It had happened about two weeks after Liberty Island. Logan had just left, leaving her with his tags around her neck and his voice in his voice in her head, along with Erik's and Cole's. Mr Summers was teaching them both literature and math and he was giving back their paper on Orwell.
"Good paper but you could work on making your sentences clearer."
When she'd recognized the words spiraling around her leg, she had burst out laughing. What an unlucky man he was if she really was his soulmate! She'd decided there and then that he didn't have to know. After all, he was living the perfect love story with Jean, there was even a rumor about him proposing soon. He wouldn't miss out, really. She had therefore not spared him a word, avoiding him as much as she could.
And then, Alkali Lake happened. Her crashing the Black Bird happened. And because of her, Jean had had to sacrifice herself. Her soulmate's soulmate was dead and it was her fault. She owed him at least an apology, even if it meant revealing her secret.
"It'll be okay, kid" Logan's voice echoed in her head.
The real Logan was long gone, probably grieving somewhere in the woods. After all she could only make him stay for so long, no matter how many times the one in her head repeated that she was family.
She braced herself to face him but in the following days, no one managed to bring him out of his room. They sent Kitty to bring him food since he wouldn't even get up to open the door. When he finally emerged after almost a month, everything about him seemed so fragile she didn't dare go up to him. It took him another two weeks before he started teaching again. Even then, his voice sounded like a ghost's. Every time she looked at him, guilt choked her. Not that he was the only one: two months after the incident, the whole school was still mourning. As Bobby had put it, "Kitty's my soulmate but Jean was the school's soul".
So when she saw Mr Summers grading papers in an empty classroom she took the chance. She made sure her first word was very ordinary, hopefully the same as Jean's.
"Hey".
He looked up from the copy, the same void expression he seemed to have had forever now.
"I just wanted to apologize" she stuttered twisting her gloved hands.
He remained silent, encouraging her to continue.
"About Jean. I mean Dr Grey. I mean about crashing the jet. It's my fault we couldn't take off and she had to go and… Oh God I should've gone, I should've absorbed her and taken her place. Everything would be better if I hadn't been such a bad pilot and then a coward, I'm so sorry".
She stopped, out of breath, as he stood up to be at her eye level. It probably didn't have the wanted effect as the visor kept his face unreadable.
"She's dead Rogue. Apologizing won't change that."
Without another word, he walked out, leaving her and the stack of paper behind. He went straight to the backyard, to her gravestone, and started sobbing. It didn't even occur to him that Rogue' first word to him -a quite rare conversation starter nowadays- was the lone word tattooed on his forearm in a familiar handwriting he couldn't quite replace. He started scratching it furiously, wishing it to disappear, because Jean's first words had been "Do you want some cake?" and he couldn't possibly accept that what they'd shared together wasn't true love. How could someone else be his soulmate?
He was almost bleeding when he felt a tug at their telepathic connection. He suddenly felt the need to rush to Alkali Lake. Could she be…