'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
'They called me the hyacinth girl.'
-Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
-T.S. Eliot "The Waste Land"

"So-"Logan was immediately cut off by Rogue grabbing his shirt, pulling him into a kiss. She held back as long as she could, feeling her power pulse under her skin, trying to break out and take hold of her again. Concentrate... she thought, feeling that this was possibly the stupidest thing she'd ever thought and if not the stupidest, at least in the top five. And then she lost her focus.

It was like he was getting pulled through her. She looked around the thoughts of her, looking for Jean, looking for all those things that had messed this up to begin with. She couldn't find them. All she could find was that same desperation running through his mind like water, afraid that she'd run off or die or simply fade away so that he could never get her back. She completely understood this feeling; it was how she always felt when she saw him with Jean.

And then it was just waiting.

Rogue was waiting to be pushed away and Logan was waiting for the life to be sucked out of him. But nothing happened.

She pulled away for a second looking up at him, confused. "Are you...dying yet?" He shook his head. "Not as far as I know."

She took of her gloves and looked down at her hands. She put her bare palm on his cheek. The sudden rush of connection was there, but otherwise nothing was happening.

"Now, you're sure nothing is happening? You're not dying or maybe...do you feel faint?" He shook his head.

Rogue started to laugh. "You broke it! I was fine less then an hour ago and then you got your hands on me and-" At this point she was laughing so hard she was practically crying. It was as if nothing was fixed between them, at least not the way she'd expected it to be fixed anyway, but it didn't seem as important as before.

It was almost one o' clock in the morning when Ororo came down the stairs for tea. She hadn't been sleeping well the past few days and was starting to give up on having a normal sleep schedule. She wrapped her bathrobe more tightly around her. There were sounds outside. 'Probably just the wind,' she thought calmly.

She focused, reaching out to sense the winds circling the trees and slipping between the leaves. There were none. But she heard it again: a snapping noise, almost like something was-

Suddenly, the house seemed to light up as if it were the middle of the day. Students came rushing down the stairs. Ororo stood, shocked into paralysis, staring at the apparition in front of her.

It was Jean, glowing, fire which seemed to radiate from her in her hair, rippling off her skin. Everything seemed slow, as if they were all underwater. The students had fallen silent, the sight of what appeared to be the walking dead having cowed them almost completely.

She walked toward them, the fire undulating along her body. She reached out a hand to the woman who had been her best friend in a seperate lifetime.

"Logan," she whispered.

****

Sunlight crept across her face like a thief, silently and mischeiviously, stealing her sleep. She stirred, rolling over and reaching out. Her first foray brought her back a pillow which she threw over the edge of the bed. There was a slightly muffled grunt when it hit the floor. Or rather, when it hit who was lying on the floor.

"Logan?" she asked sleepily. "Why are you sleeping on the floor?"

"Because the floor doesn't have feet. Or elbows."

He'd apologized to her last night in his halting, shrugging way, the only way he knew how to apologize. It irritated her to think that he'd been alive for so damned long and still hadn't figured out how to handle things like that gracefully. It was also, she thought sometimes, rather charming.

And for some reason the big reunion scene wasn't a big as she thought it would be. She hadn't slept with him (Again! the persistant voice in her head had said, trying to pass for common sense again) but she knew she would.

Right this second, the hurt was too fresh, raw, not scabs or scars.

He rolled over on the floor to look up at her.

"You okay?"

She didn't say anything, distracted by the bruise blooming on his arm. A bruise? On Logan? It was impossible, but there it was, purple and black. Had she done that with her elbow? Had he fallen out of the bed?

"Kid?"

He was still looking at her, some worry in his face.

"I'm fine." She smiled at him. "And you have got to stop calling me 'kid'. It's just creepy."

"Ah, you love it."

****

They were getting ready to leave. Logan stood at the counter, ringing the bell for the attendent. He couldn't wait to get out of his hell-hole of a town. In fact he couldn't wait to get Rogue out of this hell-hole of a town and take her somewhere nice. Somewhere she actually wanted to be. 'Which would be where exactly?' he thought. "Hey, kid!" he called back over his shoulder.

"Thought you were supposed to stop calling me that?" She walked over to him, holding out a styrofoam cup of the free coffee. He drank it and winced. He'd had worse, but this was up there.

"Where do ya wanna head to? We can go pretty much anywhere you want."

"Anywhere I want? Didn't you have a past to chase or a girl to get or something?"

He half smiled at her. "Well, I got the girl didn't I? So now I'm just trying to focus on the future."

"What happened to the whole, wild, overly-masculine thing?" She teased him.

"What wild, overly-masculine thing?"

She laughed. "Do you really mean it?"

He shrugged.

"Can we go north? Along the coast to San Francisco, the long way?"

"Up Highway One?"

"Yeah."

"Sounds fine to me." He turned back to the counter and rang the bell again.

"And can we stop in Big Sur and pretend to be hippies?" He looked at her, complete disbelief on his face. But Rogue was trying to keep from laughing, her eyes shining. She had forgotton how easy it was just being with him.

He sighed. "Why the hell not?"

****

After Logan checked out (a process taking no longer then half an hour, after they waited for the clerk for close to twenty minutes; "What the hell is for you to be doing in this shitty town except for your job?" Logan had asked the man when he'd trundled in) they got into the truck. As he pulled out of the parking lot, he looked over at her. He was still trying to get used to her being there, rather then somewhere he couldn't get to.

He was looking at her when the semi came bounding up the highway. It's driver was doing thirty over the speed limit, hoping to make his destination early, delivering cheap cuts of meat to a store in Modesto. Logan never saw it coming, even when Marie screamed. As he turned his head, he wondered how it was that he'd gotten this lucky twice. And then everything was dark.