Chapter Text
Logan absconds in the gap between one bad winter storm and the next. Three weeks later, Rogue still takes meals in her room whenever possible.
She's an only child, she reasons. And while her new classmates all seem like lovely people, she's not too eager to start playing lunchroom politics with kids who belch fire and can twist bits of rebar into butterfly bows with just their hands. She prefers it this way. Hiking up to the little fourth floor student kitchen between classes, throwing together the quickest sandwich she can, and leaving before anyone can try too hard to chat. It's quiet. Easy, in a way the main dining room sometimes isn't.
There’s a knock on her door.
Rogue flinches, pausing mid-chew to glance sideways at the stretch of drywall separating her private refuge from the communal hallway. For a moment, silence. Then the knock comes again, sharper. Rogue swears under her breath. She pushes the plate away and stands up from her desk, scooping her jacket off the bed and ramming her arms through the sleeves. She wastes a few seconds clapping the crumbs off her fingers before fumbling her gloves from the pockets. The knock comes a third time.
“Just a minute!” She stops one last time to look down at herself- yes, all covered up. Before at last going to answer the door.
A little boy stands at the threshold looking up at her, one of the younger kids whose name she should almost certainly know by now. It’s Paul, she thinks, or maybe Powell? He’s alone. And Rogue tries not to grimace as she wonders what could have sent him up this way.
“There’s a man here for you.”
“What?”
Maybe Patrick blinks at her from behind his thick lenses and points down the hallway. “Some guy. He’s downstairs in the foyer. You’re Rogue, right?”
Rogue stares down in confusion. “Yes. Yea, I’m Rogue.” Then, “Why is there a man here? What do you mean-” She cuts herself off, suddenly recalling one of the first conversations she’d ever had with her social worker. “Even if we started today, it’s unlikely the emancipation process would finalize before you turn eighteen,” Ms. Kim had explained. She’d pushed up her glasses, long feathery antennae twitching as she added, not unkindly, “and it might send up a signal that ends up making it easier to come find you.”
Rogue had tried to explain in the plainest terms she could, that court record or none, that wasn’t really a concern. Of this she was certain, nobody in Mississippi wanted her back. No one would be coming to look for her. Ms. Kim had smiled at her, only a little sad, and said, “your birthday is coming up in June, right? Let’s just try and lay low for a while.” Rogue had let it go.
Even now, with a rapidly climbing pulse and a strange man waiting for her in the foyer, she thinks, “no way.” It couldn’t be her daddy. Surely not. William Paquin Jr. was a stony little man who liked model airplanes and WWII, who had lived his entire life within the straight margins of Caldecott County and had every intention of dying there some day. There was no way he would have found her out in Westchester. And there was no way in hell he’d be taking her back.
The boy was still scrutinizing her. Without blinking, he shrugs and says, “we can send him away if you want. I’ll go tell Ms. Francis.” He turns to make his way back down the hall and Rogue jumps, hands flailing in a quickly aborted attempt to reach for him.
“Wait, hang on! What did he-” she has to pause to wet her suddenly dry mouth. “What did he look like?”
Pablo (“ Pablo! That’s what it was,” her mind finally supplies) wrinkles his nose. He seems to think hard for a second before mumbling, “kinda weird, I guess.”
“Weird, how?” Rogue grits out. Mr. Paquin had always seemed pretty standard white suburbanite to her, but you never knew what kids would peg as funny.
“I dunno,” he shrugs again. “Like a biker? He’s got the jacket and the boots and everything. No helmet though.” Rogue’s heart stutters in her chest. Oblivious, Pablo raises both hands to make a short sweeping gesture at his temples. “His hair is kind of- wait, where are you going?”
Rogue doesn’t even try to stop the smile she can feel creeping onto her face. She darts back just long enough to yank her door shut before breezing past Pablo and out into the hall. “I know him, don’t worry” she says. Already, she can see him in her mind’s eye, can recall with almost shameful clarity the weight of his arm thrown around her shoulder and the smell of his tobacco and booze. Cosmic steel and lighter fluid and a warmth he seems to save up and spend just for her. Cracked leather, a cage match somewhere cold, and the first person she’d ever truly looked at and felt she'd recognized. Rogue looks down to where Pablo is still dogging her heels with his little brows furrowed, and offers him a wild grin. He frowns, less than reassured. But Rogue can’t find it in herself to care.
“I know him,” she says again. And oh, how good it is to say it. “It’s Logan.”
Rogue doesn’t need help to find him. She takes the stairs two at a time, stops on the mezzanine and looks down to find the grand foyer nearly deserted. The typical noon crowd of slackers is gone, warded off by the interloper that paces there like a caged leopard. One hand fidgets with a cracked plastic lighter. The other stays jammed in his pocket. A strangled gurgle of laughter drifts in from the nearby dining room and Rogue watches his head snap up like it were a gunshot. He stands there, frozen, until a new threat demands his attention: a pair of teenage passers-through who take one look at Logan, and together agree to head the other way.
Rogue can’t help but snort. She knows, objectively, that some people sometimes were intimidated by him. He did it on purpose, she thinks. What with the smoking and the skulking and the entirely unnecessary ferocity with which he squares his broad shoulders. It helps that he doesn’t seem to always move quite like a person. The pinks of his eyes are dark like a dog’s, an effect that you can only really appreciate when he’s staring you down. Still, Rogue can’t help but sigh just at the sight of him. A breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding, gone like that.
“Yea, yea,” she thinks. “You’re one big scary motherfucker.” She could never find it in herself to fear him. Then, calling down over the railing, “you’ll set off the sprinklers like that.”
Halfway through the motion of lighting up, Logan pauses. He’s standing below and with his back to her and she can’t see his face. She watches while he takes his time pocketing the lighter, running a hand through his disheveled hair as he finally turns to look up at her. He’s grinning like a fool. Trying not to, for sure, but beaming right along anyway. His smile is all black gums and gleaming canines and Rogue finds she doesn’t care, wouldn’t have it any other way.
He comes to meet her at the bottom of the staircase, inevitable as sunrise.
Rogue doesn’t actually run and leap into his arms like a little girl. But damn, if it isn’t a close thing. As it is, she can’t stop herself from burying her face into his jacket, nor from throwing her arms around his neck without asking. Any thought she may have had to recoil is obliterated the instant he reaches back for her. There’s no pause, no waver in his hold. Just a soft grunt as he shifts to take her weight and the warmth of him come back at last.
He chuffs once. A low breathy noise that reverberates in his chest and tousles the flyaways at her crown. “Miss me, kid?”
“Not really,” she mumbles, still smothered in his heartbeat.
His only response is a soft chuckle at her expense. Rogue allows herself a few more seconds to revel in both the sound of it and its proximity, before pulling away.
Holding him at arm’s length, she looks him up and down proper now. Her eyes catch on a subtle knot between his brows, a patch of road rash worn into the outer part of one sleeve. Deep shadows roost in the hollows under his eyes, and Rogue struggles to recall if they had always been there or if they were new. Nevertheless, there’s a genuine giddiness about him. Despite the tension in his jaw, the grin he shows her is authentic.
“Where were you?” she thinks. “And what kind of trouble were you busy getting into?” But his gaze keeps flicking to the egresses over her shoulder, so all Rogue asks in the end is, “how’s the road?”
“Dogshit,” he replies, immediately. Then tilts his head in consideration and amends, “but also, not too bad.”
“Both?”
“Well everything’s dogshit compared to this place.” He sweeps an arm out to gesture derisively at the fine woodwork and original antique wallpaper. “Professor's practically got a palace here. Let me tell you, I spent three days in a parking lot off of-”
Rogue cuts him off with a pointed raising of eyebrows. “It would probably be less shitty if you took a car, not a bike,” she teases. She can’t resist poking at the scraped up part of his jacket where he’d clearly tasted asphalt at some point.
He bats her away, smirking as he admits, “yea. It's a shame Scotty doesn’t have any cars worth driving.”
“I still can’t believe you did that!” she groans, trying and failing to suppress laughter behind her hands. “He was so fucking pissed when he figured out who took it! I swear to god he made the next quiz we had harder on purpose. I only know of like four kids that didn’t completely flunk it.” She looks up, expecting to see him preening, unrepentant and smug as ever. Instead, she finds him frozen. Mouth still tacked up the corners like he'd forgotten to take it down.
“You’re in his class?”
Rogue's brow furrows. “Uh, yea?” she says slowly, “one of them, at least.” His face has become illegible to her. Rogue mentally runs back the last two minutes of the conversation, trying and failing to comb out whatever burr had pricked him. Logan and Cyclops might not be friendly with each other by any means, but she didn't think it could be as bad as all that. Besides, Mr. Summers was a teacher. A teacher at the school she attended, that she also boarded at, and that Logan had brought her to. Even knowing Logan as she does, she can't fathom why this would trouble him.
For a long time, they scrutinize each other in silence. Logan with his head tipped to one side, as if all might make more sense to him at a thirty degree angle. But at the end of all that searching, all he says is, “huh.”
Then, the giant double doors at his back scream open with the howling of antique hardware and a hellish chorus of good-natured jeering. Dead oak swings wide, crashes against the stop with a bang. Logan fails to fully suppress a gutteral snarl of alarm and it claws its way from his throat with a vengeance, nearly strangling him. At once, the laughter cuts out. Decapitated. Three girls- students just come in from kicking a soccer ball around on the lawn- go rabbit still in the entryway to stare up at the wolverine.
He’d unconsciously shoved her behind him when he’d startled, and all Rogue can see of his face is the curled edge of his lip and a single bared canine. His whole body has gone iron stiff, backbone straight and unyielding as a railway spike. His hands are curled into misshapen fists at his sides, arrested halfway through the contortion of unsheathing his claws. Beyond him, the three girls continue to stand motionless, bug eyed and transfixed.
Rogue shuffles pointedly out from behind his back. She purses her lips in a way that she hopes comes off as friendly and apologetic, even as Logan flinches, head whipping sideways and arm jerking as if to push her behind him again. The trio in the doorway hardly glance at her. But they do take advantage of Logan's momentarily divided attention to make a break for it, scurrying off down a side corridor and leaving the door ajar.
Logan turns to watch them go, blinking slowly. The knot between his eyebrows has only deepened. His nostrils flare like a spooked horse. For a moment, he seems so agonizingly lost that Rogue is nearly overcome by the impulse to reach for him.
Palm inches from his shoulder, she stops. Hovers. Then, lets the hand fall back to her side. It wouldn't do any good, she realizes; he's barely in the room with her.
She waits.
At the count of sixteen, he swears under his breath. His gaze sags to the floor. He reaches up to pinch the bridge of his nose, still cussing unintelligibly, sides heaving as he drags the air in over his teeth. An icy wind sweeps into the foyer and Rogue can only stare after him as he departs from her side to slam both leaves closed. He kicks the frame for good measure before turning at last to look up at her, look past her, squint at the surrounding wainscotting like it could bite him. He’s not smiling anymore.
Rogue bites hard on the inside of her cheek. There’s an inexplicable tangle in her vocal chords, stones settling in her guts. A bit much, don’t’cha think? His expression stays pinched and he turns his back to her to fidget with something on the lock. But Rogue clocks it all the same, the familiar and desperate blankness behind in his eyes.
Three weeks ago and in the aftermath of Liberty Island, she’d asked him if he was running off again. Still wounded, sickly from the cost of having saved her life, and just barely able to sit upright to hold on to the handlebars of Cyclops’ motorcycle; he hadn't even pretended to think it over before he'd bolted. The look in his eye now is the same as it was then. A wolf or coyote or some other fell canine, she thinks, ready and willing to take its own foot off. Trapped.
From down the hall comes a gentle clamor as students begin to filter out of the dining room in packs and disperse to their next classes. It’s only then that Rogue realizes she’d left her bookbag upstairs and there was no way she would have time to retrieve it now. English 301 starts in five minutes. Still hovering by the door, Logan tosses his head and huffs, as if hypervigilance was something he could physically dislodge with enough grumbling. It’s enough to make her feel vaguely nauseated. She takes several deep breaths through her nose, and finds she doesn't actually care that much about Nathaniel Hawthorne at all.
“Hey,” she murmurs. His attention homes to her instantly. Rogue chooses to ignore the sinking feeling in her chest and jabs a thumb in the direction of the rapidly deserting meal hall. “You wanna get lunch?” she asks.
You’d be hard pressed to find a styrofoam tray anywhere even near the vicinity of Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. In place of the long plastic composite benches Rogue remembers from her stint at Caldecott High, the meal hall is lined with an eclectic assemblage of vintage dining room sets with sofas and coffee tables tucked in to the corners. Tall stately windows look out onto the back patio and the gardens beyond. There’s no lunch monitor, bullhorn toting or otherwise. But one area where it doesn’t differ much from public school is the line.
So many people, so near to her. Pushing and shoving and knocking elbows, not a single one of them aware of the danger.
Ms. Kim and her are working on it. And she knows, right? She knows she’s not actually that much more dangerous than any of her fellow classmates, and they all hang out with each other just fine all the time and nothing bad happens. But it’s still enough to send her upstairs most days.
Today, the queue is mercifully empty as she and Logan pick up their plates. And perhaps it’s this, in combination with Logan’s warm presence at her back, that emboldens her to say hello to the cook as she intercepts him in the process of pulling up the leftovers. He greets her affably, all smiles. And his expression only falters slightly when he happens to glance towards Logan’s looming figure trailing after her. Rogue apologizes for interrupting closing and orders quickly for the both of them. They find a little nook off to one side, where Logan can watch the doors but not be too near to the windows. And where she can duck behind a sideboard in the event that a teacher happens to stroll by looking for absentee students.
She had ordered extra for him, but Logan still manages to clean half his plate within five minutes of sitting down. He catches her looking at him and slows. “I skipped breakfast,” he mumbles around a mouthful of salisbury steak.
“What a role model,” Rogue deadpans. Then, “you do that a lot when you’re out? ‘Cause it’s really not good for you, y’know. Especially if you’re using your powers.” She nods towards the flayed leather of his sleeve. There’s no telling from the abrasion alone how bad the accident might have been, but if you go down on a motorcycle Rogue figures you usually have a hard time getting back up.
Logan stares evenly back at her over the rim of his glass, draining his orange juice in one go and setting it down with a solid thunk against the table. He smacks his lips together appreciatively. “Who says I’m using my powers?” he says. And then, before she can push the issue, “besides, who cares about all that. What about you? You doing alright?”
Rogue chews the inside of lip. She picks up her fork and starts raking the mashed potatoes around on her plate. “Yea,” she says. “It’s great.”
“Oh yea?”
She shrugs, not quite sure how to put it into words that would be intelligible to him. “It’s… different. But good, I think. Just a lot to get used to.” Logan grunts. When she looks up from her plate, he’s still chewing placidly, gaze floating just a little bit over her shoulder and out one of the ornate windowpanes. He says nothing else, content to let the silence stretch. Rogue tries again.
“I didn’t exactly leave my old school on good terms,” she admits. “I keep expecting people to be mean, or something, I guess. But they’re really nice!” she hurries to add when she notices the way he’s stilled. “Even the teachers. Everyone’s kinda up each other’s asses all the time, but I think. It helps. It means everyone gets taken care of.” She can feel the heat rising in her face and jams another bite of food into her mouth to shut herself up. Logan makes a low, thoughtful noise and starts in on his coffee. She can feel his steady gaze on her from across the table, percipient and implaccable.
“It’s good, too,” she murmurs, “being somewhere where everyone already knows what I am.” She risks a tentative glance up from her plate and finds him nodding deeply. Their eyes lock level with one another, and Rogue finds herself wrapped up in that same sense of recognition she’d first felt at Laughlin City. Back then, it had been a revelation, had left her staggered and struck dumb. So novel and precious was that feeling, she hadn’t hesitated to tuck herself into the cold, grimy flatbed of a stranger’s cargo trailer and stay there even when it started moving. So desperate was she back then, to catch that sensation by its trailing edge and hold fast. She couldn’t afford to let it go.
Now, she thinks she could count the years teeming behind Logan’s hard eyes, and it feels like home. From day one, they’d always known what the other one was. That was special these days. That was worth holding on to.
“It’s a good thing to have,” Logan agrees.
For awhile, they eat in companiable silence. Logan sips his coffee while Rogue finishes cleaning her plate. At last, he clears his throat. “How are your, uh, classes?” he asks. He says the word, ‘classes,’ with the natural incredulity of a drifter who’d had about as much to do with K-12 education as a drifter normally would. Which is to say, none at all. Rogue resists the urge to tease him only because she thinks he’d get a kick out of hearing about the kid who’d nearly set himself on fire last week in her chem lab.
“You mentioned Scott’s teaching you something?” he prompts her, only once she’s come back from getting a coffee of her own. He’s sprawled with one arm thrown over the back of his chair and his head tipped back at an angle, all casual like. But Rogue doesn’t miss the way his voice has suddenly gone flat with apprehension.
She takes her seat across from him and hums an affirmative while stirring sugar into her mug. “Mmhmm. I missed a lot of school back home so I’m below level for awhile. He’s got me in Geometry with the sophomores.” She pauses to take a sip. The steam caresses her face and tangles in her eyelashes. The added sweetness tastes fortifying on her tongue. At length, she adds, “it’s kinda weird having an X-man for a math teacher. It’s like, everyone definitely knows, but we’re not really ‘sposed to talk about it.”
If it hadn’t been for the glasses, Rogue doesn’t think she would have recognized Scott- Mr. Summers- the first time she’d seen him out of the suit. He’d waltzed up to the front of the classroom wearing gray slacks and a pink polo shirt, collected homework first thing, and began sketching out the proofs he wanted them to practice on the blackboard like it was nothing. Even weeks later and having attended his office hours, it was still sometimes hard for her to line them up. Cyclops, the black leather wearing badass. And Mr. Summers, who had once very sincerely told her he preferred Thales to Pythagoras, but that that was considered a controversial opinion in some circles, and really, she shouldn’t even get him started.
No explicit instruction had ever come down to her, but it was easy enough from context for Rogue to guess what she was meant to ignore: the basement levels of the school were of no interest to her, the only occasion Ms. Gray had ever been on the news was the time she’d spoken before congress. And If Mr. Summers wanted to limp into his 10am class with massive yellow bruising smeared across his jaw and more on his knuckles besides; well, that was just teacher business. No reason to get excited. At least, not while within earshot.
(The fact that some of the kids with rooms closest to the basketball court would run across the hall to get the others each time the Blackbird made a spectacle of lifting off; now that there was student business. Tact, Rogue thinks, would only stretch so far.)
Across the table from her, Logan is quiet, nose scrunched up in fierce concentration as he gnaws the end of a wooden coffee stirrer. Rogue watches it writhe and sway between his teeth, the gears turning in his head. She waits.
At last, his gaze flicks back to the other end of the table. His voice is an even rumble. “Well, you let me know if he ever starts getting talkative. I’ll take his head off.”
Rogue feels one side of her mouth quirk upwards- though she isn’t sure why. It's not actually very funny, and she's not even sure if Logan is really joking to begin with. Sighing, she slumps back in her seat and finds herself mirroring his sprawl as she regards him. There are times, she thinks, where she knows him like family. And there are other times when he is lost to her, gone to ground, fathoms deep. She couldn't dig him up if she tried. Right now, he's stretched out blithe and serene as a cobra laid in its burrow. And she doesn't know what he means by that at all.
“Nah, he’s all locked up,” she eventually drawls. “I think he does the whole business casual thing on purpose, try and throw the underclassmen off his scent.”
“Hm. Good,” Logan grunts. But there's a trace of something calm and pleasant and easily amused creeping back into his expression, and Rogue catches it as he turns his head to survey the empty dining room. He straightens up from his slouch, bootheels scraping across the hardwood. “So listen," he says. "I gotta get going soon. But I also need to find some parts for the bike.” He grimaces as he adds, “probably a helmet too- fucking cops keep trying to stop me on the highway. When’s your next class?”
Rogue opens her mouth, struggles. But fails to make a sound. Her brain is all blacked out, still shocked and short circuiting around the first thing he’d said. “Gotta get going.” Going soon. Leaving. “Uh,” she stammers. She swallows and tries again. “I’m skipping. Wait, you mean you’re heading out again already?”
Logan glances at her, then back out over the vacant tables. “Yeeeeea,” he says slowly, taking in the utter lack of any other students or staff and putting two and two together. He reaches up to scratch absently at the side of his face, still chewing on his stir stick. “I was just passing through.”
Somewhere in the back of Rogue’s consciousness, there's a voice that speaks in the cool cascading tones of her mother. “Easy, girl,” it murmurs now, pushing a strand of hair off her forehead. “No use pouting over it.” Rogue jams a fingernail with vicious force into a crack on the underside of the table. She takes the voice up in two psychic hands and wrings it without mercy. Then, relaxes.
“Ok,” she says.
But she must not have said it good enough, because Logan has turned back to her with the whole undiluted force of his attention brought to bear. In response, Rogue scowls. She lowers her head and narrows her eyes. She deliberately throws back her shoulders, trying to appear as unaffected and ferocious as he does while allowing her vision to meander towards a nearby lampshade.
“Rogue.”
God, she was an idiot. What did she expect? That he would, what? Stay? The last time he’d run, he’d all but sworn to her two things in words. The first, through his dog tags, that he would come back. The second, an oath declared boldly via the stark whites of his eyes and the restless swivel of his head, that he would never, ever be convinced to stick around. Rogue knew him. She’d been okay with it. She had no reason to be so much as miffed.
“Marie.”
Reluctantly, she looks back up at him. Logan looks the way he did on the train, hellbent and heartset and still uncertain nevertheless. “You know, I came back here to see you,” he says quietly. “I wouldn’t detour through Westchester just for engine parts. I meant what I promised.” His chin ducks just slightly and his voice goes almost imperceptibly soft as he admits, “I was worried about you.”
Rogue has the sudden image in her mind of Ms. Kim, the social worker, asking her if she wanted anything to snack on back when they’d first sat down in her office. And then making her a peanut butter sandwich and a cup of tea anyway when she'd taken too long to decline. “I’m going to eat,” Ms. Kim had declared. “Now, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. But I’m starving. Hang on, I think I have some granola bars around here somewhere too.” And they’d both had lunch.
It had been a long time since anyone had cared about her.
Logan’s gone a little fidgety again, so Rogue nudges his boot with one of her converse under the table. “I was worried about you too, ya know,” she grouses. Then, tentatively, “you looked like shit when you took off.”
He lifts his head and squints at her, before letting out an amused half breath of laughter. “Darlin, you ain’t gotta worry about me.” The coffee stirrer snaps between his teeth. Logan takes it out and lays both halves across his plate, buttressing the little pile of used napkins and sugar packets to be scraped into the garbage. He flexes his hands against the tabletop, rolling out his wrists and the stiff sinews of his claws with a luxurious groan. If he notices Rogue frowning at him, he doesn’t show it.
“Alright,” he finally grunts. “Since you’re already skipping, you wanna come with me to the chop shop?”
“Gotta get going,” Rogue reminds herself. No use pouting. At once, she remembers abandoning his chain upstairs in her room, and a searing impulse rises within her to go retrieve it. She brushes the thought aside like dust; bothersome but ultimately inconsequential. And lets it go. “Yea, I’ll come,” she grumbles.