A.N.: I'd wanted to do a one-shot on Rogue/Logan's first meeting, but I'm not going to get to it, so I just incorporated it into this fic. It made the story a bit longer than I'd anticipated, though, so I'll also have to split the second half into two parts. The next chapter should have more of what-happened-after stuff everybody was asking for.

Anyway, don't forget to read and review! (Just keep it a little cleaner this time, okay? I don't need any more comments about Logan being a pedophile. If that's the best you can come up with, I don't want to hear from you anyway.)

Reader Responses from the last part are at the bottom.

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CHAPTER TWO: Memories

Not far from the place where Logan silently brooded, his thoughts completely focused on a certain dark-haired girl, a group of young people had gathered in the courtyard of a school that was not quite a school. There were probably eleven teenagers in all, some sprawled on the fresh-cut grass, others perched on low, sun-warmed cement benches. The students were smiling, exchanging bits of gossip or cheerfully complaining about the work load their professors had given them. No matter what else might be going on in the world, this was, at least for them, only a typical day.

Of them all, only one young student was not laughing or talking or even truly listening. The girl of Logan's dreams sat a little apart from everyone else, maintaining her distance out of habit as much as out of necessity, and, though she could not, of course, have known it, her eyes were every bit as brooding as Logan's. She silently stared out into nothing, clearly thinking hard. Her companions didn't notice, or, if they did, they weren't saying anything to the girl herself. This was not a place where anyone was questioned too deeply about anything, and a girl who had been hunted by some of the most powerful mutants alive, a girl whose touch alone could drain a man's very life in seconds and who had befriended the most unfriendly and frightening of mutants, was certainly not an exception.

Still, some of the other mutants glanced at the girl from time to time, vague curiosity evident in their eyes. Rogue was one of the odder individuals at the school, and nobody had ever really known what to make of her. She looked normal enough, on the outside, and was in fact every bit as beautiful as Logan believed her to be. She was a lovely thing, this girl, with auburn hair falling loosely about her shoulders, a single streak of white framing her face and somehow making her seem even more pale and delicate than she really was. Her eyes were a deep chocolate, and more expressive than eyes should be. She held herself with a grace unusual in a girl her age, with the complete inner control of one who is very aware of herself and all around her. She was a woman in a girl's body, though if any of her companions knew her well enough to see that, they were too lacking in experience themselves to put the idea into words.

The girl quietly sighed, leaned back on her bench and tried to stretch her legs without jeopardizing the distance she had put between herself and her fellows. She was tempted to close her eyes, tempted to simply curl up and go to sleep, but she didn't. Sleep was something she generally tried to avoid, at least as much as she could. It left her vulnerable, allowed her mind to replay memories she would much rather forget, and so she usually fought it as long as she could. She didn't want to remember who she was, where she had come from and what she had done in the past. She didn't want to remember the people she had hurt.

Of course, forgetting required that her mind cooperate, and it wasn't going to, today. As she tilted her head back to stare up at the cloudless sky, and as her brown eyes absently followed the path of a bird in flight, the memories came back, and she found that she wasn't quite able to think of anything else. Images were flashing through her mind, and with them came all of the emotions she'd struggled through once already.

She remembered her childhood, that happy time when she'd been just like everyone else, when she'd been innocent. She'd been only a girl, then, a girl pretending to be a woman but not having any idea just how hard life could be or what she'd have to go through before she could cross the threshold into adulthood. She'd had everything planned out for her life, all those years ago—travel, school, maybe marriage and a couple of kids somewhere along the road. It had all seemed so easy, so beautiful. She knew differently now.

And then David had come along, and she'd felt the first beginnings of real womanhood. She'd fallen for him, fallen hard, and even though she now recognized that what she'd felt was nothing more than puppy love, it had seemed like everything to her younger self. She'd wanted nothing more than to be with David for as long as she lived, to spend her life with him and hopefully figure out what that meant as they went along. She'd wanted him to be hers, and wasn't that ironic considering the fact that when she really fell in love it would be with a man who wouldn't ever belong to anyone, least of all her?

So she'd kissed David, one lazy afternoon in her bedroom, the movement of their lips matching the sweet, innocent sounds coming from her mother's piano downstairs. It was her first kiss, and her only one, and it had been everything she'd ever dreamed it would be. Maybe it was a little more physical than she'd been expecting—again, the irony being that everything with Logan was physical—but it had still been very, very wonderful…at least until the end, when her powers had kicked in and the kiss had turned into something else. Her entire world had changed, in that moment, though of course she hadn't realized it because she was too busy sucking the life out of her sort-of-boyfriend. She'd only realized what she was doing when it was almost too late, when she'd already taken a piece of David's soul into herself and become a little of what he had been.

She'd been too distracted by the kiss to sense the moment it had changed, but she soon realized that something was very wrong. She'd pulled away, eyes wide with terror as she saw the veins all but popping out of David's neck and face, knowing she'd hurt him but unable to understand what she'd done or how she'd done it. She'd scrambled to the other side of the room, huddling in a corner and too shocked to call for help, only beginning to scream when she realized he was still inside her, his terror burning through her mind even though she knew he wasn't consciousness anymore and she shouldn't have been feeling what he'd felt even if he had been.

And the worst part was that she hadn't even been thinking about David at all, at that point. All she'd cared about, in that instant before her parents thudded up the stairs and into her room, was that she wasn't herself, that David had somehow taken a piece of her rather than the other way around, as it really was. Her thoughts weren't her thoughts, her mind no longer wholly her own, but even then, as she fought with her shock and with this new, faint other in her mind, she'd been cursing herself, thinking she was worse than a monster because her fears and her screams were still more for herself and this thing she'd done rather than the one she'd done it to. She'd only been thinking about herself, in that moment, terrified of what her parents might say, terrified of what this would do to her life. David hadn't mattered at all, not the real David, and she would hate herself for that later.

Then again, she'd been right to be terrified. Her parents had immediately called an ambulance, her father tagging along after the paramedics to make sure David was all right even though he wouldn't believe she'd had anything to do with what happened to the boy until later, her mother staying behind and trying to get some sense out of the child she would soon come to fear. Of course, her attempts to calm Marie hadn't really mattered, because the girl had already pulled into herself in case someone else tried to invade her as David had. She hadn't let her mother come near her, had only locked herself in her own room so she wouldn't have to speak to anyone or explain what had happened when she really didn't know herself.

She didn't come out for days, though her parents could hear her crying softly to herself sometimes. They didn't push her, not even when the sobbing turned to screams of anguish as they often did, not even when she called out to them through the door, begging them not to hate her for what she'd done but still refusing to let them in to see her. They never answered, just left food by the door every couple of hours and looked away when she crept, ghost-like, down the hallway to the bathroom. They were never quite able to find the words to say to this pale girl they didn't know anymore.

Not that she would have listened even if they had.

The situation didn't last. David had been young, unformed and almost as much of a child as Marie had been before this. He hadn't left much of an impression, though of course that was actually worse. His thoughts in her mind were so quiet, so faint and unobtrusive, at least after the first few days, that she eventually stopped noticing them at all. They'd become her thoughts, her ideas, her feelings. She didn't even recognize David in them anymore, though she would never be able to watch football again, after this. David had been a football player.

She also couldn't go back to the way things had been, and even though she didn't know what people were saying about David, even though she didn't know what her parents were thinking, she knew that much. A week after David had been carted to the hospital, in a coma and without any reason for it, Marie silently opened her door and left her bedroom. She'd showered and changed her clothes for the first time in days…and she had a duffle bag slung over her shoulder. She slipped quietly down the stairs, down the hallway and past the living room where her mother was still playing the same tune on the piano, past her father's office where the door was shut even though it was the middle of the morning and he should have been at work. She didn't know if he was or not.

She moved lightly, probably because she hadn't eaten most of the food her mother had left for her and so had lost a great deal of weight, and her footsteps made so little noise that her mother wouldn't have heard her even if she hadn't been on the piano. She certainly didn't notice as Marie slid past the living room, down another hallway and then into the kitchen. When she emerged from the pantry several minutes later, the pack that had once been practically empty was now so full the zippers would barely close. She shifted the weight of it onto her other shoulder, and, without a backwards glance, turned and walked out the back door. She never saw her parents again.

Though it would be clear enough later, she couldn't have explained, at the time, why she'd left. Perhaps it was only that she'd recognized the moment in which her childhood had ended, and she knew she couldn't have gone on as she had been. That part of her life was over, and staying in the same house she'd grown up in, pretending everything was normal when it so very obviously wasn't…it just hadn't been something she could have coped with. And after the way her parents had looked at her, she couldn't have coped with them, either. She didn't want to spend the rest of her life wondering if they would blame her, hate her…fear her. She didn't want to see them flinch away from her touch. It would have broken her, frankly, and it was easier to just walk away, to never look back. It was easier to go out on her own, search for someplace where she wouldn't have to pretend she was normal, where nobody knew her or where nobody would care if she was tainted because everybody else was tainted, too.

In all the dreamings of her younger years, she'd wanted most to go to Canada, to a place like enough to her home that she wouldn't be afraid, but different enough to be an adventure, and now that she didn't have a home, she wouldn't even consider going anywhere else. It wouldn't be the trip she'd dreamed about, when she would have had money and food and a place to return to, but it was better than anything else. She could go there, start over, maybe reinvent herself. It was as good a plan as any.

It wasn't easy. Her food ran out long before she was ready for it, and she'd never had much money to begin with. Predictably, she took to stealing, slipping wallets from pockets, shoplifting from grocery stores. She wasn't a very good thief, at first, but necessity is a superb teacher, and she learned. She learned to target places and people less likely to catch her, learned to slip away when her judgment proved false and they figured out what she was doing anyway. She would never be great at it, of course, but then she wouldn't have wanted to be. She only wanted to survive, and if the fare wasn't great and she never quite had enough to eat, that was exactly what she was doing.

She ended up trekking all the way across the country, walking in the beginning, wearing through at least two pairs of shoes and having to waste hours stealing new ones. After a while, as her feet carried her further north, as the summer ended and winter began, she reconciled herself to hitchhiking. She tried not to be stupid about who she accepted lifts from, though there was a time or two when she practically had to jump out of moving cars just to get away from the less scrupulous men. It didn't bother her all that much, truthfully, because while she knew her youth and gender made her appear as more or less a walking target, she also knew that no man would ever be able to hurt her. There'd been enough times, over the past months, when she'd brushed up against other people, felt the first stirrings of her power before she could jerk away, and she no longer had to question the form her "gift" would take. She no longer had to wonder what would happen when she touched someone.

At least she'd been lucky, and those brief touches had never amounted to anything. She'd always been able to pull away, before, save both herself and her potential victims. She hadn't hurt anyone, hadn't absorbed anyone. She was still herself, though she often wondered how that could really be a good thing.

She never thought about calling her parents. She didn't want to hear them begging her to come home, didn't want to hear the little catch that would appear in their voices because they didn't really mean it. She didn't want to acknowledge what she'd done, either, or why she'd run away, and anyway that part of her life really was over. She wasn't their daughter anymore, wasn't their innocent little girl, the one they'd failed to protect from herself. She wasn't Marie, anymore.

She did call David, once. Three months after she'd left, she stopped at a pay phone in some nameless little town in Illinois. She'd begged some change to make the call, refused to give her name when David's mother answered. She only asked how he was doing, whether or not he'd recovered. His mother, puzzled and more than a little suspicious, admitted that David had been in a coma for three months but was now fine. She didn't say what had caused it, and Marie didn't ask. The conversation ended quickly.

It wasn't a good life, and it only got harder as the weeks dragged on. There were plenty of times when Marie was fine, when she was able to feed herself and be almost free, but then there were more times when her stomach was empty and she didn't think she would live to see the next sunrise. There were times when she hated herself and all that had brought her to this, times when she almost started back home. There just weren't any times when she felt pity for herself, or when she questioned her wisdom in leaving the only home she'd ever had. No matter how bad things got, she never wished she hadn't left.

She was in one of the bad times, when she met Logan. She was past the border, then, and she hadn't eaten for days. She'd been hungry and cold, tired and despairing. She'd been about to give up, and she'd decided that she'd stop, after the next town. She'd settle down, see if she could find a job, see if she could stop running. She didn't have a choice, because something told her that things were only going to get worse from here on out, as the weather dropped below freezing and as the towns grew smaller and scarcer. She was simply out of options.

Of course, she'd been assuming that the next town she came to would actually be a town, and it wasn't. Laughlin City was more of a way station than a town, with nothing but a gas pump and a seedy-looking bar. There was nothing for her here, but she'd gone inside anyway, too cold and too hungry to care that this probably wasn't the best place even for her. Her skin might not protect her here, not when most of these men were armed and could very likely snap her neck with a thought and before her powers could kick in.

She regretted her decision almost immediately. True, she was warmer inside, but there wasn't anything else she could do for herself. The only food came from the surly barman behind the counter, and so there wasn't any possibility of stealing what little there was. She also didn't like the looks the other men were giving her, and she knew, from the way they were staring at her, that looking young and innocent wasn't going to help her get what she needed in a place like this. She could see the desire in their eyes, could see the darkness of their hearts reflecting in their faces. It made her uneasy, and she found herself thinking that coming into this place had probably been the worst decision she'd ever made.

And then she'd seen him, and her life changed for the second time. He was standing in a metal cage set in the center of the room, the kind she'd seen before in other bars and knew were meant for men to fight in. A fight had just ended, in fact, and from what she could tell, it had been quick and dirty. The winner was leaning against the grating as the other man was literally carried away, and even though his back was to her, she couldn't help noticing how angry and tired he looked. His shirt was off, a thin sheen of sweat coating a torso so tightly muscled that he might have been a body builder. She stared at him for a few moments, as she slipped through the crowd and headed closer to the cage, watching him with eyes that had widened in spite of the more shocking things she'd seen in her travels. She could sense the danger in him.

Another man had entered the ring, by then, shouting an angry challenge to the first man, who didn't seem to care all that much. He had a drink in his hand, and he took a quick swig of the contents. The bell rang, and the challenger barreled in, intent on something more than an honest fight. He lunged at the first man, but the fighter didn't even turn around. That was obviously a mistake, as the second fighter landed a vicious kick to the small of his back, and then two punches to his face when he finally spun around. The fighter went down and was kicked twice more.

The crowd was cheering, clearly happy to see the reigning champion fall, but even as the cheers continued, the second man was readying himself for another punch. He didn't get to make it. The first man, the one Marie had thought was dangerous, suddenly lifted his body up, spun and met the other man's fist with his own. The fighter didn't even flinch at the contact, though everyone in the room could here the sickening crunch of bones being broken. Then, as the second man cried out in pain and fell back, he pushed himself to his feet.

The fight was over quickly, after that. A few punches with his seemingly rock-like fist, a few kicks of his own in retaliation, and the challenger went down amidst the catcalls and booing of his bar mates. He, too, was carted away, slung between a couple of men like so much dead weight. The crowd was still shouting in anger as the first man—Wolverine?—was proclaimed the winner. He still didn't seem to care. He only prowled the edges of the cage, looking every inch the predator he'd just proven himself to be, and then resumed his old position against the grating. He pulled a thick cigar from somewhere about his person, though his jeans were tight enough that she didn't think he could have kept it in his pockets, and began to smoke, waiting for the next challenge that didn't come.

Some of the patrons took off as no other challenger came forth, their night's entertainment over, but she stayed where she was. She could see the man's face now, though of course she'd caught glimpses of it in during the fight, and she couldn't help staring. She'd seen plenty of fighting men in her journey, but never one like this. He was handsome in a rugged, animalistic sort of way, and older than herself by at least ten or even fifteen years. His hair was spiked a little on each side of his head, and while this would have been ludicrous on anyone else, somehow it just fit him, like he'd been born that way and to change it would be to change too big a part of himself. He looked…strong, and mean, and apathetic. He also still looked dangerous, perhaps even more now that she'd seen what he could do.

She might have left, then, because she'd realized this crowd was a lot rougher than even she was used to, because even though that fighter fascinated her, she didn't want to stick around in case he got mad again and somehow happened to take it out on her. She just didn't have anywhere else to go. It was too cold outside for walking, and she wasn't about to trust herself to any of the men or women she'd seen here. So she sighed, slipped over to the now almost empty counter and perched at one of the stools, waited for something to happen so she could figure out what to do next. She didn't have to wait long.

The man from the cage was suddenly next to her, taking a seat a short distance from hers. He ordered a drink, glanced at her briefly and then looked away again, and she found herself staring hard at him in return. There hadn't been any sympathy in his eyes, or compassion or friendliness or anything at all encouraging, but there also wasn't any lust or animosity, and that was something of a novelty for her. He wasn't looking at her as the other men had, as an object of desire or a way to satisfy their own sick fantasies. He wasn't looking at her at all anymore, in fact. It was as though she didn't exist, to him, and somehow that was more encouraging than it should have been.

Maybe that was why she tried to warn him, when the man he'd knocked down earlier came back and tried to pick another fight, and maybe it was just from what the other man had said, about this Wolverine taking a beating and somehow still being able to walk away. She'd stared at them both, eyes wide once more, wondering if maybe, just maybe, this fighter could be like her, with abilities he shouldn't have, with secrets he couldn't share. Maybe she wasn't alone anymore.

The fight had happened anyway, her suspicions quickly confirmed as the metal claws erupted from his hands and he nearly sliced his attacker's throat open. She didn't know if he refrained only because he really wasn't as dangerous as he looked, or if he simply didn't want to give himself a murder rap. Maybe he already had one. She didn't even think it was because the bar tender had a rifle pointed at the fighter's head, because he honestly didn't seem to care about that any more than he'd cared about the blows he'd taken in the ring. He only turned his head slightly, glancing at the rifle from the corner of his eye, and then attacked. The hand that wasn't at the other man's throat lashed out, lightening quick, metal blades fanning out from his knuckles, and sliced the gun into pieces.

He hadn't once looked at her since the fight had started, but when he left, she followed him anyway.

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Reader Responses:

Keikochan3: Thank you for the compliments! Loved hearing from you.

Dark-lil-devil: I'm so sorry to keep you waiting that long. I'm just a very busy person, and I don't often have time to work on these things. I'll try to do a little better with the next section, though.

Sodapop Allerdyce: They're obviously my favorite couple, too. I think they're perfect for each other—Marie helping Logan be more human, Logan loving Marie even when she thinks nobody else could. And I completely agree with your analysis of the man. You're pretty darn insightful, did you know that?

Fan: I thank you for the compliments!

Hachigatsu and Shigatsu: Have I ever told you that I adore you? You're one of my favorite reviewers, and I think I'd get all depressed if I didn't hear from you. You're such a wonderful writer yourself that your opinion means the world to me. Thank you for taking the time to read my stuff!

Sassy-chan: Thank you, beloved Sassy-chan. As always, it's a joy to hear from you. Your words are always so intelligent and flattering! I'm glad you liked this, and I look forward to hearing from you again.

Katie: Well, I thank you for both the compliments and the interest you have shown. It was wonderful to hear from you.

Karen11: That's a compliment in itself! I hope to hear from you again.

TheWolfLoved hearing from you. Your review was short but sweet, and I enjoyed it.

CleoStarreYes, and it took me forever to write it, too. I'm glad you liked it, though, because that made my efforts worthwhile. I thank you for the input.