I live, and so does this story.

2. A Meeting Undone

Long rides and how you get through them have guidelines. No official ones, obviously, but ones that have to be discovered through a meeting of experience and good sense. And the first thing you will discover is that pit-stops are your friend if you use them wisely. If you need to go to the restroom, go. If you don't need to go to the restroom, go anyway. Always move your legs and stretch as much as possible. Try to grab some food if you can, but if you can't, be prepared to have an empty belly for however long it takes to get to the next stop. The same goes for water. And did you go to the bathroom? Yes? Well, go again.

And that's how it goes for a full day of frozen terrain.

It's also mildly awkward. She forgot to ask the driver's name, and their one conversation so far has simply been her confirming a sort of alter ego. She feels a little bit like a comic book superhero, except she's not very good at it because she doesn't even have a mask… or a Rogue-mobile, which would be great for not begging rides off people and therefore not having these conversations.

Or, lack thereof. Mr. Driver hasn't had much to say since discovering that she's a not-superhero. And Marie was never exactly bad at being social (definitely could have used some improvement), but this isn't exactly a situation she ever thought she would be in, so she keeps her mouth shut.

She stares out the window and wonders what she was thinking when she told Danny –Real Life Danny, not Danny-In-Her-Head, whatever the differences between them may be– that this would be an adventure. She's from Mississippi. What had made this, something so entirely different from the world she's known, so attractive? What about Anchorage, Alaska had called for her? She isn't even halfway there, and when she gets there, what will happen? Sleeping on the ground here is barely tolerable, but it is tolerable if only because she wraps herself in enough layers that she could be mistaken for a small bear. Sleeping on the ground where the blizzards can drop twenty feet of snow (or whatever? She doesn't know how any of this works) on her is going to kill her.

This was a really dumb idea, Rogue thinks. But, she's doing it. Whatever it is calling her to go north (stupidity, perhaps, or a teenage inability to properly weigh risk factors) has not yet gone quiet. Besides, by time she gets to Alaska, she might be eighteen, and maybe she'll have earned herself enough money to buy a plane ticket home, if going home is even an option by then. She'll have had her adventure before graduating high school, anyway (except, she's not going to graduate, is she?). Then she'll have a few more 'adventures' before she can find a place that won't make her want to crawl out of her skin. Maybe that place will be Alaska. After all, no one looks at her funny for being covered from head to toe, here. Can't get away with that in Mississippi.

When the truck stops, she gets out without caring where they are, but then she sees the sign and corners of her lips curl downwards.

"This is Laughlin City?" she asks. That's what the frost-covered sign says.

The trucker nods. "Yeah. Not much, is it?"

"No."

Aw, this ain't gonna work, she thinks. A tired giggle bubbles up in her throat and turns into an amused snort. Laughlin City is laughable.

"Ha."

Shut up.

"You made a pun. Kind of."

No.

But it isn't a surprise. She's been in big towns (though never for long), and little hollowed-out scrapes on the side of the road that dared to call themselves towns, but Laughlin City is just sad. It's not an actual city, that's for sure, even if it's not as bad as some of those hovel-collections she's stayed in. It's a close-knit collection of barn-houses and crumbling cement and bent-over light-poles, dusted with seven-inches-and-counting of powdery snow and drawn through with narrow, truck-run streets. That's fine. She's spent weeks in worse conditions. This looks... cozy.

The problem with Laughlin is not that it's small. The problem is that it is small and crowded.

There might be more to it than she can see. Danny's taught her to look for the things that can't be seen in the dark, and it is Rogue who knows, with or without Danny, to never judge a book by its cover. But this cover isn't worth taking a chance on. She can't stay in this sardine can of a town. It might be a good place to sleep for a night, but nothing beyond that.

It's a swing and a miss, Danny concludes for her. This town is a dud, unless something special pops up. She'll have to keep moving as quickly as possible.

She won't impose on the trucker's hospitality again. She'll find another ride quickly or she'll stay the night, split at sunrise, and walk to wherever might be next. There's no sign of a hotel, but Rogue's discovered that there's one place in every town that isn't as comfortable as a hotel, but free and warm and common as dirt and usually easy enough to disappear in.

She thanks the driver for bringing her this far, then heads for the closest bar. It may be the only bar, judging from the size of this place, but it's loud and crowded and that very likely means that she'll be ignored if she falls asleep in a corner, which is all she needs.

"Actually remember to keep your head down, this time," Danny tells her.

Yes, Mama.

"You have a reputation, Marie."

It's R–

"Rogue, I know. It's Rogue. I think it's cool. Very you."

Thanks, Danny.

She stands in the snow, listening to the sounds of raucous drunkards and blunt, bruising punches traded between brawlers. The shuddering clang of metal hitting metal and the chiming crashes of breaking glass. It sounds absolutely wild, worse than any bar she has yet frequented.

But so is she. Not worse than a bar (she likes to think that she's at least a little bit better than a bar, thank you very much), but wild. Sort of. She's still struggling to kick off the useless bits of fluff from her old life, but it's made her… well, raw is the best word she can think of. Raw like the coppery tang of her own blood in the freezing pain of a winter river. Raw like her scarred hands and her thin, severe face. The softness of Marie the southern suburban girl is being peeled away, and she is a strange, bone-and-muscle creature under all that fluff, with ice in her eyes and a voice ripped hoarse by the cold. Not complete, yet, but something very different from Marie.

"It's like Shakespeare in Mrs. Ingerman's English class."

What?

"You're tempestuous."

Oh, Danny.

She steps into the bar with that word printed on her brain. Tempestuous.

Well, the bar is definitely tempestuous. It's not quite as bad as it sounds from the outside, though. The fighting is not, in fact, bar-brawling, but a cage fight. There's a tense, hissing, half-drunken crowd between her and the cage, so she doesn't bother to go see, but something in the back of her mind – that has to be a part of her because it's not Danny – whispers that if she could touch one of those fighters, just for a second or two, they would probably never feel it and she might absorb some much-needed fighting skills… but that's not an option. She won't do that. She doesn't really know how long of a touch it would take. Even a second or two might kill a man. She doesn't know. She doesn't dare risk it and she doesn't particularly want another voice in her head, no matter how useful Danny has been.

The man behind the bar eyes her warily and she offers him a smile– not a timid, teenage-girl-who-doesn't-know-what-she's-doing-here smile, but a confident one that promises nothing except that she will be civilized and make no trouble. And she makes no plans to cause trouble, either. She is quiet and blending and not to be noticed. Danny has become some cross of a nagging mother and an overzealous drill sergeant in her head, and she takes him seriously. He has told her time and time again to not get noticed, and, this time, she won't. Like stealing fighting skills (would that even work), drawing attention is not an option.

At least it's warm in here. There's the temptation to take off her gloves and rub her hands together, but she doesn't do it. Obviously.

"You going to order something, sweetheart?" asks the bartender. He's built to work, with strong shoulders and calloused hands, but time still folds and pulls the skin of his face. It's okay. He has a nice face. Maybe a little cranky, but reminiscent of her grandfather in a way that softens his whole appearance in her eyes to something friendlier than it actually is.

She wonders if he would still be so friendly if he knew what she is.

"No," Rogue says.

In her head, something bites nastily at being called sweetheart by a strange man even though it never would have bothered her before, but Danny calms her, saying that she can't get upset about the little things and the man is just being friendly. He also warns her to not buy a drink, but Rogue knows better than that without his advice. She can't afford it and she doesn't dare even dip her pinky finger in anything alcoholic anyway. Her being drunk or even slightly tipsy is a bad idea, and she doesn't need Danny to tell her that.

There's a pause from Not Grandpa, an unreadable look, and then: "Want water?"

He's filling up a glass before she can say yay or nay to the offer, and she's grateful. Drinking melted snow just makes her cold, so she… well, it's just that dehydration is easy to not notice, when you live like she does. She wakes in the night, thirsty, and goes back to sleep, and resists the temptation to eat snow because she's done it a few times and is too aware of the chill that snow puts in her gut. And she would put up with that, would muscle through it, but she can't afford to lower her core temperature in this kind of weather.

If Rule Number One is to always take a bathroom break, then Rule Number Two is this: Cold is a killer.

She thanks the bartender and guzzles the water down fast enough to make herself sick, but she stomachs it. He refills. She drinks slower. He refills. She nurses this glass, taking sweet sips and savoring it, desperate and no longer dry-mouthed. She makes a note in her head to buy a water bottle wherever she can get one and refill it at every pit stop so she can have it with her. This business of going a whole day without having a drink that's cold enough to make her afraid of hypothermia has got to end.

"Got that right."

Shush.

She wants hot cocoa.

Water hits her gut painfully after guzzling it down too fast. The pain isn't much compared to the cold outside or the ache in her back, but it sweeps in suddenly like a punch, and Rogue has to pretend she doesn't want to double over and gag.

She is suddenly aware of how pathetic this is.

Wild? What was she thinking? She's not wild. She's a little girl who's never been kissed and ran away from home because she was scared of her own parents. And now she's overwhelmed by a glass of water because she's tired, dehydrated, and on her period. And too damned desperate to drink it slowly and prevent a stomach ache.

She wants to cry, and she knows this fast of a dip in her mood must be from the hormones, but knowing it doesn't change that she feels awful.

"Well this sucks," mutters Danny, who usually keeps his nose out of any mood swings but now seems equally pulled down by her thought process.

The bartender is giving her this unbearably sympathetic look, and she can't meet his eyes, so she stares down into her glass and tucks her chin in shyly, feeling less tempestuous and more like the high school girl she knows she still is despite any evolution on her part. And it's not because she hates sympathy, or pity (which she isn't going to call it because she's not a drama queen), but because she's afraid of what she'll do if someone's too soft.

She'll break, won't she? She can barely stomach water. She'll die for kind words.

Rogue takes shallow breaths, waiting for the heaviness in her gut to pass.

She just needs a little time. Time to get off her period, time to sleep, time to find another ride, and time to figure out what she'll actually do when she gets to Alaska. And at the rate she's moving, she has all the time in the world.

Chill, she tells herself, sighing. Drink water and take a nap. You'll feel better.

"Hey, hey – look."

At what?

"At that."

They're playing that recording on the news again. Some muted, grainy security footage of a girl who looks to be about ninety pounds beating up a guy who turned out to be a wanted serial rapist (and one who occasionally dabbled in pedophilia, to boot). The first time he saw it, he had a good chuckle. Not because rapists are funny (no, no, and he's beat the living daylights out of a few of those creeps over the past fifteen years, just because he could smell it on them), but because the girl or woman or whatever on the tape is a fierce little scrapper and there's nothing better than seeing a kitten get the better of a mean ol' dog. Not that she's a kitten – no, but a mountain lion, maybe – but she does get the better of the man. She bashes his nose in, bruising it with her fist and then smashing it with her elbow. The tape isn't in color except for a flat green tint on everything, so there's no red to be seen, but the dark spray of blood arcs obviously. And that kick to the crotch is, well, painful to watch. If it were any other kind of man feeling the brunt of a kick like that, Logan might feel sympathetic.

But it's been nearly two weeks since it happened and Logan has seen the tape plenty of times. The only reason he cares to glance at it anymore is because he's heard what they call her– the Rogue. Allegedly, she travels the same cold, sparsely-populated corridor that he usually does, working her way north out of America. There are truckers and travelers who claim to have met her, to have seen her on the side of the road in passing, to have given her a ride. And what the word from them is that this Rogue character doesn't seem entirely… human.

Inhuman is the commonly used word, and Logan thinks that's a real funny way of putting it, especially since no one ever says mutant. There's been no suggestion of that, specifically. Just that she isn't entirely human in nature, which begs to question what else she could be, if not mutant. Or, because she probably is a mutant, why that's not what people describe her as.

It's all just superstitious talk, probaby. At least, Logan thinks so. That sort of thing gets more credence when there are fewer people and more opportunities for weird happenings to slip through the cracks. But what is created by this vaguely superstitious idea-chucking is the concept of someone who is less like the mutant she probably is and more like some being out of a book of forgotten mythologies.

But what he gains from listening to this is not some entertaining fantasy of a modern-day mythical creature from the epics (he doesn't really know much about those either, actually), but the chance that he might meet her in reality. Because she does not sound, to him, like a myth or a cryptid. Not as much as she sort of sounds… like him.

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking.

Well, no. It's not that. Not wishful. He's just curious, because if she's like him, mutant-but-even-weirder, maybe she has answers. Maybe she can tell him how they're supposed to live.

Not that he thinks about it except for in passing. Life's a little too harsh for that and he's not the kind of man who spends every empty moment fantasizing. The animal part of his brain won't allow for it, not when survival is a much more relevant topic. But he has thought about it.

And in the end, it doesn't matter anyway, does it?

He's going his last round of the night with a muscled, head-shaved thug who is probably doing this just to get out some tension and save some money. Logan can't really blame him for that (okay, it's the guy's fault for gambling, but whatever), so he reminds himself not to hit too hard. If he wins this round (he will), he collects the winner-takes-all prize and makes some of the more clever gamblers in this fine establishment a few coins richer. It's been a good night for him, but he's not in the mood to draw it out. He rarely is. He's tired and this place is wreaking havoc on his finer feral senses.

Fight, win, collect, get a drink, then go.

A fist flies towards him and he ducks and then lashes out. He had half a mind to let the guy get in a few punches, but he doesn't have the patience to endure hammy fists bouncing off his gut. He hits hard, one, two, three times and the hulk of a man before him is out for the count. There is cheering from those who were smart enough to bet on him and booing from those who were not, and he doesn't care. What they think of him doesn't matter as long as they pay him, and if they don't pay him, then he'll be on his way to try the next place.

He's collecting his winnings when a rich, iron-heavy scent of blood hits his nose. That's not unusual in and of itself – there's plenty of blood in here. A man knocked out a tooth less than ten minutes ago. But it's not fighting blood. That richness, the way usually tangy copper has been dulled and usually understated iron is so heavy, that's the unique mix that reveals it as the blood of a woman's cycle. There's a watery undertone, too, from the blood of raw, weeping wounds. The whole scent is smothered with a cheap disinfectant that he thinks is actually the same stinging, twenty-cents-a-block soap that he uses himself.

Shaking his head, Logan rubs his palm down the arch of his nose and snorts harshly to dispel the smell. The scent of a woman's cycle does weird things to his feral instincts, and he doesn't like the unwanted urges calling him to protect and defend a female who is possibly made vulnerable by her condition.

Not an animal, Logan snaps at his own feral mind.

The Wolverine only growls back.

Great. Fine. Be that way.

His sharp eyes pierce the heady smoke to search for the woman, and there she is, sitting at the bar with her hood up and her gloved hands cradling a glass of clear water.

She's completely covered in multiple layers up to her chin, but he can see her pale profile. He can tell by her smell that she isn't a feral, but she looks it. She looks hungry. Her cheeks are hollow under sharp cheekbones. Her lips are cracked, drawing red, angry lines over the pale fullness of her mouth. There's redness around her nose and eyes, but she doesn't smell sick, exactly. Just unwell. She's been on the road for a long while without a place to settle. He can tell. And the smell of blood, of wounds, sluggishly stains the inside of her clothes. It's not an open cut, but places where skin has been scratched away just deeply enough for blood to weep weakly. Not life-threatening, but probably very uncomfortable for someone who, as far as he can tell, doesn't have a warm place to sleep the pain off. She's surprisingly clean, but so is he, although he's not sure how she manages it.

Poor kid wisps across his mind, just because she smells young and is built young, but she looks… she looks not young. Not old, not young, just existing with a skin-tingling sharpness that makes all age a void concept. Sort of like him, he supposes. He knows that it's… not normal, to not age a day in fifteen years, and who knows how much longer before that. Maybe, if she had some weight around her face and more softness to her features, she would look young, but that's not the case.

What he's thinking when he sits next to her, he doesn't know, but he does it and the smell of blood and stinging soap and river water makes his nose twitch. He gives her sidelong glances, trying to make out her measure, but he realizes that he doesn't have to be so subtle. She's not looking at him at all. Her eyes are glued, completely attentive, to the fuzzy TV mounted on a high corner. The sound of it can't be heard over the bar's dull roar, but he looks and sees what has her so focused. It's the news, replaying that same grainy footage.

Serial Rapist Caught On Tape, the newsfeed blares in red. Logan smirks, and then his smirk drops.

The girl…. He makes another one of those sidelong glances and sees her split, winter-bitten lips press tightly together, likely irritating the wounds there. She needs an ointment or Vaseline or something. Even he doesn't let his lips get like that (not that they can, with the healing factor, but still, he just wouldn't). But that's not the point, because those ruined lips curl into a slight grimace and her dark diamond eyes glitter with victorious fury.

Oh, Logan thinks. Huh.

It's her. She's the one from the tape. She's the right size and she covers herself the same way and there's that look in her eyes, the look of vicious pride from someone who got backed into a corner and fought their way out by tooth and claw.

Logan takes a deep breath.

So. This is the Rogue.

It's not– there's not– he should have noticed as soon as he saw her. He's seen that tape on the news so many times. The hood on a cloak that hangs down to her heels, the gloves, the petite figure. Dead giveaways. But she's not what he expected. He had been expecting someone like himself, someone hard and unbending, not this. Not a shattered creature of sharp edges, dragging herself from one day's survival to the next. Even he isn't like that. He's controlled and enclosed within himself. She's cut open and bleeding furious desperation.

It's intimidating. Or, it would be, but she's so small, so it's not intimidating as much as it's…

There are no words that can truly express this, but she seems unreal. Inhuman, and not in the way of a mutant. She's the Rogue, and that may only be the whispers of northern back-and-forth travelers and gossip-heavy small towns where she made temporary den, but she measures up to her reputation. She is the mythical being of modern-day myth. As so is he, in his own way, among lesser fighting circles, but not like her.

Her eyes meet his and he looks away, almost embarrassed to be caught staring.

"I'll have a beer," he grumbles to the aging bartender, who nods curtly.

The Rogue's lip twitches slightly in disdain. Not a beer-drinker, then. But she schools her expression quickly enough, so he's pretty sure that she doesn't mean to cast any judgment on him. She just doesn't like beer, apparently, and probably not alcohol at all, seeing as she's in a bar and drinking water that isn't even of the sparkling variety.

Her loss, he thinks with only the mildest sense of humor, accepting a beer and thumbing over the appropriate amount of bills in payment. One drink, then I'm out of here.

"He's staring at you."

Who?

"The fighter. They called him the Wolverine."

What kind of name is Wolverine?

"What kind of name is Rogue?"

… Right.

She's pretty sure that he's a mutant. From a distance, she saw him fight, and it was not quite right. Or, it was too good. Too immovably solid under such strong blows, and he came out barely marked. She's not the only one to notice, either. The thug Wolverine beat is grumbling angrily in a corner, obviously miffed. A buddy of his is doing his best to calm the thug down, but it doesn't seem to be working. There's going to be some conflict here.

"Yeah, that's called trouble," Danny says. "Exactly what we agreed to stay out of, remember?"

Yeah, yeah. Keep your britches on. I'll get out of the way.

The Wolverine – does it sound as silly to be called Rogue as it does to call him Wolverine? – sips at his beer and ignores everything behind him. Rogue doesn't know if he's stupid or if his mutation allows him so much security that he doesn't care about what comes at him. Maybe he's invincible.

Nah.

"Okay, but he might be,"

Danny sighs. "He'll be fine. You saw him fight. He can take care of himself. Now can we leave?"

Maybe she already knew it before this moment, but now Rogue truly realizes that, as helpful as Danny has been to her, he has no fight in him. He's a runner. He's made her very good at being a runaway, but there's a difference between being a runaway and actually running away from everything.

"I could have told you that. Disappointed in me, Marie?"

No. I knew. It's alright.

Danny was Marie's crush. Not Rogue's.

The Wolverine is a fighter, and, from what she had seen, a force to be reckoned with. He'll be fine. He doesn't look like the kind of man who would appreciate her help anyway.

She downs the rest of her water, gets up, and walks out of the bar.

She doesn't look back.

Thank you for reading! Reviews are appreciated.