"Marie? Honey?"
"If Daddy finds out you're talkin' to me, you'll be in trouble Momma," Marie answered, cracking the door of her bedroom open a little bit and peeking through.
"Your papa is at work," Alice D'Ancanto replied firmly. "Baby... he's already thinkin' of kickin' you out," the woman confessed, tears streaming down her face.
"That won't look good to the neighbours," Marie pointed out, a little desperately. She knew that image meant a lot to her father, so that was the thing to appeal to. "Even if I'm some strange, dangerous monster all of a sudden."
"I don't care!" Alice wept. "You're my baby! Even if -!"
"I wanted to travel anyway," Marie said quietly. "I was just going to wait until I'd finished high school. I've been saving."
"You... Oh Sugar..."
~oOo~
Tuesday night, Marie's father, Ramond 'Ray' D'Ancanto slammed her bedroom door open with a thunderous look on his face.
"You are gonna see out this week," he informed. "But you had better start packing. You're testin' out of high school girl. You been traumatised, you can't take it any more, you're gettin' out. You been plannin' anyway," he said with a gesture at the map on her wall. "Your first test is tomorrow. I'm gonna buy you a camper van, an' you'll be outta my house by Saturday night. You hear me girl?!"
"Yes Daddy," Marie answered softly.
"An' you'll be covered!" he snapped before he slammed her door shut again.
~oOo~
Marie went to school on Wednesday, wrapped up in sheer black – light to wear, but 'moody' looking – and blessed her over-achieving father for making sure she was so well-studied that she could test out and graduate a year early. Even if he was kicking her out.
More than her father, she blessed her Momma. Alice, every afternoon before Ray got back from work, slipped an envelope of cash either under Marie's bedroom door or into the camper that, as promised, Ray had bought for Marie. It was brand new and had a ten-year warranty – which was excellent shelf-life for a vehicle of any sort.
He clearly didn't intend for her to come back home any time soon. If ever. He even arranged for her passport to be fast-tracked so that she'd have it by Saturday. That way, if she wanted to leave the country, she could – and without having to come back home for it.
Alice bought things that Marie would need to make the camper-van homey. When Ray wasn't there to keep the mother and daughter away from each other, she also helped Marie pack up her belongings into it when Marie came back from taking her tests. Alice wept every day as she helped Marie prepare to leave, and wept some more as Marie climbed into her van on Saturday morning and drove off.
Ray was either stone-faced or wearing an expression of barely-contained rage the whole week.
~oOo~
Marie had decided to give herself a new name, to go with her new life. She was on her own, going her own way... she'd liked the sound of 'Rogue', and had gone with that. On the other hand... well, the times she stopped to look for work, people weren't interested in hiring someone called 'Rogue', so she introduced herself as Anna. It was true enough. Anna Marie D'Ancanto. She'd just always been 'Marie' back home.
'Rogue' was the name she gave when she was in places she would normally have avoided – except that she couldn't afford to sometimes.
Rogue smiled to herself as she drove her camper into the Canadian Rockies. She'd showed her passport at the border, and been waved through after they'd done a quick check of her van and asked her a few questions from a standardised list.
She'd barely gone five miles from the border when she saw a man, naked as the day he was born, stumbling through the snow with one hand raised to cradle his head.
He looked up and saw her then too, and stretched out a hand, clearly begging her to stop.
Rogue didn't think twice about putting her foot down on the breaks. She'd already begun that action before he'd even spotted her. Of course, she did it carefully, not wanting to risk an accident. As far as she knew, there wasn't any ice on the roads, but there was a lot of snow around.
"There's blankets in the back," she told him as she hopped out of the driver's seat and opened the door to the camper part of her van. "Get in and get warm," she instructed with a smile. "You can tell me your story as I drive."
"Thank you," the man said softly, his voice low and a little scratchy.
Rogue blushed and told herself it was because she was less than a foot away from a naked man – not because she found him attractive. And the shiver that had just run down her spine was because it was cold, not because she liked the sound of his voice. She gave him a quick smile and hurried back into the driver's seat.
"Secure?" she called back once she'd done up her seat-belt.
"Uh... yeah," the man answered hesitantly.
Rogue glanced over her shoulder and saw that he'd wrapped himself up in the green wool blanket her mother had bought her, and wedged himself into the corner nearest the little heater that she kept back there. Satisfied, Rogue nodded to herself and got back onto the road properly.
"So, what's your story Hun?" Rogue asked.
"Not much to tell," the man admitted. "I woke up in the snow a couple of miles away, only thing I've got is a pair of dogtags that don't have the sorts of details normal dogtags have. I don't know how I know that though. I don't remember anything from before I woke up."
Rogue frowned at that. "Well, what's on the tags?" she asked.
"One side says 'Logan', other side says 'Wolverine'," he answered.
"Well, I'd say 'Logan' is probably more likely of the two to be your name, though first or last, I couldn't say," Rogue said.
"And what's your name, Miss?" the now-named Logan enquired.
"I'm Marie," she replied with a smile. "But I get called Rogue."
"And what's a pretty girl like you doing driving through the snow all by yourself? Picking up naked men?" Logan asked, curiously, rather than as any kind of pick-up line – it was in the way he said it.
Rogue smiled ruefully and snorted in unhappy amusement. "Avoiding coming into contact with anybody ever again," she admitted.
"What?" the man asked, confused. "Why?"
"Because when people touch my skin, they get hurt," Rogue stated.
For a while, there was no reply. No conversation of any sort as Rogue continued to drive, headed for the nearest town that would have a shop she could buy clothes at – clothes for the man who was naked and wrapped up in a blanket in the back of her van.
"I got attacked by a cougar," Logan said after a few minutes. "It's what woke me up. Claws sinking into my skin. I didn't even think. Just... popped out a set of claws of my own. Only mine are a foot long, covered in metal, and they spring out of my knuckles. All my injuries healed up while I was killing the cougar."
Rogue blinked at that, but didn't turn. It was certainly interesting. She couldn't touch people, and this man had claws and would heal from interesting sorts of injuries – possibly any sort of injury.
"Does it hurt?" she asked when she found her voice.
"What?"
"Popping the claws... and the injuries you healed from," she elaborated. "Does it still hurt?"
"It... Yeah. Yeah it still hurts."
~oOo~
It was awkward and embarrassing, but Marie managed to get Logan's measurements so that she could get him clothes that fit when she hit the next town, and then she hit up a steak-house for something to eat before the pair of them moved on. This time with Logan strapped into the passenger seat beside Marie in the cab of the camper-van.
"So, that was interesting," Marie offered delicately.
Logan blushed a little, which looked wrong on him, but he was clearly uncomfortable and embarrassed.
They'd had to have a reading lesson in the steak-house, with the menu as their texts. It seemed that, apart form talking, Logan really didn't remember anything. His body knew how to do things, and he was pretty quick about picking up stuff – like washing his hands after going to the bathroom – but anything that was learned in a classroom? He didn't have that in his head any more.
He knew how to use the utensils and he had displayed excellent manners, but... he couldn't read the menu, and he didn't understand numbers that went higher than he could count on his fingers. It was a wonder he knew what was written on his tags.
"Sorry," Logan said softly.
Marie shook her head. "No problem," she insisted. "We're just gonna have some fun figuring out what you know how to do, and teaching you over the things you don't know. Maybe you'll even remember something along the way," she suggested hopefully.
She hadn't had a lot to be hopeful over since she'd left home, and in all honesty, she wasn't nearly as hopeful as she sounded, but... for his sake, she'd hope anyway.
"Thank you," Logan answered, and smiled shyly back at her.
~oOo~
A week after the pair had met, Rogue pulled up next to a man in a flannel shirt and a yellow hard-hat who was frowning at a clip-board.
"Any work goin' Hun?" she asked as she leaned out of her window.
"Can ya cook Miss?" the man asked hopefully. "I got a camp full of lumber-jacks who are all jack-shit at cooking."
Rogue smiled. "Hun, you just asked a girl from in Mississippi if she could cook. I was raised to be able to do everything a person could need in a house. Cook, clean, sew any clothes get torn, even got my first aid."
"You're hired," the man told her at once. Then he noticed Logan on the other side of Rogue. "What about you?" he asked. "You lookin' for work too?"
Logan nodded. "Anything to keep me busy," he agreed.
"You ever do this sort of work before?"
Logan shrugged uneasily.
Rogue leaned further out of her window and cupped her hand to whisper.
The man obligingly leant in.
"My man, he just woke up a week ago, no memory of his life. We decided we'd build a new one together," she said, and leant back. "Daddy didn't approve of us anyway," she added, a half-truth. Her daddy didn't approve of her. He didn't know about Logan. Probably wouldn't have approved of him either though, if he'd known.
The man nodded in understanding and acceptance. "Alright," he agreed. "I'll keep an eye on ya for the first week, show you how the job works and all. You two do good, you'll be able to afford your own cabin out here this side of a couple of months."
"Much obliged," Logan said gratefully.
Rogue smiled brightly. "Where d'you want me to park it Hun?"
The man pointed to where a collection of other trucks were already lined up. "I'm Larry, by the way. Larry Bryson."
"I'm Anna," Rogue answered with a smile, using the well-established identity she'd been using since she left home. Then gave the name she'd gotten, quite accidentally, from Logan. "An' this is James."
There had been an accident. He'd had a nightmare, she'd woken him, he'd stabbed her through the chest with his claws, she'd touched him – she'd accidentally touched another mutant a few days after leaving home, so she knew what that would do – and she'd healed using his mutation and actually gotten some memories that he didn't even know he had.
Logan hadn't known his name when she picked him up after all, but it was still buried in there, deep. Someone had called him Jimmy. She felt he was a bit too old for the diminutive 'Jimmy' any more though, and so went with the name it was a nickname for. James.
"Welcome aboard," Larry said with a smile and a nod.
~oOo~
Having learned how to make Sunday lunches for the whole neighbourhood at her mama's knee certainly came in handy with her new job as cook for a camp of men who spent their entire days doing hungry work. From making sure there were enough sausages, eggs, rashers of bacon and waffles for them at breakfast, to having proper-sized sandwiches wrapped up in paper for the men to take with them to eat when they took a break in the middle of their work day, to having meat, potatoes and three veg all waiting for them when they got back at the end of the day – and dessert every Sunday night, as a special treat.
Learning how to skin and joint a couple of animals from her mama had come in handy too, especially the day Logan had brought back a deer. The animal, normally agile, had apparently been attacked already that day. It had gotten away from the predator that had left some nasty scratches on its hindquarters, but it couldn't move as fast as normal, and when a felled tree landed on it... well, that was it.
"Well, fresh meat then," Rogue had said as she'd taken in the slightly daunting task. She'd never done a whole deer before, after all. Turkeys and chickens, certainly, and the occasional rabbit or piglet, but never a whole, fully-grown deer.
She managed though, and all the men had sung her praises most enthusiastically.
Logan, for his part, had taken naturally to his new employment.
"I think I've done this before," he confided to Rogue when they settled into her camper the first night. "It all... it feels so familiar, almost natural, but I can't remember. It's... it's so frustrating."
"Shh," Marie comforted, and wrapped her covered arms around his covered torso. "It's okay. You're allowed to be frustrated, but tryin' ta force the memories ain't helpin' you. I'll try an' find other lumber camps. When the season here's done, we'll travel some, then head to another when the season comes round again. Maybe we'll find someone who'll know you."
"Thank you Marie," Logan said softly, and wrapped his hands gratefully around where her arms crossed his chest. "Thank you."
~The End~