that no one had been around to see. He keeps pointing out how much smaller Scott’s dick is in comparison to his, even though he knows Jean doesn’t like it. She shouldn’t date guys with small dicks if she doesn’t want them to get teased.

“Thought I did.”

It’s average. Jean lying right to his face. She shouldn’t date a scrawny guy with a massive stick up his ass. Should tell Scott to stop enjoying it so much, if he doesn’t want Logan to tease him.

She could just date Logan instead.

“God,” Rogue says. Logan had been such a fucking asshole. She feels the way his lips curl up into a self-confident smirk even as Jean glares at him.

Logan isn’t teasing Scott. He’s being mean.

He teeths at her neck. Rogue’s eyes snap open, fixed blankly on the ceiling. He fills her up, frustrated and unsatisfying.

Logan’s not mean. Maybe he is. But it’s fun.

“You should be mean to me.”

Jean’s judgemental glare prompts Logan to continue speaking. I don’t give a shit about Scott, he snaps, taking a step back. He doesn’t deserve you!

Rogue doesn’t want to remember this. Logan’s feelings are an uproar of uncertainty, anger, exclusion, self-pity. He stares down at her, puzzled, and Rogue’s own erupt in perfect sympathy.

Even if girls pick the good guy, the good guy isn’t what Jean wants. She smiles. Logan has no idea what she wants.

“Break?” Logan’s already pulling back.

“No,” Rogue snaps. She locks her ankles in the small of his back. Logan doesn’t fight her, chuckling as he starts to rock his hips again.

“You’re distracted.”

A moan. Logan’s fucking her up against the wall, Jean’s hands clutching at his and his clutching at her breasts. He surrenders himself to the certainty that Jean isn’t going to leave Scott. He had already known this, but Jean moans into the sheetrock and Logan finally allows himself to live inside of that reality. The same reality where Scott knows he’s fucking Jean, Scott watches him fuck Jean, Scott likes it when he fucks Jean — it’s weird and fucked-up and not how anything is supposed to be, but satisfying in its own way —

“Oh, this is really fucked-up.”

Logan stops. Only a beat passes before he’s pulling back, confused expression replaced with one of active concern.

Rogue hisses at him. “No, don’t stop. I’m just.”

She locks her fingers behind Logan’s neck. Logan hadn’t wanted to fuck her. He had in the sense that Rogue was attractive, sure. But she didn’t need to see into the depths of his mind to know that he had never thought about her like this and probably never would have.

“You used to be my teacher.”

Nose to nose, Logan stares at her like a deer in the headlights.

“Um,” he says, and starts to pull away from her.

Rogue doesn’t let him. She bites into her lower lip, locking her limbs together around his back. Logan respects her, even now, which is something Rogue had perhaps taken for granted. It’s that gap in their relationship, the lack of spontaneity, the way Logan can’t stop thinking about her that makes this feel like an obligation.

“No,” Rogue snaps. She knots her fingers in Logan’s hair. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

Logan had been her teacher. He’d been a steady adult figure in her life in her late teens — the exact kind of relationship that makes the fact that he’s got his dick buried inside of her not inconceivable but undeniably incorrect in some nebulous way.

Rogue arches her back. Her hips roll into his. Logan breathes out sharply through his nose.

“What are you doing.”

It’s not really a question. In fairness, Rogue doesn’t really have much of an argument, either, other than that it’s wrong in the same way it had been when Logan had fucked Jean, when Logan had fucked Jean while Scott watched.

“Just keep going.” She’s breathing hard as Logan picks up the pace again, suspicious look in his eye as he slides his cock into her. Like he knows where she’s about to take this. “And just — if you hate it, you can tell me to stop.”

Logan knows where this is going.

She can feel his certainty rattle down from his mind into hers. He doesn’t stop. His pace quickens, fucking her deep in short little strokes that make Rogue’s toes curl. She knots her fingers in his hair, using the grip to his head still.

Neither of them speak. Rogue’s working up her courage, rolling the words around in her mouth. Logan knows where this is going, and it’s fucked-up, but the thought of it makes Rogue’s chest feel tight and her cheeks burn red, teeth digging into her lower lip. Logan stares down at her, unflinching. He’s not a coward.

“You used to be my teacher,” Rogue says. Slowly, deliberately, she doesn’t break Logan’s gaze. She leans into the wrongness of it. “And you came inside of me.”

Involuntarily, Rogue clenches around him. Logan’s breath, expelled sharply through his nose, tickles her chin. He starts fucking her just a little faster.

“Oh, shit.” Rogue’s jaw drops. She can feel it this time. Not thinking about pleasing her or fitting his body into the right shape, just reacting. “Taught me — history, now you’re fuckin’ me.”

It’s not as snappy as she would’ve liked, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Logan. His strokes grow deeper, his cock throbbing, stretching her out. Her limbs burn with Logan’s guilty thoughts, tugging sharply at his hair and arching her hips up to meet his.

The sound of their sex fills the room, Logan’s furrowed eyebrows trying to pin her down. With a grin, Rogue licks her lips before whispering, “So big inside of me, professor.”

“Rogue.”

It’s a warning, issued through gritted teeth. Logan digs his fingers into her hips. He doesn’t stop. The guilt only accentuates the pleasure, every point of contact buzzing with tension. She locks eyes with Logan, unwavering. She’s not a coward either.

“You’re kinda like my dad, you know.” The movement of Logan’s hips catches for one second before he doubles down, jaw clenched tight as he fucks into Rogue with so much force each thrust reverberates through her entire body.

Jean hadn’t been the first woman to push Logan to lean into his own discomfort. Hadn’t even been the first to make him enjoy it, either. Rogue throws her head back, eyes fluttering shut, and she remembers seeing Scott wrap his hand around his cock, lips parted and sweat dripping down his brow, stroking his little cock while Logan pushed Jean’s face down into the sheets of her and Scott’s bed and fucked her so hard she screamed.

“Harder, Logan, harder, please — “

It had been fear. That was the first. For once, Logan hadn’t been afraid.

Growling into her neck, Rogue wrenches Logan’s head up by the hair. She grasps at him with both hands, his own holding her hips steady.

Spit flies from Rogue’s lips as she speaks. “Just a li’l like my dad, know you’re always gonna be. Said ya were my friend, but it’s still different, ‘s fucked up.”

It feels good to say it. Equal parts relief and arousal wash over her. Logan’s holding her waist so tight in some combination of anger and shame and arousal. He growls when Rogue pulls at his hair, the most superficial part of how fucked-up this whole situation not just labeled but actively enjoyed.

“Saw it,” she hisses. Logan’s silent, but he wants her to keep going. His own ravenous reaction feeds into hers. “Liked lookin’ at me in my underwear. Felt so good to grab my tits and my ass and — “

She cuts herself off as Logan’s pace turns punishing. He buries his face in her neck, back arched like an animal, chasing his own orgasm. Rogue can feel it. She drags her nails down the length of his back, just hard enough to tear at his skin, and he loves it. The curve of her hips and her stubborn battle against her own inexperience and the way her cunt squeezes tight and wet around him.

Rogue arches up into him. “You’re fuckin’ me raw.”

Her heartbeat races. She can smell Logan’s sweat, his blood rushing just beneath his skin, and this is what she’d wanted.

“Already came inside of me.” She’d loved it. Probably her favorite part of sex so far. “You gonna do it again?”

Into the sweaty crook of her neck, Logan nods. He doesn’t need to. His resounding yes penetrates Rogue’s mind so forcefully it stuns her — no thoughts, no movements, just bracing against the force of Logan and languishing in their shared pleasure.

Rogue whines. The words leave her lips as soon as the thought has formed. “Fuck, what if you got me pregnant?”

She doesn’t fight when Logan pulls away from her. Her thighs shake, pulsing and throbbing around nothing as Logan pulls out of her. She’s not surprised when she finds herself sprawled on her front, Logan’s hand on the back of her neck, sliding into her, jerking her hips up for a better angle. Her fingers twist into the sheet.

“Quiet.”

Rogue couldn’t speak even if she wanted to.

The way Logan fucks her is animalistic. She loves the rasp of his breath, fighting to breathe beneath the pressure of his hand between her shoulder blades, her own voice muffled in the sheets.

Her arms jerk, then her legs. Logan’s cock presses in painfully deep, her brow furrowing when she feels the head press against her cervix. The building climax teeters on the edge of painful, her fingers balling up in the sheet. She yelps when she feels the elastic band slip off the mattress and snap against her wrist, a laugh bubbling out of her, Logan’s cock pushing against her cervix, past it, slipping even further inside of her with a pop.

Rogue’s eyes fly open. Logan’s panting. She can feel him shaking, the intense pressure of her around his cock. He ruts forward, grinding into her, impossibly deep inside. He pulls back just far enough to slip out, then back inside, barely picking up the pace before Rogue starts to burn.

The trembling begins deep inside of her. Then it extends out to her limbs, a hot pressure that leaves her shaking, agonizingly slow even as he fucks her faster, harder, longer, her cunt spasming around him.

A sob works its way through her when she feels Logan bottom out. He throbs and twitches inside of her, that deep aching pressure building. Rogue’s actually crying now, whimpering, writhing beneath Logan and he can feel her cumming around him, pulsing and pleading and begging for more.

Her orgasm has barely finished when she feels his fingers on her clit.

“Again.”

Rogue obeys. Logan strokes her clit with the same rhythm he fucks her. It’s harsh, Rogue throbbing and groaning each time. But she spills over the edge again for him anyways, exhausted muscles almost completely giving out.

Logan swears, slamming into her one last time before he cums.

He cums inside of her. She can feel it filling her up, the head of Logan’s cock straining against her walls. Rogue shudders and sobs. Her head spins as her orgasm fades, Logan’s fingers sending spindly tendrils of overstimulation creeping up her limbs.

She wants to swear. Wants to say something a little snarky, tease Logan, entwine their fingers together. Her brain barely sputters along. Her lips refuse to move, forehead braced against the bare mattress.

With a grunt, Logan slides out of her. Her thighs immediately collapse, slick dripping from her and onto the sheets. Logan rolls off the edge of the mattress and onto the floor.

Breathing hard, it’s a long time before he speaks. “Y’good?”

Rogue grunts in response. It’s hard to breathe against the mattress. She doesn’t think she can roll over. Logan came inside of her. Exhausting, she feels her clit twitch.

Logan’s head shifts. “Rogue?”

With a long, thin whine, she tilts her fist and extends a thumb towards the ceiling.

She doesn’t even have the energy to be upset when Logan laughs at her.

Chapter Text

“That was way longer than nine minutes.”

Logan grunts. He’s still on the floor next to the mattress. Rogue doesn’t know whether he’s agreeing, disagreeing, or simply acknowledging her. If she had to take a guess, she’d land on the latter.

Rogue struggles to catch her breath. It doesn’t take long for the high to wear off: sweat tacks to her skin, the vague sense of nausea that goes along with being slightly dehydrated, an ache deep in her exhausted muscles. She’s somewhat surprised that Logan’s healing factor doesn’t whip all of it away. She supposes being tired isn’t really an injury.

“Y’good?”

It’s Rogue’s turn to grunt. She lifts her hands and presses the heels of her palms into her eyes. “M’fine.”

It’s hot. The elastic band of the sheets tugs insistently at her shoulders. As if provoked, her brain shocks her with the memory of her own moans followed by her whiny voice squeaking out the words, what if you got me pregnant.

All at once, Rogue wants to curl up into a ball. “Oh my fucking god,” she mutters. Reality sets in suddenly, forcefully, and with a violent embarrassment. She can’t believe she said that. Her knees snap together with a bruising force. Logan had cum inside her, and she can still feel it, and she can’t believe she actually said that to him.

“Y’sure?”

He’s not kicking her out. He’s being normal. Crickets sound off in the distance. Rogue can pinpoint the direction of each if she focuses hard enough. The sheets are rough against the soles of her feet. She wants to rip off her own skin.

Instead, she rolls onto her side facing the wall. She’s fine. Everything is fine.

“Is it normal to feel gross afterwards?”

She doesn’t have to gall to look in Logan’s mind to see.

A sympathetic sigh. “Unfortunately.”

Rogue stares aggressively at the wall. Her cheeks burn. She struggles to reconcile her image of herself — introverted, guarded, a little too serious — with the woman who’d told Logan he was like her dad and always would be while he was in the middle of fucking her —

The mattress bucks underneath her as Logan sits on the corner.

She turns, cheeks burning. The pack of cigarettes, top flipped up, is extended in Logan’s hand. He already has one pinched between his lips. Rogue hadn’t even noticed him get up.

A beat passes. Logan raises his eyebrows. Blushing, Rogue takes the cigarette.

“Stop stressin’.” The lighter flicks once, twice, three times before coming to life. “You’re fine.”

Rogue rolls the cigarette between her fingers. She squeezes her eyes shut in an attempt to shut out the memory of her own voice. Protective fingers form bars over her face. Long and low, she croaks.

“You’re not mad at me for sayin’ all that?”

She can barely tolerate peeking at Logan out of the corner of her eye. He takes a drag off the cigarette and stares up at the ceiling.

“Honestly,” Logan says, after a long moment of silence. “I’m more upset I was into it.”

“God.” Rogue tries to laugh. It comes out deflated. “There’s that, I guess.”

She stares down at the cigarette. Rolls it idly between her fingers just as she rolls her lip between her teeth.

“Ain’t no shame in sayin’ shit that’s true.”

Rogue pauses. She flips through her words in her own mind. They all had been true, she supposes. And she’d felt relieved, she remembers — applying words to her own discomfort. Reclaiming it, living inside of it. Jean had loved to do that.

It’s not a memory, but Rogue’s own observation.

Feeling watched, Rogue turns to the little bird on the nightstand. Its gaze is pointed directly at Rogue. A shiver shakes her spine.

“I guess,” Rogue agrees. She licks her lips and turns to Logan. Thighs folded up against her chest, she rests her chin on her knees and tries to weathers the storm of her own anxiety. “You’re not really my dad.”

Logan’s pupils drift to the corners of his eyes, scanning Rogue’s body. “You better fuckin’ hope I’m not.”

This time, Rogue’s laugh is genuine.

“I’m your friend.”

Rogue hums. “Yeah.”

Ankles crossed, Rogue stares through Scott’s lenses. Relationships change just as much as they stay the same. There’s this little kernel at the core of her relationship with Logan that will always make him just a little bit like her dad. It grows over time — sprouts leaves and flowers and thorns. Maybe the entire plant is severed at the stem only for something new to be grafted on, but the roots are still the same.

Logan had regretted how his relationship with Scott had ended. How it had continued, after Jean had died. From the outside, Rogue sees with a grim clarity that their relationship had died the death it did because Jean had cultivated it. The sun snuffed out with her death. Logan and Scott left as thorns and flower buds.

It’s sad. Rogue sucks in a shaky breath and tries not to cry.

Briefly, Rogue finds herself grateful that she doesn’t have any relationships like that. She recalls the feeling of standing in front of their graves, the long thorny stem of Logan’s past, the futility of hating every fiber of who she is.

She thinks about Remy.

“You gonna light that thing anytime soon?” Logan’s holding the lighter out to her. There’s no movement. Rogue has no idea how long he’d been hovering there. “Or you just gonna look at it.”

“Sorry,” Rogue mutters. She takes the lighter from Logan, fumbling with the spark wheel before finally lighting it up. She drops the lighter into Logan’s waiting palm and takes a slow, shallow drag. Smoke burns her throat like a sandstorm.

She feels disgusting.

“Didn’t know you smoked.”

Rogue exhales, eyes watering. Her voice is rough when she answers. “Only on occasion.”

Logan grunts. “Shit’s bad for you.”

Briefly, Rogue tucks her face into her knees, crook of her elbow hiding her head. She hopes Logan never changes.

“I thought they only did this in movies.”

She breathes in bitter, hot smoke. Her heart beats a little faster. Logan stares at her, silent.

“Smoke after sex?” Rogue raises her eyebrows.

Logan chuffs. “I dunno.”

“Oh, yeah, no idea.” Rogue finally stretches her legs out. Logan offers her an ashtray. “You’ve only slept with eight gazillion people. And you never noticed if that’s something people actually do.”

Logan hums. The room is dense and foggy. Lightheaded, Rogue finally lets out a little cough.

“I smoke a lot.”

—

Rogue showers.

Logan sends her off with a kiss to the crown of her head. He cracks open the windows, smoke cycled out with fog. Rogue pushes herself up onto her toes to kiss him, long and slow. Humid air caresses her shoulders. Logan’s beard scratches her cheeks.

She uses Logan’s towel. Leaves it hanging, damp, and emerges in nothing but a cloud of steam. She drinks directly from the kitchen tap, water trickling down her chin, streaming down her neck, dripping from her breasts. Her nipples pebble. Wet hair kisses the steel basin. Behind her, Logan sits in the lonesome chair.

Rogue already knows he’s looking before she turns around.

Breathless, she says, “I feel better.”

Jean had never been into gentle sex.

Logan fucks her over the table. Breasts pressed to the flat surface, fingers scrabbling at the windowsill, three fingers pressing down on her tongue. She lets go of her inhibitions and moans, whines, pleads. Her teeth dig into Logan’s fingers, three thick digits resting on her tongue. When he finishes first, he flips her over. Blown pupils bore into hers. Logan’s cum on his own tongue leaves her following in seconds.

Perhaps boring sex would be a better way to put it.

Logan fucks her against the wall. She braces herself on her elbows, arching her back. When the angle is just right, the fat on her hips, waist, and thighs shakes with every thrust. Logan squeezes her ass, bites her shoulder, and leaves scratch marks down the length of her belly. He says she’s beautiful. She screams that she loves his cock.

It’s not Logan’s thought — he doesn’t concern himself with observations like that.

Logan’s tongue drags painfully slowly across her clit. She’s groaning into the fold of his thigh, hand wrapped around the base of his cock. Hips rocking desperately back and forth, she pushes down against him only to be held still. She curses into his skin. Teeth dig into the skin that flutters over his jugular. The force is enough to make him grunt. She yelps when, in retaliation, he spanks her.

Rogue doesn’t think she’s interested in boring sex, either.

Fingers grasping sweaty calves, she holds her own legs spread wide. Logan’s between them, one hand roaming appreciatively over the ugly folds of her curled stomach. She’s on the edge, face hot, blood rushing to her head as Logan strokes at her clit with the head of his cock. Wet and obscene, she blushes as the sound of herself. Her body clenches around the absence of him. Embarrassed, she doesn’t manage to turn her eyes away until she cums. Head thrown back, her whines turn to screams when, as she’s riding the tail end of yet another orgasm, Logan slides into her up to the hilt —

Maybe with someone else, she’d want it to be different.

On her side, she rocks back into Logan. His hands are firm on her stomach, breath hot in her ear. He tells her that she feels good. She knows it’s not just the way her body fits into hers, not just the lingering sense of taboo, not just the way she’d held him and said she loved him. He kisses the back of her neck and ruts into her and feels grateful to have known her. She melts into him, turning to meet his lazy gaze, and silently returns the sentiment.

Rogue supposes she’ll never know.

—

“Okay. I think I’m done.”

Cradled in the folding chair, Logan smokes. “Wore you out, huh?”

Ashes flutter directly into the sink. He’s completely naked. His shriveled dick looks silly curled up on his thigh. It makes Rogue smile. She likes the intimacy of it.

“Feel like I should be sore.”

“Probably the healing.”

Ceramic protests as she scrapes the spoon across the bottom of the bowl. She shoves one last bite of oatmeal into her mouth. It makes Rogue feel old. Logan had offered her a variety of bare-minimum foods such as protein bars, lightly salted chicken breast, whole apples, and unsweetened oatmeal. It feels strangely like visiting her grandmother. When she’d asked him if he ate like this all the time, he had responded simply, sometimes I make soup.

“Probably.” Logan drops her bowl into the sink. Rogue whines, digging the heels of her palms into her eyes. “I know this makes me an asshole, but I’m, like, so jealous of your power.”

Logan chuckles.

Rogue doesn’t know what time it is. One or two in the morning, she thinks. Head tilted back, she sucks down the last few gulps of water from the same speckled mug. Logan refills it without her having to ask.

He sets the Plan B box down on the table. With a grimace, Rogue tears open the cardboard packaging. The blister pack creaks before releasing one little white pill into her palm.

Neither of them speak. Rogue drinks to chase the pill down. Logan clears away the trash. Her cheek presses against the cool surface of the table. A cool breeze brushes past the curtain and through her hair. Engulfed in one of Logan’s overlarge shirts, warm satisfaction envelops her heart.

The warmth of his feelings for her tickles at the back of her mind. The word eludes her. Logan doesn’t really think in words. It’s all images. Sounds, sensations, smells. It’s the same feeling she’s experiencing now. Gratitude.

With a sigh, she turns to Logan. He’s staring down at his own hands. Rogue hikes her knees up and buries them beneath the fabric of Logan’s shirt. Short sleeves sag down to her elbows. His clothes had been neatly organized in his closet. She’d only seen two shirts with sleeves.

After a long moment, Logan finally glances up at her. He winces.

Almost imperceptible, Rogue tries not to let it get to her. She turns to look at her own hands. Naked, they sit placidly on the surface of the table. Her and Logan are done touching. Not any reason for him to put up with it any longer.

Rogue has no idea what he’s thinking. She can’t know. The whole book of his entire existence sitting in the back of her mind couldn’t tell her that.

Without a word, Logan stands. The sound of fabric rustling against skin hits her like a brick to the head.

Grief creeps like sludge through her veins. She thinks about Jean and Scott, both long dead. Logan hadn’t changed since they’d been around — not really. Rogue doesn’t know if it’s possible for him to change at all. The structure of his mind, dense with fog, interwoven branches, and ancient layers of permafrost buried beneath snow, gives it all away. He’d been broken and put himself back together more times than either of them can count.

Rogue doesn’t want to go back. She doesn’t want to pick up the pieces of her broken life and put herself back together. He emerges from the bedroom as a tower of muscle, fully dressed, so unapologetically himself.

In a violent vision of the future, Rogue imagines herself bumming around with him. She envisions herself curling up inside of his grief. He’ll cherish those memories of Jean and Scott until the inevitable calcification of time buries them cold beneath the dirt. Fingers twisted together, Rogue could watch it happen in real time. If she touched him frequently enough, she probably wouldn’t even age. His little parasite, lingering on his island of time, his loneliness nourishing her own. She could set aside her own grief and pain and thousand little disappointments. The world would rage on elsewhere. In her fantasy, both of them are okay with that.

Logan sits down. The fold-out chair protests beneath him.

Rogue knows it’s an impossible fantasy. It wouldn’t even be good. She may die young, but she’ll at least live as her own person.

It’s not like she has as much to fight through as Logan does.

Silence hangs.

Rogue had fucked Logan. Many times, in fact. The reality of that settles over her like a blanket. He’d left some of himself inside of her — in far more ways than one. His consciousness weighs heavy in the back of Rogue’s mind. Despite the insistent pull, she doesn’t let his memories drag her under when she closes her eyes.

Jean and Scott are gone now. It hurts to remember how much Logan had hated Scott after Jean had died, how much he’d resented Jean for not leaving Scott, the sharp silence of his mind as he’d realized that Scott was dead and Jean’s shadow had swallowed him up whole.

It had been years. Those feelings have softened. They dissolve on Rogue’s tongue, almost sweet if she doesn’t think about it too hard. Scott had been a coward, but he’d been Logan’s coward. He should have been, at least. Logan had never been strong enough to tell him. Instead, Scott had died knowing that Logan hated him. It makes Rogue ache down to the marrow. Loneliness had deepened the cracks, but the loss had completely broken him.

Face-down on the table, Rogue’s own memories loom.

With a miserable groan, she twists her fingers into her hair and remembers Remy resting one gloved hand over her own. He’d sat on the bench beside her at dinner. The clang and clink of silverware on dishes had pierced Rogue’s ears, her head pounding out the same tattoo as her heartbeat. She’d snatched her fingers back.

He didn’t say anything. He hadn’t even looked at her. Rogue had stormed off anyway, stomach pressed into a ball beneath the heavy weight of her heart. She had wanted nothing more than to curl up into bed.

Remy had caught up with her. Red irises staring into hers, he’d held her shoulders. She’d held her jaw clenched. The excruciating honesty in his crinkled crow’s feet had made her hate him.

He’d said she didn’t have to be alone. That he still loved her.

Rogue doesn’t remember the words she’d said. She had screamed at him. It had been more than a year since they’d broken up. She’d watched him flirt and kiss and fuck in the meantime, bare skin on bare skin, no compromises or planning or lingering sense of inadequacy. Jealousy had burnt her to her very core. She was the emptiness left by a missing piece, a hollowed-out doll, a gaping fucking hole, and maybe Remy had never said it, Bobby had never thought it, Logan had never felt it, but Rogue knows that love mediated through fabric is not enough, Rogue is not enough.

Of anyone, Rogue should know.

She’d slammed the door in his face, listened to his footsteps fade away. She’d buried her face in her knees and tried to be as quiet as possible while she cried.

Back then, Rogue had thought that she was broken. She realizes now that it’d just been the cracks deepening.

She hears herself sniffle. The sound echoes in the cavern of her arms. It occurs to her, as she envisions herself walking out the door, starting up her car, hitting the road. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. It occurs to her, for the first time, that Remy would probably hate her if he knew that she did this. As if she could ever have a chance with him again.

The wind runs its fingers through her hair. Nervous, Logan shifts in in the chair. Loneliness cuts like a knife. She sees herself from the outside, and for the first time she experiences her breakup with Remy as confirmation that even his best efforts weren’t adequate. He’d tried to show her how full her life could be, how full their relationship could be, and Rogue had told him that it wasn’t enough. He’d looked so unhappy, his dissatisfaction practically palpable. When it finally occurs to her that Remy had felt that way because Rogue was so unhappy with herself and not the other way around —

She wants to break apart completely.

Rogue bursts into tears. She expects for it to stop after a moment, but her hiccupped little sobs continue. She wipes at her own eyes, sniffling, feels Logan’s loneliness and regret pulse in her like a dull ache, and her only response is to want. She wants to stay with Logan, she wants to unravel the past, she wants to be a child again, she wants to be anyone other than herself. She wants to undo every mistake she’s ever made.

The tears won’t stop. Logan stares at her, wide-eyed and guilty. He’s terrified to ask.

She knows so much about him. Too much. His deeply romantic love for Scott and Jean, which he survives in spite of everything, is carved into her soul. She aches and cries and longs to return to feelings she’s never had. They had been her teachers, just as much as Logan had been, and it’s confusing and horrible but in that particular moment it doesn’t even matter.

Staring at Logan, tears streaming down her cheeks, she realizes not only that she doesn’t want to be lonely for the rest of her life — but that she doesn’t want to hate herself, either.

Snot vacuums into her sinuses. “Stop lookin’ at me like I’m gonna getcha.”

Quickly, Logan glances away. His arms are crossed. He’d never been good at dealing with other people’s feelings, let alone his own.

“I toldya I wasn’t gonna ask you about it. Anything. It’s all goin’ with me to my fuckin’ grave.” She doesn’t flinch at her own choice of words. Logan does. “And it’s not — not even why I’m crying. Not everything’s about you. Just ask me what’s wrong.”

Logan clears his throat. He won’t look at her. “Sorry.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Rogue snaps. “You did everything right.”

After Jean was gone, Logan had come around less and less. He’d always made sure to see Rogue, though. Waiting in the hallway outside her room, staring down the hall like he hadn’t been looking for her. He’d offered her sweet paternal nothings, How you doin’, kid? and Iceman’s treatin’ you good, right? and I’m just passin’ through, but you call me if he needs his ass kicked. He was a deadbeat, but he was her deadbeat.

“This was so weird.”

She can’t stop crying. Not sobbing anymore, her despair manifests as tears pooling on the table. Logan hides the puddle behind his own hand, extended palm up.

“I don’t regret it.” She can’t make herself take his hand. “It was — weird. But I don’t regret it.”

The silence yawns, stretching its limbs before sinking its teeth into her. Rogue starts to shiver. She doesn’t have the energy to be embarrassed anymore. Jean had shattered Scott’s glasses into a thousand pieces. They were gone forever now, just like Scott. As if his destruction in effigy could erase the memory of him.

“What’s wrong?”

Rogue’s lips fold into an ugly frown. “I threw Remy away like garbage because I hate myself.”

Herself, her powers, her thousand little mistakes. It’s all the same thing, it’s all the same way that Logan hates himself, so painfully obvious Rogue can barely stand to acknowledge it.

Logan peels her hand away from her face. He stands, and she follows suit, soaking the chest of his shirt.

“Can’t undo the past, kid,” Logan says. “Future’s all you got.”

Rogue sniffles. “I know.”

Through bare skin, she saps away at Logan. He runs his palms down the length of her spine. Her tears finally begin to subside.

Her relationship with Logan is different now. Ruined, just a little bit. Maybe a lot. She loves how Logan had thought about her before, and she can feel in his mind that it’s different now. Messy and weird and the deeply-set dissatisfaction that goes hand-in-hand with complexity. She hates it. But when she squeezes him back, she feels at least a little more whole.

Logan sighs. Rogue realizes, mucus dripping from her nose, that the two of them are rocking ever so slightly side-to-side.

“You gonna go get Gumbo back?”

Rogue shakes her head. Her twisted fingers stretch out the fabric of his shirt. “It was a long time ago, now.”

Logan winces. Rogue can feel it. “He dead?”

“No,” Rogue answers. She’d been gone for months. Her throat tightens as she revises her answer. “Probably not.”

In acknowledgement, Logan grunts.

“He’d definitely hate me if he knew I did this, anyway.” Rogue deserves it. “He was real good to me.”

Another grunt, this one disbelieving.

“I mean it.” She wants to laugh, but the sound comes out sounding much more like a sob. “Was willin’ to try all sorts of shit with me. But I dumped him ‘cause he couldn’t fuck me for real. And then I went and. Instead of. I kinda had sex with my dad.”

When she tries to breathe in, her throat closes up.

Logan rubs her shoulders. He stays silent for a long time. His mind roils with anger and indignation, the squeak of grinding teeth.

“I mean, guy’s pretty freaky,” Logan says, eventually. “Probably just want you to call him daddy or somethin’.”

Completely shocked, Rogue finally lifts her head from his chest. She stares into his eyes and says, “I’m bein’ completely serious right now. You are absolutely not allowed to say shit like that to me.”

Logan laughs. Rogue sits back down at the table, scrubbing at her own eyes. No amount of sex with Logan would ever make a comment like that feel normal to her.

Some things never change, she supposes.

“Sorry for gettin’ snot all over your shirt.”

“It’s fine.” Logan sits down in the chair. It creaks again. She’s shocked it hasn’t broken yet. “Already got every other damn shirt I own dirty.”

“I should stay and do your laundry.”

Logan chuckles. He stares out the window. Rogue’s still got his eyes. Even in the darkness, she can make out the trunks of the trees. A possum’s eyes glow in the darkness. Logan could live like this forever, if he needed to, but Rogue —

She misses Remy.

Standing, the chair clatters to the floor. “I think I have to go.”

Logan furrows his eyebrows. “Now?”

She nods.

“It’s two in the morning.”

Certainty settles over her like a blanket. “I’m not gonna be able to make myself leave if I stay the night.”

Rogue swallows. She’d thought that Logan would make her whole.

With a grin, she continues, “Don’t wanna make you abandon me on the side of the road again.”

“I came back for you.”

Rogue’s not whole. She probably never will be.

“I know,” she says. “Thank you.”

Logan watches her get dressed.

It feels more like armor and less like a prison, this time around. Leggings, socks, shoes. Shirt, glove, jacket. While she rolls the turtleneck up, he makes her a cup of coffee.

“I really don’t regret it.”

She squeezes him tightly, hovering on the threshold.

“Won’t tell anyone. And if I ever see you again, you know — it never happened.”

Logan sighs. Reluctantly, he looks away. “About — “

“Stop.” Even covered, Rogue knows. Maybe not the specifics, but enough. She cuts him off. “It dies with me.”

The trailer shakes beneath her as she opens the flimsy little door. Cool night air rushes up to greet her.

“Rogue?”

She turns. Dewy grass dampens her tights.

“Keep workin’ on it.”

She clutches her bag in two hands. When her eyebrows furrow in confusion, Logan chuckles.

“You were right. It was way longer than nine minutes.”

The door closes before Rogue can respond. A beat passes before her lips split into a grin.

It takes a long time for Rogue to work up the courage to leave.

She sits in her empty, cold car. Repetitively, she pumps the brakes. Up and down, up and down. Hot tears slip down her cheeks. She can’t help but roll her eyes at herself. The feeling of loss persists regardless.

Strange and imperfect, she’s terrified to leave Logan behind.

His mind knocks against hers with a surprising gentleness. Sniffling, twisting her fingers around the steering wheel, Rogue lets him in. She tells herself it will be the last time.

“Scott, you love this song!”

Streaks of sunlight catch in Jean’s hair as it billows in the wind. Scott’s driving, only the back of his neck visible through the blurry bars of Logan’s lashes. Arms crossed, Logan breathes in deeply. He’d been trying to take a nap.

It’s hard to resent Jean, even as she turns up the volume on the radio. Logan grunts, shifting to take pressure off his neck. A synth beat vibrates in the speakers by his feet. Logan doesn’t know the song. Rogue recognizes Justin Timberlake’s voice.

“Tell me you love me, why did you leave me all alone?” Jean sings, leaning across the center console to grin obnoxiously at Scott.

“Stop.” His voice is like stone.

“Bridges were burned — “

“Jean.”

She clicks her tongue, rolling her eyes.

The song continues without her accompaniment. Logan’s shoulders sag, vision going black. Rogue’s sniffles quickly melt into laughter when the radio croons, in high-pitched boyband cheese, cry me a river. Crying in the car — that’s why she’d remembered this.

“I think he’s asleep.”

“He’s not.”

“His eyes are closed.”

Scott huffs. “He’s probably just pretending so he can use whatever we say to screw us over later.”

Logan fights not to smirk. He loves the way Jean scoffs in response.

“You’re so paranoid!”

A beat passes. Logan can feel the car accelerate, rocking slowly side-to-side down the winding path towards the mansion. He’s going too fast for the road, but neither he nor Jean bring it up.

“You can say that to me again after he starts stealing your ideas to try and make you look like an idiot.”

It’s been years. Logan doesn’t recall what, specifically, he’d done to piss off Scott. His own sense of smug satisfaction is confirmation enough that whatever it was, Logan had definitely done it.

“Or maybe he’s smarter than you give him credit for.”

The compliment makes Rogue smile. Logan doesn’t feel the urge to grin until Scott answers her.

“He’s not.”

The specific words fade after that. Jean and Scott bicker lightly, music blasting on the radio. Logan pretends to be asleep just to listen to them.

There’s nothing complicated about the way Logan recalls that moment. There are no reverberations of loss or regret or the skulking beasts of self-hatred and rage. It’s just a nice memory.

Slowly, Rogue refocuses on the present. The ache of loneliness doesn’t let up. She doesn’t need it to. Even after she leaves, she’ll always have her pieces of him.

Not grief nor time nor pain had soured that memory. A deluge of Logan’s other intact recollections press at the door to Rogue’s mind. Fond memories. Rogue keeps them at bay.

She pulls a package of tissues out from the center console. With a flood of relief, she finally blows her nose. The lights in the trailer stay stubbornly lit. Rogue can make out the silhouette of Logan’s cat-eared form in one of the windows, watching. She smiles.

She’ll always have her own moments of peace. Her own cherished memories. Her fear and awe the first time she’d seen him fight, the rush of belonging after he’d promised to take care of her, heavy weight of love and self-hatred when she’d awoken with Logan’s hands on her face only to feel him collapse at her feet in the skies above Manhattan.

That relationship had died when she’d walked out of the doors of the mansion in search of a cure. Or perhaps it had died along with the Professor, or with Scott. She doesn’t really know. But death doesn’t mean being forgotten — or even truly gone. Logan’s still important to her.

Now, it’s just different.

Rogue’s always going to be the same person she used to be. She’ll be the girl who ran away from home, who was afraid of herself, who spent years dating a gay man without ever realizing it. She’ll be the woman who threw away the best relationship she’d ever had, who tried to cure who she is, who hated herself down to the core.

She watches Logan push back the curtain. The window thunks open. Logan’s borrowed hearing leaves the words clear even though the windshield of her car.

“You plannin’ on leavin’ anytime soon?”

Laughing, Rogue turns the key in the ignition. She rolls down the window just for the joy of sticking her head out. “I’m working on it!” she shouts back.

The seatbelt clicks. She presses down on the brake and shifts into reverse.

She’ll always be the same person she used to be. But maybe she can be someone a little different, too.

Her tires roll up onto the empty road. Her headlights flick on as Logan’s windows go dark. Her gaze turns to the long stretch of road ahead. Dread fills her. Three months is a long time to leave.

The gearshift thunks loudly into drive.

“Nothin’ to it but to do it.”

Her toes curl, remaining stubbornly glued to the breaks. She clasps her cheeks between two gloved hands, as if she could squeeze the fear and regret out of herself. The tacky leather sticks unpleasantly to her skin.

With a sudden and irrational anger, she rips the gloves off and discards them in the passenger’s seat. She touches her own cheeks, runs bare fingers through her own hair, presses cool palms to the back of her neck. She takes a moment to live in her own fear and regret and shame, accepts them, before diffusing them out on the back of one hot breath.

“Okay, kid.” She eases off the break. “Time to go be a person again.”

With a steady pressure, she hits the gas. The car accelerates. She leaves the dim island of Logan’s grief in the rearview mirror.

The past is set in stone, after all.