Title: Thursday in June
Author: Jojo
Email: randomleaves@yahoo.co.uk
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: It took ten years.
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Definitely for X2.
A/N: Thanks, Mel.
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Rogue was twenty-six and it was a Thursday. That was all she knew.
*
For ten years, Logan had been coming and going – only sticking around for troublesome villains or when certain members of the X-Men decided to rise from the dead. He called her kid, winked at her, but otherwise pretty much ignored her very existence – she was protected here, she was safe, and there was very little he felt he had to do for her now. He'd passed on his role as guardian to Xavier and the other, more permanent, X-Men.
"They look after you better, any how," he'd told her, hanging up his meager selection of clothes in the closet as she hovered by the door.
"I guess," she'd replied half-heartedly, knowing that it was essentially true.
She gained a measure of control when she was nineteen and he hadn't been home to hear her squeals of delight, to watch her tentative finger-touching with Bobby, Jubilee and Kitty, her closest friends who were all just about as excited as she was. When he did come home, it was to fight a new battle, one she wasn't involved in, and the only glimpses of him she could see were in Xavier's office or training with Mr. Summers in the gym. Logan dropped by to check on her, leaning against the door in her room and looking with confusion around the very feminine bedroom, asking brusque, impersonal questions about her life and almost looking straight through her when he did.
Then he left.
She was twenty-two when her control was finally perfect, when she could hold on through rage, through passion and through misery. Twenty-two and she sat on Bobby's lap for a full day, holding him while wearing a tank top and little denim shorts. Bobby was thrilled, but uncomfortable. She spent the following weeks being overly tactile, hugging people for little reason, touching faces, stroking hands – people got used to it, grinned in pleasure for Rogue.
Two months later, a round-the-world airline ticket in her bag, Rogue hugged everyone goodbye and left to do what she'd always wanted to do. She emailed pictures of herself standing by the Seine in pouring rain, hanging by a bus stop outside the Houses of Parliament, lounging on a bench in Venice, standing by the Parthenon in Athens, freezing her ass off in Moscow, and Jubilee printed them off and tacked them to the notice board in the common room.
She returned tanned and cheerful and requested another couple of weeks off so she could visit her parents. Kitty volunteered to go with her and Professor Xavier – amused and proud of this show of solidarity – agreed that maybe it would be wise to see if Rogue couldn't try to mend her bridges.
Her parents cried, asked her to come home now that she was 'cured' and Rogue refused, thinking how much older her father was looking. She wasn't cured. She was a mutant. She was *glad* she was a mutant. Her mother wept some more and her father reached out, tentatively, and held her hand, his mouth trembling underneath his moustache. He asked her what she was going to do.
"I like English," she told him, tilting her head to the side and letting the white streak dangle down her neck. "I'm gonna learn how to teach it to kids."
When she was twenty-three, she started her teaching degree, moving out of the mansion three months before Logan came back after his year-long absence. He swung by to take a look at the apartment, no doubt just because Jean was already dropping by to check up on her.
"How do you work in this mess?" Jean laughed, stepping over a pile of books that Rogue had vague shelving plans for and nearly landing on a pair of Jimmy Choo's that Rogue had borrowed from a friend.
"I, ah, don't spend much time here," Rogue replied truthfully, wondering why her apartment seemed so much smaller now than Logan was standing in it. "Um, I've got to go." She looked at her watch. "I have a lunch date."
Jean's delicate eyebrows rose. She looked pleased. "With a boy?"
"Joe's twenty-eight, Jean. That's only four years younger than Scott," Rogue replied dryly, smirking as she found a comb underneath a pile of papers and began combing her hair out in front of the large antique mirror she'd bought for a bargain from a flea market.
Logan chuckled and flicked through a paperback novel that had been lying between the cushions on her couch. "Nice one, kid."
They left then, Logan checking out Jean's ass as they walked down the stairs and the part of Rogue had remembered what Logan's mind was like, admitted that it was, indeed, a very nice ass.
She sighed, and outside the building they went their separate ways. She refused to look back, to watch him checking out another part of Jean's very pleasing anatomy.
Then she went to lunch.
After the success of her degree, after the champagne and the parties and the first outing of the little black dress that she'd scrimped and saved for, Xavier offered her a teaching position at the school, as expected. She accepted and moved back into the teacher's wing of the mansion and admired the larger rooms and the positively luxurious bathrooms.
Logan's room was next door. Empty, but next door, and as she lay in her bubble bath that first night she hoped to God the walls were soundproofed. Judging from what she'd heard from the chattiest of the teenagers, Logan did not follow a life of celibacy and chaste longing for Jean.
She was a popular teacher, almost instantly. With the exception of a couple of pranks pulled on her at the beginning, she began to recognize the troublemakers almost first off – possibly with the help of long-lost senses of Logan's, possibly with her own instincts. Then again, Eric had a great sense of those who could be used for mischief – the boy who sat in the back corner, innocent cherubic face hiding a mind that was sharp as a needle and a wicked sense of 'fun'. Add to that mixture the tendency to create electric shocks wherever he wanted – of varying degrees of power – and you had a difficult student.
Rogue developed eyes in the back of her head. She knew when the silence in the classroom grew unnatural, recognized what notes were innocent and which ones were plans for trouble. She disciplined students hard, but fairly – finding the troublesome students entertaining and something of a puzzle to work on; she had always done what she was told, as a teenager, riding on John's coattails and watching from the sides so the students that misbehaved were interesting to study.
She started training after Professor Xavier suggested she would be a great addition to the staple X-Men team. He warned her that since her primary gift was not pro-active, she would need to develop her physical strengths – hand to hand combat. He engaged a self-defense teacher who also taught some of the older students and then he admitted to her that he hoped, should Logan return, that he would aid in teaching some combat training.
Rogue got used to the bruises, the aches and pains that came with training every day. She ran regularly, made use of the school swimming pool and gym. Scott initiated her into the Danger Room and she found herself enjoying the thrill of it all, the adrenaline rush and she liked to say it was the 'Logan in her' – in fact, everyone said that – but she knew it was just her.
She started to called Mr. Summers 'Scott' and Ms. Munroe 'Ororo', though she never called Jean 'Jeannie'. She sat at the teacher's table with some of the older students and enjoyed chatting with the Professor in the library, discussing literature and music – recalling from her childhood the pieces of classical music her grandfather had played and she'd loved. She wrote letters to her parents and her mother replied in kind, with snippets of her father's laborious 'casual' chat and including pictures of her little cousins on Sunday picnics and the wedding photos of her friend Amy, who had married Kevin Bradley, her boyfriend from high school.
"Do you miss it?" one of her students asked, sitting next to her on the couch and reading the letter over her shoulder.
"What?"
She raised dark, unblinking blue eyes to Rogue. "Home."
Rogue smiled. "I am home."
The little girl didn't look convinced, but then she'd only been at the school for three months. Rogue put an arm about her shoulders. "I used to miss it," she admitted, "but that's nostalgia. Things were certainly simpler then, but this is who I am now."
"What's 'nostalgia'?"
Logan came back, of course he did, and this time he came back and found Jean and Scott had finally married. He laughed loudly when he heard, and Rogue came out of the main common room to watch as he stood in front of a scowling Scott and laughed harder than she'd ever heard.
She didn't understand, but then she had long ago decided that Logan was a mystery, one she wasn't going to solve no matter how hard she studied him.
It was only polite to walk over and greet him, give him that tentative, barely touching hug, and ask him how his 'trip' had been.
Still smiling over the huge joke of Scott and Jean's marriage – he'd turned warm eyes on her. "I hear you're a teacher now. Next they're gonna be telling me you're coming on missions with us!"
He seemed to think this concept was funny and Rogue tilted her head to glance at Scott, who was looking even more angry.
Deciding it would be best not to comment – though she briefly considered showing him that she could now throw him over her shoulder with ease – she smiled instead, said she'd see them both at lunch, and walked off. She had the day off tomorrow and was seeing Joe that night – she needed to pack a few things for the night and for the next day. She hoped Joe wouldn't mind that she had some marking to do.
That night, Joe proposed and she turned him down almost immediately – an instantaneous reaction that she didn't think about until months later. They fought – he was miserable, heartbroken and she was apologetic, hating herself for hurting him in this way. She explained about the training she was doing, the bruises he saw when they undressed one another, and said she couldn't commit herself knowing the dangers she would be putting herself in. He couldn't understand.
She left.
Only Logan was awake when she came home, walking through from the garage where she'd parked her car. He was sitting in the common room with Jones, entertaining himself by requesting channel numbers and getting Jones to find them. He looked up when Rogue walked past and she winced when he called her name.
"Good date?" he asked.
Standing the empty hallway, she half turned. "Use your senses, Logan," she told him, sharply, knowing that the fresh tears on her face and the hoarseness of her voice had to be a big giveaway.
There was a pause. "Oh. Sorry, kid."
She didn't have anything to say to that, instead she shifted her bag over her shoulder and walked up the stairs.
A few nights after that, she lay awake listening to Logan's... friend... screaming in ecstasy. Numb now – to her own problems and to the whole concept of Logan as something other than a vague personality in her life – she stared up at the ceiling and wondered what the hell he was doing to that woman for her to make those kinds of noises.
She was probably just a screamer, Rogue decided hopefully. A really, really... vocal screamer.
Rolling onto her side, she looked at the clock on her bedside table. Nearly three in the morning. They'd been at it for about four hours. That woman wasn't going to be able to walk in the morning. Then again, it wasn't as if Logan had any plans for the next day. He wasn't a teacher and though he had agreed to a couple of training sessions, he'd only given two to Scott and one to Jean. As far as she could tell, they weren't exactly scheduled and were based purely on when Logan felt like kicking someone's ass and calling it 'educational'.
Deciding a glass of warm milk would probably help, she rolled out of bed and pulled on a robe. Running her fingers through her hair and encountering a few split ends, she decided she'd book a hair appointment tomorrow and do something about them.
She laughed when she found Jean and Scott in the kitchen, sleepily dozing over mugs of hot chocolate. Minutes later, Ororo swept in looking murderous and she went straight for the Oreo's before hopping on a stool and complaining about the soundproofing in the teacher's wing.
Rogue laughed harder and snatched an Oreo and dipped it in Scott's hot chocolate before popping it into her mouth. "You don't have to sleep next door," she pointed out.
Everyone snorted. Ororo had a crumb on her cheek. Jean had a hot chocolate moustache and Scott's hair was decided left sided. Rogue giggled harder and rested her head on the cool kitchen counter, her hands wrapped around her untouched warm milk.
"God, do you think the dormitories below him can hear too?" Ororo announced, suddenly appalled. She brushed the crumb from her face.
Jean all but spat her hot chocolate out and choked. Rogue winced.
"I bet they can. Shit," Scott decided, standing up and patting his wife on the back. "We can't have that."
After that, Logan got an apartment which he used for his 'liaisons', as Jean put it tactfully. No one from the school knew where the apartment was – except, perhaps, the Professor – and Rogue found she really didn't want to know.
"Kid, let's go," he said to her one day, as she sat in the library marking essays on 'Romeo and Juliet'.
"Go?" she asked, wishing she wore glasses so she could look down at her nose at him. Or, rather, up at him as Logan was standing over her, casting a shadow on Louise Makley's rather weak essay.
"I'm gonna teach you to kick ass."
Logan's teaching was something to behold. She had more bruises, more aches and pains, and frequent trips to the infirmary where Jean handed out pain medication and they compared the bruises on their thighs, hiking up their skirts and laughing when Scott walked in and got an eyeful.
Twenty-five and three weeks and Rogue went on her first mission with Scott and Ororo. Logan was away from home again – somewhere in Mexico, it was rumored – and he missed her debut in leather, not including that show for the President. Scott told her she looked very 'fetching' and Ororo smothered her giggle at the pained look on Scott's face by turning it into a delicate cough.
Five missions later and Rogue woke up in the infirmary, groaning. Strangely, Logan was hovering over her this time, though she could have sworn he hadn't been back when she'd left. His face was twisted in what she thought could have been concern, but it abruptly turned to anger.
Jean hurried over when Logan started shouting at her and had to forcibly eject him from the room.
Rogue demanded more painkillers, please.
After that, Logan would wake her up at the crack of dawn every day and drag her out for regular training sessions. Half asleep and yawning, she'd stretch in sweats beforehand and then let him throw her about the room, wondering if this could possibly be considered of as abuse.
Then one day, she threw him across the room. Sure, he didn't go half as far as she would have gone had they reversed roles, but still. He applauded, mockingly, and made her all the more determined to do it again.
"Have you noticed, he's not used the apartment for a couple of months?" one of her students foolishly whispered to a friend at the front of her class.
"Melissa, Rachael, do I have your attention?" Rogue asked, tapping their desks as she walked past with a collection of homework.
Rogue celebrated Christmas with Jubilee and Kitty, in the apartment they shared in central New York and then New Year's at the school with Bobby. At midnight, they kissed familiarly, much to the amusement of any students who happened to be around when it happened and for weeks afterwards she had to sit through questions about her boyfriend, the Iceman. She rolled her eyes and sidestepped them, pulling out Thomas Hardy and ramming the concepts irony and fate down their throats, then listening to their complaints about Catherine and Heathcliff and sniffling over War Poetry and hoping Liam in the middle wasn't heightening everyone's emotions.
Logan disappeared for January and February and came back looking tired in March. He was grouchy and everyone avoided him – he was snappish during training and his hands lingered too long on Jean, pissing off Scott. Pissing off Rogue.
Most people avoided him and Logan seemed to spend a great deal of time in the Professor's office.
"Did he go on a bad mission or something?" Scott asked the Professor casually, during a teacher's meeting.
"I'm afraid I can't divulge anything, Scott," Professor Xavier said apologetically, smiling a vague, evasive smile and turning their attention back to the student performance records.
Had she been younger, still a teenager, perhaps, Rogue might have asked him herself. Something was clearly wrong and the situation wasn't improving. He accidentally broke Scott's arm during a session and though he was clearly apologetic, hovering nervously in the infirmary, the Professor suspended all training sessions with Logan. This resulted in more secret conversations in the Professor's office, the walls of which were very definitely sound proof.
He left again, to no one's surprise, only this time he paused in the doorway of one of the empty classrooms where she was catching a few moments peace to run over her class schedule and told her he was going.
"Canada?" she asked tentatively, standing up and edging a little closer.
Logan's eyes hovered somewhere down by her knees and she wished she'd worn a skirt that day. "You know... you've lost your accent."
She blinked. "Well, yes. I know."
"I kinda miss it."
When he was gone, Rogue felt a strange sense of relief. The school atmosphere calmed, the students didn't scurry through the halls looked slightly hunted, Scott's spine relaxed for the first time in weeks and Jean let out a sigh of relief.
"I do like him, you know," Jean confided to Ororo and Rogue one lunchtime, her fork hovering over a piece of broccoli, "but he's so much *work*. Don't you think?"
Rogue just wished she'd known what was wrong, but of course he wouldn't tell anybody. Couldn't tell anybody. That wasn't the type of man that Logan was.
For her twenty-sixth birthday, she flew down to Mississippi for a family celebration. Beyond her parents, the rest of the family didn't know about her mutation. They all thought she'd run away from home after what had happened to David – the reasons for his coma having been seriously hushed up. And she was happy for them to live in a delusion. She had no intentions to see her extended family much and she certainly wasn't about to announce it at her birthday party, not when her parents were trying so hard to be understanding.
"Happy birthday, baby," her mother whispered, kissing her cheek, smelling of baby powder and vanilla. "Make a wish."
She noticed as she blew out the candles, her mother's arm about her waist, that for the first time her mother's shoulders weren't tense with nervousness at touching her. And that her father's fingers accidentally brushed hers when she took a piece of napkin-wrapped cake from him. She sat down on the swing outside under the tree she had climbed as a little girl and ate her cake, watching her eldest cousin's daughter crawl over the grass and trying to eat ants.
After crying her goodbyes at the airport, she held her father's handkerchief against her cheek on the flight home and recalled the tight way he'd held her, the brush of his bristly moustache against her ear. She cried a little more and curled up against the window, staring out at the clouds, feeling almost... almost content.
It was Tuesday when he came back in June. A little less tired, a little less aggravated, he nodded at Jean and Rogue who were sharing a box of chocolates in the kitchen and chattering about the latest mutant orientated legislation and went straight to see the Professor.
On Wednesday he went with them on a mission, giving a uniformed Rogue a very serious look as she walked out to the Blackbird. His eyes followed her as she took a seat at the main controls of the Blackbird, Jean sitting in the other seat. He didn't say anything though, instead strapping himself into his seat and closing his eyes.
Take-off was smooth, the flight swift, the landing in Atlanta even smoother. Logan let out a sigh of relief and smiled tightly at her. "Hate flying," he said.
"I know." And she touched his elbow lightly.
They picked up a mutant teenager in Atlanta, though it was hell trying to coax him out of the sewer system. On the way back, Logan switched seats several times, his sensitive sense of smell picking up scents that were making his eyes water. Trying not to giggle as she listened to Logan holding his breath and the kid apologizing repeatedly, Rogue pressed her lips together and focused on getting them home.
Thursday morning, Rogue woke early enough for her to feel comfortable wandering down to the kitchen to get a bowl of cereal in her pajamas. She was standing still, looking out of the windows, spoon in one hand, bowl in the other when she felt Logan walk in.
Not turning around, she addressed him, "You're up early."
"Yeah."
She heard the fridge open and close and he padded over to her. Looking down, she saw he had bare feet and she found this indescribably cute for some reason. She looked up, a smile on her face and saw that in addition to the bare feet he'd not put on a shirt. Lifting her eyes to his face, she swallowed before saying, "Isn't it a little early to be drinking?"
He lifted the bottle and she didn't know how he had done it but she was suddenly crowded against the window and his eyes were so very intense that she didn't think could breathe properly any more. "It's a soda. Rogue..."
"Yeah?" she whispered, a little breathless.
The bottle of soda lifted and he touched the chilled glass against her shoulder. Automatically tilting her head to the side, he ran the bottom edge up her throat as her eyes fluttered closed. Moments later, something soft and warm touched the cooled sections of skin, moving upwards, lightly pressing. She sighed, her fingers loose around her bowl of cereal.
Logan's mouth paused at the corner of her own mouth. She could feel it each time she breathed in. Opening her eyes, she looked into his. "I didn't think you'd ever look at me that way," she whispered.
"I've been looking for a while now," he said, his free hand touching the side of her face, fingers stroking a streak of white hair. "Do you still want to go to Alaska?"
*
So, Rogue was twenty-six and it was a Thursday. That was all she knew. On Friday, they took one of Scott's sturdier cars and left.
-end-
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