He is everything you want
He is everything you need
He is everything inside of you
That you wish you could be
With Logan gone to hunt, Ororo took the time to bathe and think.
Peacefully floating on the azure surface, she stared up into the soft white-blue swirl of the sky.
And was beginning to understand.
She was wind and rain, cool and soothing to others, thunder roiling within.
Logan was fire and earth, blazing with banked fires outside, so bright hidden inside.
Ororo knew - without a shred of doubt - why Jean had never accepted Logan's often wistful, heartbreaking love.
She could not bear the flame.
Jean, the Phoenix, firebird, friend. She burned bright and hot - but all too briefly.
For Logan, the fire burned too bright for most souls to bear even sight of.
They fled it, while aching for it's touch.
His touch.
Needing, fearing, fleeing, fighting, all so desperate for the fire and strength, light and power.
And what society - say it - civilization - could not have, it brutalized.
Made outcast, cast out.
Yearned for.
As Jean feared it. Feared the flame that was too deep, too strong for even the Phoenix to hold, to control. So she fled to Scott's loving arms, abandoning what would have been such joy.
Ororo pitied her for the very first time, the flame-haired, beautiful Jean.
Perfect and product of so many young men's dreams, the beauty she had on occasion envied.
Now she saw the firebird, wings clipped, bitter in a way Jean did not understand.
Wanting Scott, poor dear Scott, to be the man that Ororo had held, caressed, made love to.
Flitting from one man's arms to flirt with the fire of a friend.
Never again.
Ororo had truly belived she would never find her soul's mate, the perfect love she yearned for in private, sometimes crying silently into the night.
Never had she imagined that Logan, her dear friend, companion, and oft-time shoulder could become what she had needed and wanted so very long.
No more could Jean use Logan as a tool to make Scott jealous at her convienience, convincing herself that it was a harmless act.
It was not.
Logan was no animal, nor was he merely a man.
He was the first flash of birth, the last blaze of death.
Beginning and end, fire beginning and earth to welcome.
The cycle blazed in his soul, the eternal hunter and provider, the perfect, primal male, his two halves so strong they clashed in fiery shadow and earthen frankness.
In another circumstance, he might say, yin and yang.
Those were words, only words. Concepts, faint as gossomer breath of wind, hiding something deeper, more primal.
What lived with her now was not a lessening.
The two halves, tormented by men, savaged by civilization, rejected by all both held dear, had chosen what none of his team-mates had seen - did they even deserve the title, the privilage of friendship?
Ororo frowned, flipping over to make her way back to the shore.
Logan had found a beginning, a place his primal soul, so passionate and untamed, so real, could not merely mend, but unite.
Ororo took a sip of the sweet, cool water, and swore a silent oath before the Goddess and all she held dear that she would never leave his side again.
Tears formed in her eyes.
Even if it meant rejecting the X-Men forever, Logan would never be alone again.
Ever.
He was growing into something more than the rejected, ostrasized samurai, the feral X-Man, the loner by need and civilization's darkest fears, something more than ever, she belived, they had imagined.
Something more than the Wolverine.