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Rogue

I woke slowly, warm and content in a blanket cocoon. For a split second, my sleep addled brain thought I was home. Home. What a beautiful word. I opened my eyes expecting to see the alarm clock and photographs I kept next to my bed, but was greeted instead by the glittering stone walls of an alien cave. I ran my fingers along the soft fur wrapped around me. It was thick, insulated as well as a sleeping bag. Actually smelled sort of good, like Logan. 'Spose it would, he had been rolling around in it all week. My face burned as memories of last night washed over me. I covered my mouth with my hand and buried my face against the fur to hide the huge shit-eating grin that played at my lips. Had that really happened?

Last night had been mind-blowing, the man's reputation well-deserved, but what now? My stomach knotted in response to my mind's question. I frowned, the realization that I was alone creepin' over me like a cold chill. I sat up slowly and tucked the fur under my arms. The fire was going for warmth, not light. The daytime sun played tricks with the cave's shadows around me. His clothes and boots were gone and his scent was cold. I sighed and ran my hand through my tangled hair. Jesus H. Christ, I had really fucked things up between us, hadn't I? I had thrown myself at him, repeatedly, out of, what? Desperation? Loneliness? Or what? Love? Was that what pushed the air out of my chest lately whenever I looked at him? I had myself pretty convinced of that fact, of that love, before I sailed ass over feet into the river. Oh, god, he had saved me. Again. I was such an idiot, had nearly drowned trying to recover my stupid cell phone. The chill became a sick swim in my stomach, Remy's smile on the cracked glass screen flashing before my eyes. Remy. Logan. Two men, two very different men, and I loved them both. I knew Remy loved me, always would, and I felt the same, but that didn't mean we were good for each other. That was just how it was with us, we each bore the scars of loving the other. But what would he say, what would he think of this if we made it home? And Logan? What about Ororo, if the rumors were true? She was one of my oldest friends and I hadn't let myself consider her or her feelings. I didn't even know where I stood with him, was truthfully scared of the answer. He had politely pushed me away, trying not to hurt my feelings on more than one occasion, and I had stuck his dick in my mouth. I groaned and buried my face in my hands. Pathetic, girl. Just pathetic.

I smelled him before I heard his footsteps on the rocks below. His outline filled the entrance to the cave and I was suddenly unsure and scared, my heart rapid firing in my chest. I smiled weakly up at him. He stepped inside and shook off his battered leather jacket. He looked good, his color was back to normal and he didn't move like he was in any pain. He had shaved his beard after half of it had been wiped away by that creature, looked like himself again. Jesus, he smelled so good, musty and woodsy, deep. I wanted to reach out for him, put my arms around him, but I sat frozen.

"Hey," he said easily and draped his jacket on the rocks next to my clothes. My stomach clenched in nervous tingles, and I held onto the edge of the blanket across my chest.

"Hey," I swallowed hard. Oh god, he looked so uncomfortable. I had made a huge mess of everything, probably completely destroyed our friendship. "Logan," I began, fumbling. "Last night, I'm so sorry, I had no right to…" He stalked towards me and swallowed my apology with a bone-crushing kiss that turned my insides to jelly. My anxiety sent my heart hammering into my throat at a wildly staggered rhythm that I knew he could hear. He moved his mouth to my neck and the pleasure pooled warm and low inside me. His voice was hoarse, insistent in my ear.

"Darlin', don't you dare take back what happened between us." He pulled me painfully tight to his chest and dug his fingers into my shoulder blades as he spoke. "Only gonna' say this once, Anna," he pulled back slightly and grasped the sides of my face with his hands, his eyes scorching into mine. "I wanted you." I saw fear in his eyes for just a second, fear at what I would say next. I released my hold on the fur and it slipped down to my waist. I stroked one hand down the side of his cheek where his ear had grown back, so damn happy to have him here with me, whole. Whatever was happening, our feelings, Remy, Ororo, we'd deal with the consequences later. All that mattered in that moment was him.

With my other hand I grabbed ahold of the front of his flannel shirt and pulled him back to my lips. Dropping my hand from his face to his chest, I set to work on his buttons. He moaned against my lips and took my lead, practically tearing the clothes from his body between kisses, breaking away from me only as he pushed his jeans off. He crawled back towards me, grinning wolfishly, and I flipped the fur blanket back, inviting him in. His eyes were wild, a hint of the animal glinting in their depths. He raked his gaze up and down my body, his stare burning my flesh, sending that low, slow warmth throbbing inside me. He inhaled and growled deep in his throat. I leaned back and he pounced. His weight pressed against me, heavy and hard and I wrapped my legs around his waist. He took his mouth away and wrapped his arms around my back. Watching my eyes, he slowly entered me. We exhaled and shuddered against each other, the feeling confirmation that last night hadn't been a dream. Leaning his forehead against mine, he held himself there, pulsing inside me. I held tightly to his back and he shoved deeper inside me, grinding his hips against mine. Slippery and thick, he pressed harder, faster, his muscular form coiled tightly against me. Our breathing became erratic and I dug my fingers into his back as he worked a steady rhythm, both of us slick with sweat. Bracing himself on one arm he gripped my hip with the other and picked up the pace, hammering into me mercilessly. Awash in the sensations steaming beneath my skin I actually wailed and it drove him faster and faster. The tingling pulsing low down spread along my arms and legs, pushing me higher as he bucked against me, his thrusts making me explode inside. His groan was wild, inhuman. He finished hot and wet inside me, and we collapsed against each other in a contented tangle of arms and legs.

Sam

Stepping off the metallic stairs of the newly commissioned Blackbird I smiled, inhaling the comforting smell of jet fuel, and puffed my chest out like a proud peacock.

"You handled yourself well today, Samuel." Ororo touched my shoulder tentatively as she descended behind me. I nodded my thanks, but didn't give her anything else. Things were awkward and uncomfortable around the mansion these days; lines had been drawn in the sand. More of the X-Men and students had found out about the circumstances surrounding Storm and Gambit's changing relationship. Some were pissed, some thought that it was about time for the two of them. Me? I was civil towards them, was all right working with them, fighting by their side, but any respect I had for them personally was long gone. I knew that ultimately the final judgment wasn't going to be mine, that they would have their come to Jesus moment the second we found Anna and Logan. Ororo smiled sadly at me and dropped her hand, walked towards the entrance to the school's underground levels.

"Yeah," Bobby punched my arm where Storm had touched it. "Did real good, Guthrie!" I grabbed for him, but he was too fast for me and laughed while he ran for it. Jerk. I would get him later, nothing was gonna spoil my mood today. I was back on the roster, an X-Man again. We had just returned from my first mission, some routine garbage with the Friends of Humanity, and it had gone well. The Doc had finally cleared me for active duty and I had chosen to stay here in Westchester instead of returning to the Avengers for the time being. A little stab of guilt threatened to derail my good mood when my thoughts turned to Lila. She was part of the reason I hadn't returned to New York City, she and Anna and Logan.

Lila's recovery was progressing, just still not as quickly as everyone wanted. She was free of the worst effects of the Purifier's weapon, her system finally purged of the power damaging peptides, but she had been really reluctant to test her celestial scale teleportation powers. Could see why she would be a little scared. My powers took me into the air, hers took her across the galaxy. What if something went wrong? I had tried to be supportive and to protect her from the pressure the rest of the team was applying. They could all back off until she was damn good and ready, no matter how bad I wanted to rescue our friends.

Rachel had been amazing. While Lila was physically recovered by all accounts, emotionally she was still a wreck. Rachel, bless her, had been working with my girl around the clock, keeping her distracted and interested in anything that would take Lila's mind off of her current situation. I would never say a bad word about that telepath again. Rachel had somehow convinced Hank to help her and Lila reroute Cerebro's functions through a program they developed for the Danger Room, a 3-D model of the galaxy that reminded me of the opening sequence to Star Trek: The Next Generation, y'know, where the ship flies through the solar system, through cosmic clouds and asteroid belts? The sequence was truly amazing, interactive and intuitive. Rachel and Lila had figured out a way of combining their abilities to trace Lila's way through the galaxy using the program, searching each star system for any trace of our friends and monitoring Lila's mental reactions as they went. I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but the way Hank explained it to me, Rachel was augmenting her telepathy with Lila's sense of the endless universe to focus her powers like a laser through the cosmos, hoping to hone in our friends as her consciousness drifted by on solar winds. I had no idea Rachel was that powerful without the Phoenix, but apparently the power source of the Danger Room boosted Cerebro which in turn boosted Rachel and Lila's link. The 3-D galactic model provided a visual track through the galaxy that Hank hoped would jog Lila's memory, maybe even get her excited about using her powers again.

I didn't want to admit it, more than likely because I was still super pissed off at him, but Gambit had been right about Lila's powers. Her unconscious mind kept a record of the where, when, and how of her portals. Great, right? No problem, Lila called up her last destination, bam, we ported in, grabbed our friends, happily ever after, right? Wrong. Surge messed with the girl's powers, amplified them beyond their normal range, beyond what she and Rachel have begun to call Lila's sensory awareness. The way Lila explained it to me, she had a map of the known universe flowing through her veins that she reached out to anytime she called up her powers. That map gave her a spatial awareness of planets and other physical objects, kept her away from black holes and such, allowing her to port in blind without getting herself killed. Problem was, Surge amped her so much that the last portal fell off the edge of her map. Wherever that portal ended, she couldn't find it, couldn't feel it. She told me it was like she was fumbling for the light switch in a pitch black room she'd never been in before. Things had been complicated further when Rogue borrowed her powers, the portal had originally started with Lila, but Anna had finished it. Even if Lila could figure out where she had been heading, there was no way to know if the destination stayed as originally intended, but it'd be a place to start. Rachel still thought the information existed inside Lila, that with enough time they would figure it out. Sweet Jesus, let her be right.

I exited the hangar and walked towards the Danger Room, punching my code into the panel to the right of the door of the control room. Dr. McCoy turned his head over his big blue shoulder at my entrance.

"Salutations, Mr. Guthrie. I assume from the grin adorning your visage from proverbial ear to ear that the mission was an unmitigated success?" I stood beside him and leaned over the control panel to peer into the Danger Room below.

"Damn right, Doc," I said, feeling good enough to have a little bounce back in my step. "Any progress here?" I asked, nodding towards the simulation running beneath us.

"It is truly difficult to voice an affirmative, but as it is the only option currently on the table…" he waved a massive paw towards the safety glass and pushed his eternally droopy eyewear up onto his nose. In the massive open space of the Danger Room millions of simulated stars frothed and danced, galaxies swirled around the vast space like stirring cream into a cup of coffee. In the center of the room hovered Rachel, using her telekinetic talent to hold Lila and herself at the breathtaking simulation's core. As we watched, specific stars would burn a brilliant red and the focus of the room would shift, narrow, zooming in like flicking your fingers on your IPhone, immersing the two women in the fabricated light of distant worlds. Even from our vantage point, high above them, I could see the longing, the joy in Lila's eyes. I knew she was frightened, frightened of what her powers could do, of what they had done, but her powers were a part of her. They defined her. The need to traverse the universe flowed through her blood in ways beyond the X-Gene that made her teleportation possible.

"Rachel's still convinced they can figure out where Lila's powers sent them?" Hank grunted in agreement.

"The young Grey, or Summers if you prefer a different nomenclature, certainly inherited her parents' collective hardheadedness. Her current approach of routing distant satellite imagery pirated from our Shi'ar connections through the Danger Room while linking to Lila's subconscious has produced mixed results. No sign of Anna or Logan, but working together the two have been able to track and identify worlds and solar systems Lila has previously teleported to." I raised an eyebrow Hank's way. "Indeed, Mr. Guthrie. Promising. Our resident telepath has identified certain markers in Lila's subconscious present when your young lady is shown familiar planetary forms, the current theory is that Rachel can perhaps track these mental impulses to trigger a response, that their created Danger Room celestial simulation will react to its current link to Lila and produce the long sought final destination of our friends."

"So they're goin' through each section of the universe, solar system by solar system? That could take them years." I hung my head, that old familiar guilt and frustration dampening my joyous mood like a baked bean fart in a coal mine.

"No need to be so optimistic, Samuel. Centuries. More, perhaps. At any rate, unless we win the theoretical lottery, it will take them more time than any of us have, save perhaps Logan." I heard for the first time weariness in the Beast's voice, a grinding tired that I had rarely seen suddenly present on his face. He turned and looked pointedly at me. "All of this work will continue to be for naught if Ms. Cheney refuses to exercise her mutant abilities, Sam. She is physically fully recovered. This may sound extremely harsh, but we have a duty to our friends and can no longer afford to coddle Lila in the benign bosom of the Jean Grey School. If she would use her powers, new plans and possibilities would open themselves wide. She could teleport a team of X-Men and begin searching the furthest points of the galaxy, Rachel could stretch the range of her telepathic tracking beyond our current Earth bound limitations." I sighed and pursed my lips in a hard, flat line. "I know you have been reluctant to push her, but the time has come for us to move if we are to offer our friends any sort of assistance." He stood and laid a big burly paw on my shoulder. "It has been too long, it is time to bring our teammates home."

Logan

We stayed put for a few days. With my healing factor we probably could have gotten moving right away without a whole lot of trouble, but I didn't want to take any chances. We had both come real close to buying the farm, and the fear of either one of us bein' alone on this rock twisted my guts inside out. I couldn't lose her, not now, not when we had just...I still wasn't sure how she felt. It ripped a hole in me to think of puttin' my heart out there and maybe havin' her stomp on it, but I wouldn't apologize to anyone for us bein' together.

Besides all that shit, I wasn't ready to leave the cave because I was having way too good of a time gettin' her naked. Had a few women that could keep up with the animal inside me, but Anna was different, ferocious in ways I never knew. Always had an inkling of the passion she had for life, but she had kept such a tight lid on herself for so many years. It was good to see her letting go. Her body curved alongside mine like it had been made that way, and her powers let her follow my pace. I put it to her for hours yesterday, long enough any normal woman would have begged me to stop, but she just smiled that smug smile of hers and used her power to drain off some of my healing factor and was raring to go again, just like that. One of the sexiest fuckin' things I'd ever experienced. It may seem stupid, but it felt nice to not have to hold myself back. Why didn't we do this years ago?

After one of our marathon sessions she gave me a funny, sad look and my breath caught. Figured this was the conversation I had been dreading, her tellin' me that we had made a mistake, that we needed to stop. I didn't want to hear that she still loved him.

"What?" I asked, propping myself up on an elbow, my guts churning waiting for her answer. "Something on your mind darlin'?" She chewed her bottom lip like she did when she was thinking hard.

"Yeah," she said slowly. "Us, I guess." Well, wasn't like I hadn't seen it coming.

"What, you want to talk about us?" She sighed and rolled onto her back.

"Not yet, sugar." She turned to me and smiled softly. "Not really sure what I'd say yet, y'know?" I did. We had been friends. There had been times we had been closer, time we had been on the outs, but we had always cared about each other. If we weren't here, now, stranded, would anything have ever changed between us? She loved LeBeau, I would never deny that, had since the moment they laid eyes on one another. I had to give him props, he gave himself to her when her powers were out of control, when everyone else was afraid to come near her. I knew I was a coward for not asking her where they stood, but she hadn't pushed me on Ororo, so I decided to give her the same space. Bottom line, she and LeBeau weren't together when we left Earth, and hadn't been for quite a while. He had let her go, fuck, he had dumped her, sent her running to that bastard Magneto's bed, nearly costing me her friendship. He was my teammate, and I considered him a friend, most of the time, but part of me was pissed at him for tossing her away. I knew what she had told me couldn't be their whole story, but the next time I saw him I was gonna punch him in the gut. But, maybe right now, I deserved worse from him. We left it there. Figured we'd get to it, to us, when we needed to. For now, we'd see where this thing lead us. I was okay with that, always did better running on instinct anyway.

We decided to finally move on, and packed up our slowly building possessions in silence. I had gathered us a little food to replenish our stocks, but we would need to hunt more, no doubt about it. I rolled up the fur blanket, thick with our mingled smells, and tied it 'round the middle with the belt from my jeans. Rogue helped me secure it across my back, shoulder to hip, using a strap of vine as a sling.

"Ready?" I asked when I caught her giving the cave a weird, wistful look. I pulled her close to my hip with one arm and kissed her cheek.

"Yeah. Gotta keep moving, right?" She smiled and started down the rocks. There was a noticeable chill in the air, and traces of what looked like a pink-tinted frost on the plants that were sheltered under the shadows of the trees. Rogue zipped her jacket and burrowed down into it.

"Brrr…" Her breath puffed out in a tiny vapor cloud and she shivered. "Never thought I'd miss my gloves."

"Yeah." She smiled, but a look of worry passed between us. The seasons were changing on us already. I had stopped counting how long we had been here, but it had to have been months at this point. Six? More? And hadn't it been, what, a week, maybe two, since we had been sweating our asses off in the grasslands? I scowled and counted days. My memory was murky thanks to my injuries, but Rogue had said I was down and healing for five days. We had stayed for two after she had been hurt, before that was the night we had almost…nine days. Nine days ago it was steaming hot and she was bare-assed in my flannel, sitting on my lap. My pants tightened at the pretty little picture that thought brought up. I stole a sideways look at her. Was it too soon to stop and pull that dress up, bend her over?

I saw she was still shivering even after hiking a ways. The deep woods near the river were even colder, and my mind raced back to our impending problem. Winter, or whatever passed for winter on this flamin' planet, and we had no idea what to expect. On Earth, the leaves changed color and fell before the long cold, deep of winter. For all we knew, the weird ass colors we had been seeing on the spiraling trees were their fall colors. There were a hell of a lot more leaves crunching under our feet today.

"We've got a problem, darlin'," I stopped her, my voice gruffer than I had meant it to be. She stopped and tensed, sniffed the air frantically, popping her borrowed bone claws.

"What is it?" she snarled from a ferocious fighting stance. "Another one of those creatures?" I held my hands up defensively and stepped closer to her.

"Easy there, Rogue." Rogue. The name felt almost foreign rolling off my tongue after the last few days, like she was two different women: Rogue, my friend and teammate, and Anna, the woman I had taken to my bed. I winced inwardly. It wasn't fair to try and separate her like that just to ease my conscience and to justify my actions. The woman in front of me was now both friend and lover, and our choices were gonna have to be dealt with sooner or later "Darlin', if there was one of those bastards gunning for us, I think you probably scared 'em away." I chuckled and she retracted the claws, glaring at me as she flicked the blood from the healing wounds on the back of her hands.

"Please don't patronize me, Wolverine." Her face screwed up in an angry scowl, and she jabbed a finger into my chest furiously. "And don't you ever sideline me like that again! Where do you get off sending me to pick fucking carrots while you went after that thing by yourself? We're supposed to be a team! Running off on your own was about the stupidest goddamn thing you could have done! What do you think it did to me, seeing that thing tearing into you?" She was raging, hysterical, and her anger caused mine to boil over.

"Running off by myself? Like you did?" She fumed, but snapped her mouth shut. I grabbed the sides of her face fiercely. "Do you know what it did to me, seeing you in the river like that? Not being able to find you, thinking you had drowned?" We stared each other down, but I blinked first and pulled her roughly into my chest. "We're both right, all right, Anna? We're both hot-headed assholes who think we're bulletproof. We just have to be more careful. There's too much at stake. Agreed?" She nodded, and untangled herself from my arms.

"So, what was the problem you were talking about before I went off on you?" she asked quietly as we started walking again. I sniffed at the chilly air, could practically smell the atmospheric changes.

"Cold's moving in. And we ain't ready." The sun glittered through the thinning leaves on the trees above us. "We're gonna' have to make a decision soon: find a place to wait it out, or keep goin' and hope we don't freeze to death." The fur blanket slid and I hoisted the sling on my shoulder to move it back into position. "Shame you didn't grab more of this fur. We could use it."

"Yeah, at the time I was so scared for you, and worried something else was going to attack us, that I took what I could and bolted." She blushed in the cold. "Sure has come in handy, though." I laughed. "Do you think maybe there would be some left on the carcass, or would it have rotted too much to use?"

"Don't know. Maybe it would still be okay, it's gotten pretty cold. If it was in the shadows and the scavengers left any behind…" I shrugged. "Worth investigating. Think you can find it again?" She raised an eyebrow at me and smirked.

"Can't you, sugar?"

We made good time, and between our two noses found the clearing pretty easily. There wasn't much of a rotting smell for what was left of the creature's body, but there was something else, a different smell, something new that twisted my guts…Flamin' planet still threw curve balls at me every day. I pushed it to the back burner of my brain and circled the animal that had ripped me to shreds. The scavengers had done that and more to its body, all that was left was skin and bones, but thankfully the fur covered skin was what we were after. Amazingly, it wasn't rotted. I hadn't thought to ask Rogue how she had managed to preserve the piece we had been sleeping on. Maybe the cold cave had helped preserve it, or maybe there was something about the creature itself, maybe it didn't decay as readily as others. Would explain the lack of the smell of death in the clearing. I set to work cutting free some of the larger pieces of fur. Rogue kept her distance, and I let her. She smelled real nervous, scared. After what that thing did to me, I didn't like being back here either, that was for sure.

"It we waited it out, the winter I mean, what would we do? Stay at the cave or something?" She paced around the body at a safe distance. I grunted and tossed another length of fur on my growing pile.

"Probably not that cave. Getting to the river is too tricky with that bluff, it'd be real risky if there was snow and ice." I pulled off my leather jacket and handed it to her, warm from my work, rolled up the sleeves on my flannel shirt. "Caves by the waterfalls would be a better bet."

"That's backtracking quite a ways," she said her voice muffled on the other side of the carcass.

"There's our problem right there. Do we keep going, or find a safe place to stay?"

"Should I stay or should I go now…" she sang slightly off key. I rolled my eyes.

"Funny."

"That's me, sugar. Regular comedian." Her footsteps crunched, kicking their way through a pile of fallen leaves. "I liked the waterfall."

"I know you did," I said, putting as much lewdness in my voice as I could.

"What's that supposed to mean?" She sounded annoyed. I finished my cut and smiled at the salacious images that floated into my mind.

"Don't act all coy with me, darlin'. I saw just how much you liked that waterfall." She gasped and I laughed, ready to give her hell. I came around the side of the carcass and headed towards her. She was standing back towards the perimeter of the clearing, staring mutely at her feet. "S'okay, Rogue, shouldn't be embarrassed. Nothing wrong with taking care of business yourself." She didn't answer me. "Rogue?" She knelt and held a trembling hand out towards the ground. "Anna!" I closed the distance between us in a few quick steps. "What's wrong, girl?" She looked up at me, green eyes wide.

"Logan…I think we've got another problem…" She pulled her hand back and spread more of the leaves away from the area she had been kicking. I blinked, not sure I was seein' what I was seein'.

"Holy shit." A footprint. A fucking footprint, and not one of ours. She looked up at me with eyes of steel.

"What are we gonna do now, sugar?"