This started off as a one-shot and then grew. I sat in front of my computer screen, had a drink and this is what happened. This is going to be a depressing tale, no humour at all if I can help it!

And no, this is not a 'ROGAN' this is friendship all the way! ;) LOL

It's set after the first film and let's just pretend that the other two didn't happen, although I do like the second.

An Age Old Muse

Do you ever wish that you could turn back time?

That is such an overused, trite remark; it's a hackneyed phrase, a cliché and it's one that I cannot run far away enough from. In all my eighteen years I have never yearned for such an unattainable thought then: I wish I could turn back time.

When I was growing up I was never a daydreamer. I never sat on the front porch and built a pretty castle in the sky. I never fantasized about becoming a fairy princess, a famous and beautiful movie star or a well to do renowned award winning country singer. No, at the age of six Marie D'Ancanto wanted to become a veterinarian when she grew up.

My next door neighbour was a cantankerous and ill tempered elderly man, he never married and my papa always warned me to stay away from him. 'Marie' He would say, 'There is something not quite right about that man.'

Even at the age of six I felt the need to prove those around me wrong, years later I would run away from home with nothing but a handful of five dollar bills, a green cloak and a duffel bag full of meagre possession's but at the age of six and three quarters I wanted my daddy to know that there was good in everyone.

It was a humid and sweltering August morning when I ventured into the elderly man's yard, I crawled under the formidable chain link fence that guarded the ran shackled remnants of a bygone era. Brushing the grit and the baked earth off of my Sunday best I crept on tip toe to the nearest murky window and nervously and gratuitously gazed into a life in decline.

I was peering into the front room, a room that was in complete disarray. There were newspapers piled high to the ceiling, stacks of magazines, antiques that had surely not been dusted for a decade and a lone framed photo of a smiling young, dark haired woman adoring the peeling wallpapered wall.

I was impressionable at that age and you remember that I wanted to prove my daddy wrong. But standing there in my black and white dress, panty hose and with a large black bow tied in my chestnut shoulder length hair, I felt pity. I knew nothing of the way of the world, I didn't understand that there were those that were poverty stricken and impoverished. Politics meant nothing to a girl of my age; shortage of work for the timeworn never crossed my tiny but compassionate mind.

And then a gentle hand fell on my shoulder and I was looking into the haunted eyes of an exhausted and broken man with a dishevelled appearance. He asked me what my name was and I answered in a shaken whisper that it was Marie.

The man smiled kindly down at me and said that he once knew a Marie and through a woeful frown he told me the tale of Marie Roberts an heiress to a small fortune. They had fallen in love on a rainy evening in March of nineteen thirteen; they were both twenty one and had met at a cocktail dinner held in remembrance for the late mayor.

Marie Roberts and the man courted for five months until one night with a full moon observing their antics in the starlit sky he got down on one knee and proposed marriage. She immediately accepted and they danced as Mother Nature celebrated and a shooting star catapulted across the southern skies.

The man closed his intense blue eyes and wished, he wished that they would be together forever. Hand in hand through life until their dying days.

That muggy summer morning I found out that the world was a cruel and harsh place for those that loved. The young man with the seemingly bright future ahead of him and the love of his life on his arm found that out too.

Marie Roberts died five days later, she was found with a handgun grasped in her unmoving hand and a note was discovered on the side dresser. The man didn't know that Marie was depressed, however hard she fought to overcome her illness it would absorb her mind and destroy her from the inside out.

Every time that she failed she would pick herself up and try again, until one night the dark feelings would become too much for her to handle on her own. She was unable to fight against the darkness that had consumed her and Marie admitted defeat. A single bullet to the left temple and Marie Roberts was at peace but what became of her lover, the twenty one year old dashing man, with a bowler hat and a sharp suit.

He lived on, he was strong but over the years he would never forget her, he always told himself that he should have done more, why couldn't he see the pain she was in?

The man never married and shortly after her untimely death he bought a house, a house that he would live in for the rest of his life... The house next door to mine.

After that day I would always visit the man regularly and over the months we became what you might call friends. I would walk to the corner store for him and buy him groceries with my allowance.

It was a chilly December morning a week before Christmas when I made my way to his home. I had made a Christmas card for him at school and had wrapped a present up for him, it wasn't much but I was sure that he would be thankful. Christmas was a time for giving after all. That had been installed in me from a young age by my parents and I felt that this man needed to feel the Christmas spirit; he had become even more withdrawn over the past month or so.

I let myself into the house with the key he had given me and ventured into the hall calling his name. As I stepped quietly into the drawing room the first thing I noticed was that there was not a Christmas tree to be seen. Isn't it strange what runs through a child's mind?

I called his name once more and then I saw him, he was lying there peacefully in a threadbare chair beside the piano, his eyes open but there was no longer a haunted look to be seen, he looked at peace. There was a photo clutched in his hand, the photo of his Marie and in his lap was a handgun.

I gulped and thought back to his story that August, he had said that he had wanted to join his darling Marie but had been scared, what if she was not waiting for him when he arrived at the pearly gates and most importantly what if there was no afterlife?

I stood rooted to the spot for what seemed like hours taking in the scene in front of me and burning it into my brain. Then I screamed, screamed for the loss of the kind and misunderstood elderly gentleman and screamed because I knew that this was the end of my childhood as I knew it.

Twelve years later and I've returned to Meridian, to my place of birth and to the street where I grew up in.

I creep onto the back porch feeling all of six years old again as I lift one of my Mama's prized plant pots and search for the back door key. Finding the illusive key, I unlock the door and walk over the threshold into a life that I had abandoned eighteen months before. So much has happened since then, I have grown into a young women but my life is tarred by many a bad decision.

I smile to myself knowing that my parents won't be home for another five days; they have always vacationed north of the town this time of year. I used to look forward to those trips to the lake where we would rent a cabin and I would watch my Papa fish for our supper and always cry that he should put the poor trout back in the water where he belonged. I could never hurt an animal and I sometimes still fantasize about becoming the veterinarian that would help the poor defenceless pets and nurse them back to full health.

I shake my head free of those thoughts knowing that they are the source of pure evil, those are memories that I cannot handle right now. I venture over to the refrigerator and open the door. Ah, I knew it. Mama you are so predictable, don't you ever change?

I steal the bottle of wine out of its resting place and take a glass from the cabinet. I could never drink from the bottle; my southern manners would never permit that. I climb the stairs and head to my room, my safe haven from the world once upon a time. Now it is a catalyst for a serious meltdown and I would not want it any other way.

There is so much inside of me that no one ever hears, so much left unsaid and I don't have the strength to sit down and talk to those who care. I know that people care, sure I do but I have become so lonely these past few months. I'm surrounded by people day after day, yet I feel so lonely. My heart aches for the past, I miss my family and know that I can't return to my old life; I'm not the same girl and my life is full of shadows and hurt.

Standing in my room, I kick the door closed and slide down the wall, sinking into the carpet. I gaze around my room, my room and it hasn't changed. The map is still displayed above my bed and the trophies I won at school are still housed on the bookshelf alongside the photos of forgotten friends and family. I open the bottle of wine and pour the amber liquid into the crystal glass; I really do need this drink.

The wine has hit me hard because I have yet to eat tonight, I haven't eaten since yesterday morning and I feel empty in mind, body, soul and stomach.

How did I become this depressed, antisocial eighteen year old with a penchant for trouble and strife? I was never inclined this way, what was it nature or nurture? Was the biggest mistake of my life leaving this house full of love and laughter?

I felt like I had outstayed my welcome in this house as soon as I discovered I was a mutant with the ability to kill with a lingering touch. My parents weren't unkind they just didn't know what to say to me. This was something that they couldn't kiss better; they couldn't chase the fears away.

So I took matters into my own hands I left, duffel bag in hand and a note left on my neatly made bed addressed to my parents, apologizing but begging them to understand my reasoning's.

I had to figure this unwelcome twist in my comfortable life out alone and I always wanted to visit Canada, Anchorage especially.

Now sitting here in my eerily quiet childhood home, in the room I grew up in I ponder the very thought of life. Why am I here? I'm not enjoying this life I have been given, I am drinking the days away with illegally obtained liquor and a scowl permanently etched on my pale face. Should I have left so hastily when I first mutated and do I really wish that I could turn back time and return to my mundane existence?

It's hard to reason with my mind, it is clouded with so many other psyches and other memories of those I have absorbed, I don't know where I finish and they begin. I'm a mixture of so many different components, emotions and personalities I find it too hard to even think at times.

Thinking is for suckers though, I don't want to think. If I concentrate on those bleak thoughts my heart just might break in two.

An hour has passed and the clock on my desk displays the time as one fifteen in the morning. I've always considered myself a night owl, I party hard at night until the early hours of the morning and even then I don't know when to stop. It is then that I make a decision, my life is a mess and I know that there is only one way out...

The back of my head hits the wall and I close my eyes praying that when I fall asleep, I won't wake up. I don't want to live the rest of my life miserable and alone on the road to hell and back.

My vision dims, my head swirls with promises and the face of my feral saviour. The man that saved me from certain death on the Statue of Liberty and brought me back to life, he left days later and has not been heard from since. He was wrong to throw himself into jeopardy and save my life. What if he had died, how could I have lived with his blood on my hands?

But he had no thought for his own life, I still have his feelings flowing though my polluted mind and he was scared. The mighty Wolverine was scared that the pure and innocent stray slip of a girl had died, the girl that he had promised to take care of. Well, he's done an amazing job because I'm now dying once again with packets of empty pain killers resting at my feet and I am finally truly happy.

I often thought that the name Marie was a curse, after all the great Marie Roberts committed suicide and her afflicted poor lover followed suit many years later and now it's my turn. The pills are dissolving in my stomach and I smirk arrogantly in the face of death. I'm not scared to die, I never have been and this is what I want. I need to die because I have no fight left in me and no hope for the future.

My body feels as though it's floating, it's as light as a feather, as I slouch to the floor in a drugged induced slumber and then a gruff voice breaks though my near lethargic, deadly state.

"Kid!?"