Rating: PG-13 for language.

Category: Drama, angst, romance.

Pairing: Logan and Marie

Disclaimer: Me no own.

Note: Just a little short one-shot I wrote after seeing X3. Spoilers for X3 ahead, so read at your discretion! Marie wants to leave, and talks to Logan. With this piece, I was hoping to capture a little bit of their relationship.

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HOME

By: Hallospacegirl

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I'm halfway out the door when I feel him at my back. One moment, the gaping emptiness of the late night hallway, and the next moment, Logan.

Do I know he's there because I can see the top of his shadow lengthening over mine? Do I know he's there because I can smell the familiar traces of soap and perspiration and bitter cigar smoke? Or can I see him and smell him because I know he's there? What happened first, Marie?

I shuffle around, my backpack and my gym bag and my suitcase shoving into me like overweight strangers on a crowded train.

He's standing there in a threadbare white tank top and blue jeans. The tank top has a wide rip along the bottom, and one thumb is hooking into the rip as he hangs both thumbs from his front pockets.

I nod to the torn hem with my chin. "You're aiming to take care of that?"

"Where're you going?" he asks instead, unmoving. In the dim light of the hallway, the furrow between his eyebrows seems to cut into him like a canyon.

"I'm going away."

"Really? I hadn't noticed."

"I'm moving out for the summer."

"It's not even five in the morning."

"I know. I have to—"

He steps forward, takes his thumbs out of his pockets, and plucks the suitcase and the gym bag away from me. And then I'm watching the rhythmic motion of his shoulder blades as he turns to walk back into the mansion, swinging a piece of my luggage from each arm.

"Hey – hey Logan."

"Don't be an idiot, kid," I think I hear him call.

I stare into the back of his sleep-tousled head. Then I run to him, my limbs churning clumsily like a mess of elbows and knees as my backpack jerks and thumps against me. At the foot of the stairs, I grab his wrist, and he stops.

"What're you doing, Logan?"

He narrows his eyes at me over his shoulder. "I'm putting your stuff back in your room. It's four thirty, and you're staying here."

"The train's going to leave—"

"Did you fall out of bed and bump your head, kid, or what? Get back to bed and wake up at eight like everybody else in this joint. And then you can pack up your stuff and move out of here with everybody else."

"Logan, I don't – hey, Logan. How'd you know I was up and about?"

He only gazes at me with that exasperated steadiness in his green eyes, and without words, I can hear him telling me to stop playing the fool. The Wolverine can hear crickets from a mile away if he trains his ear to pick up the sound – so what's to stop him from hearing the repeated fumbling of zippers and locks, and the dry rustle of books being shoved into bags?

Logan shakes his head. "Stop trying to change the subject. Why the hell do you want to leave this early? Trying to run from someone?"

"God, no."

"Are you kidding? I can smell fear on you like bad perfume, kid. Eau denial." A corner of his mouth lifts in a lopsided grin.

"Your joke is so good you're almost funny," I reply.

He only continues staring at me, and slowly, his grin fades, and I realize that I'm still holding onto his wrist with my bare hands. Only now, instead of feeling that rush of complete, unexplainable Logan-ness come filling into me – attitude and bad puns and power and claws and all – all I can feel is the warmness and roughness of his skin against my fingertips. His skin, and the light dust of downy hair. Nothing more.

I feel like his eyes are burning into me from behind a brick wall. "Stop it, Logan," I repeat, not knowing what it is exactly that I want him to stop, only knowing that I suddenly can't stand it any longer. "Stop it."

"Well, Rogue," he says in a voice as hard as the adamantium within him, "you can't make me." He glances at my hand on his wrist, and lifts his gaze back to me. "Sorry, kid. You still smell like denial." And he jerks his wrist away from me and strides up the staircase.

He reaches the small landing before I can finally catch up with him. This time, I shove my way past him, and stand in front of him with my arms crossed in front of me, my bulky backpack blocking the remainder of the stairs. He can toss me down the banister with one hand, but between the suitcase and the gym bag and the backpack we're trapped like sardines, and neither of us can move.

"Logan," I say, "you're acting like a real jerk." I can't ever bring myself to say this to anybody else, not to Ororo or even Bobby, but somehow I can say it to Logan.

He smirks. "You can't talk to me like that. Apparently I'm part of the faculty now."

"Not anymore. Not for a while, anyway. It was officially summer vacation yesterday."

"Fair enough, Rogue, I'll bite. Then tell me, what's the meaning of all this, kid?" he asks, gesturing to the bags that he has dropped onto the landing with a dull and heavy thud. "Just what're you trying to do here, huh? Who're you trying to avoid?"

"What makes you think I'm trying to avoid someone?"

"Look, I'm no Einstein, but the situation's pretty obvious when I see you sneaking out the door at four thirty in the morning with fifty pounds of luggage on."

"Wrong, Logan. It's because I have to catch a train."

"Alone? That's funny, because I always thought you were pretty popular here. Where's your farewell committee? Where're those friends of yours to help you with your stuff and drive you to the station? No. Don't tell me. You got in a fistfight with Bobby and now you're storming off."

I look upward in frustration. "You wish."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you're not thinking straight. Now give me back my bags."

"Tell me what this whole deal is about and I will."

"None of your business."

"Who're you trying to avoid?"

"Just give me my suitcase, Logan." I make a halfhearted grab for it; his cool hand closes in a full circle around my lower arm, and I uselessly try to pull away. "You're going to make me late for the train."

"Where's it headed to?"

I sigh. "Where do you think, Logan? Where everybody goes during summer vacation. I'm going—" The word gets stuck in my mouth like a bramble clinging to my throat, and I choke on the silence. When I swallow, it feels like pushing down a jagged marble.

"Let me guess. To Cancun?" Logan offers. "The Bahamas? Mutant Girls Gone Wild?"

"Shut up," I snap. I glare at him for a hard second, and then it's too much, and I find myself staring at the scuffed tips of my sneakers. "I'm going home," I say, so softly that I can't even hear myself.

But he can.

He lets out a low whistle and releases my arm. "So you finally worked things out with your folks. They're letting you attend this joint. Well, it's about damn time—"

"No."

"I don't follow."

"Logan… they're allowing me to stay home because I'm not coming back here ever again."

"Not so fast, kid. You still got several years of studying left."

"You don't understand," I say, but I know he does. I can feel it, like how I felt him standing behind me at the threshold. Even with the brick wall between us I can feel it.

"Jesus." His eyes are so dark that they're only inky slits beneath his furrowed brows. "So whose brilliant idea was this? Your stepmother's? Or Ororo's?"

"My own. I talked to Ororo, and she approved of my decision. She's giving me a full scholarship to go the University of Mississippi next—"

"Damn it, Rogue." His voice is quiet, but it somehow echoes raggedly into the hall just the same. "Don't you think somebody was missing from that little committee?"

"You wouldn't have let me."

"You're smart, kid. And I'm not letting you now. Jesus, I should've known you were avoiding me. Get out of the way. I'm putting this stuff back into your room, where you're going to stay for the whole summer." He hoists up the bags, and when I don't move, he bodily presses past me and starts for the final flight of stairs.

"Logan, you're a – you're – you're an asshole!" I splutter out.

"You're going to have to try a lot harder than that to offend me," he replies without breaking his step. "You think you belong over there with those people? They were shitting in their pants when they found out what you were, Rogue. Do you think they went looking for you after you left? Do you think they cared? Hell, you don't belong there. You belong right here." He reaches the top stair and disappears down the hall.

"Logan." I struggle to keep up behind him, but it's hard to do in the darkness when my eyes are stinging and my vision is beginning to blur with something moist. "Tell me what, exactly, still makes me a part of this school—"

"You're still a little squirt who needs to learn her ABCs."

"—because in case you haven't noticed, lately I'm not exactly the same person I was a couple of months ago."

He stops and spins around so abruptly that I collide into him. I push myself away with my hands, with my open palms pressing against the warm skin of his upper chest. I feel skin, a pulse, and a heartbeat underneath. Nothing more. My arms drop limply by my sides.

He runs his fingers through his nest of unruly black hair and peers into me with one eyebrow cocked. "You want me to compare the old Rogue with the new? Okay. Sounds fun – I'll play. Let's see. You still look the same. You're wearing the same clothes. Same height. And this—" He flicks the white lock of hair that is cutting across my face with his fingernail, and tucks it behind my ear. "—this is still here. You still write in that little diary of yours all day. You still stare out of the window during class. And am I missing something? Why, I believe I am. You're still that annoying, brooding kid I saw that day in the bar."

Shooting me a grin, he pats me lightly on the cheek. The feel of skin against skin. Did you take the cure for this, Marie? I ask myself for the first time in weeks, and my stomach churns. I wish to suck the life out of him for that little nonchalant, flippant pat. The anger spills from me like a burst dam, and I reach up and I slap him.

"Stop calling me 'kid' and treating me like I'm still seventeen. It won't make me listen to your orders, Logan. Not anymore."

He rubs his jaw and flexes it, and the red handprint quickly fades. "Since when did you? When'd you listen to anyone? Huh, Rogue?"

"It's Marie."

"Come again?"

"It's Marie. And you damn well know why. Because Rogue is gone, Logan. And Rogue belongs here, not me. That's why I'm going. That's why Ororo let me go."

"And where're you going again? Home? Jesus, Ro – Marie, you haven't been to that house in years and years."

My eyes are stinging almost unbearably now. "Shut up, Logan. You don't know anything about home."

"Why do you want to return to a place that can only accept half of you?"

"I don't know! Maybe because that half of me is now all of me, okay?"

He swallows, the Adam's apple in his neck bobbing. "You don't think that place is your home. I can tell. Stay here," he says, and I know he's right.

"I can't."

"Because you're not a mutant anymore? You were. We're still not sure if the cure's permanent."

"It's not my home. I feel out of place here."

"What about Bobby?"

I shake my head. His name sounds odd coming from Logan's mouth, almost like it is something forbidden. A curse. "When he graduates, we can—"

"What about now? He doesn't want to be with you now?"

"Of course he does. But—"

"He wants to take some time off. Am I right? Time off from touching you?"

I can only stare numbly at him. My heart is pounding like a drill, and it's a full ten seconds before I can muster up the energy to slap him again. The sound ricochets off of the walls like a whip. "Logan, you can go to hell."

"I'm already in it. You just put me in it."

"I can't believe I'm talking to you—"

"Because now you have to say goodbye. It was going to be so easy to just grab your stuff and slink out the door. Saves the trouble of having to explain yourself, doesn't it? Now it's not going to be so easy."

"You have no idea what you're talking about."

"Yeah? Go to Bobby's room right now and tell him you're leaving him."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm not the one who wants to break u—" I don't catch myself in time, and neither do I catch the tears that tumble from my lashes and onto my cheeks. Logan's eyes are overwhelming, and I can do nothing but stare at the floor.

"Bastard," he says, softly.

And then silence overtakes us.

Would it be easier to easier to dig a hole in the floorboards and crawl into it, Marie, than face this mess? Run away, Marie. Run now. Run, and you'll never have to hear those final words from that boy, and you can pretend he still cares about you. Run. Run, so you'll never have to say goodbye to—

"Well, what about me?" Logan asks.

I clear my throat. "What about you?"

"Were you going to bother to say goodbye to me when you left?"

"Logan, stop this."

"Well? Why or why not?"

"We're more than this, Logan."

"More than you and Bobby?"

I think he's joking, but I answer him anyway. "I gave him my first touch. But I saved your life in that bar, and you saved mine."

"Marie, don't leave."

"Damn it, Logan, I'm sick – so sick – of goodbyes," I blurt out, and then a sob rises to my mouth, and I cover my face with my hands. "Can't you just pretend I'm going to come back? I want to go home, Logan. It's not here, and it's not that house in Mississippi, and it's not going to be in that university, and – oh God, I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I just want to go out there and find it. I just want to go home."

He takes a hand and places it beneath my left collarbone. "They say it's here."

"But I've changed. In here, I mean."

"No, you haven't. Not to me."

"And you say I'm in denial—"

"Let me show you," he says, and then slides the heavy backpack from my shoulder and wraps his arms around me and pulls me into him. My head rests on his collar, my cheek sliding against the scratchy, unshaven skin of his jaw and neck. He smells faintly of salt and musky smoke, and I feel his warmth from all sides, the heat from his skin melting the brick wall between us and feeding him into me like a river. Logan, his attitude and bad puns and power and claws and all.

When he lifts his head to look at me, he murmurs, "You still kill me, Marie."

"Logan, you're almost funny sometimes," I reply, and I think I smile. Distantly, I can feel the gradual lightening of the air as the night dissolves into dawn. A bird sings – now two.

Later, will I be sitting in the seat of an anonymous train, flying down the tracks to a house that hasn't received my presence for years? Or will I still be here with the people that I no longer consider my own?

Be with me, Logan. Be with me, wherever I am. With you, I'm home. Nothing less.

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