Fic: Bulletproof Soul - Part 1
Just a drabbly story, Logan and Marie. Wrote it a while ago but feeling in a very Rogan-ish mood lately so might progress, I have another chapter or two in my head I think. Have lurked here for a while but never posted but today I thought, what the hell. So, big breath, here goes. (hope I've done everything right mods, sorry if not :)
Bulletproof Soul (lines borrowed from the song by the same name by Sade)
Movieverse - after X3
Logan/Rogue
G rating
2nd person perspective for Logan
Disclaimer: X Men not mine etc etc blah di blah- you know the song on that one
Set straight after X Men The Last Stand which I really feel was left very open from a Rogan POV. Well, in my lil mind anyway. Heh.
You've started to become preoccupied with fixing things.
Fixing the air conditioning. Fixing a wooden bench out the back that had been shattered by some over zealous new idiot, showing off powers he hasn't mastered yet. Tinkering with a cd player that no one uses anymore, and never will even if you succeed in fixing it, which you won't. Even though you've never had the steady hands or refined movements for it, all of a sudden, it's your new obsession.
It's a psychologists dream you suppose. Couldn't make any thing right, couldn't save Jean. So you spend your time looking for answers in inanimate objects, thinking if you figure them out, it will unlock some sort of door in your brain that will help you forget the moment you sank your claws into her warm body, holding her limp form against you as the life drains out of her. And consquently you.
But you're still alive. Jean, Phoenix, whoever (whatever?) she was, is most definately not. For a while there, you held out hope, that she would come back again, like she did last time, from the lake. But you know that she isn't, you don't know how, you just know. It's nothing to do with the cold lifeless body you carried in your arms, across the bridge until the whirling sirens stopped in front of you, and someone took her from you, placed her on a stretcher. Covered her face and her blood red hair with a pathetic sheet.
Part of you is pissed off that she wouldn't come back, for you.
Another part of you knows, she was never yours anyway. And she's happy now.
And what are you? Happy?
You have no idea. You know you're not as bad as they think. Them, in the mansion. Because you've managed not to take off so far.
This strange obsession with fixing things seems to have replaced your urge to jump on the nearest thing with wheels and get the hell out of town. That stops you. And her of course.
You wipe an oily cloth over the silver fixings of the bike; Scott's bike. It runs well now. Purrs even. You smile at the thought and wonder if Scott would be pissed that you turned his bike feral. You wish he was around to bitch at you about it.
Her.
The thought pushes in again.
Rogue.
You stay for her. And she stays for you.
As if you've conjured her with your thoughts, you hear quick steps behind you, and smell the distinctive scent of her skin as she approaches and then leans against the wall behind you. You keep polishing the bike, knowing she'll make her presence known when she's good and ready.
"Logan."
You turn and offer her some semblance of a smile. You turn back to your bike, realising that you're almost disappointed it's working and there's nothing else to fix. Then you realise there was something different about her, and you look back.
Her arms are bare. She has a singlet on, white, and fitted in to her body, with thin straps. Her collarbone sticks out under her smooth skin as she crosses her arm across her chest to rub her bare shoulder self conciously. It's a strange thing seeing her like that, and the Wolverine in you flinches, unhappy. Unhappy she seems vulnerable and fragile, and that it stirs a protective growl inside of your chest.
Her eyes are sad as she watches you and you know she must be counting on your reaction. You paste a smile on, hoping she doesn't know you well enough to know it's fake. Of course, she does though.
"Don't look at me like that."
You turn back to the bike, even though there's nothing left to do to it. She doesn't even wait for you to answer.
"Like... I don't know... like you're disappointed in me."
You grunt and shake your head, always straight to the point, Marie.
"Don't know what you're talking bout."
You're suprised and grateful when she's quiet for a moment, and then seems to move on.
"Taken it for a ride yet?"
You shake your head. Then for some godamn crazy reason, you find yourself saying something that goes against every mantra tattooed on the inside of your skull especially for her.
"You wanna go?"
Her face lights up comically and it's almost worth it, for that second, to see her looking like that kid again. The one that you feel slipping away, being replaced by this caricature of a woman in front of you. Hell, you can't take it back now.
"Go get a jacket."
She screws up her face.
"Do I have to?"
Yes, you think. But you must be getting soft in your old age because you consider the weather, currently in the second week of a sticky heat wave, and then all that porcelain white skin that she's only now been able to bare to the world. You can't deny her the feel of the wind playing over it. Just a short ride then.
"Get on."
This is how you find yourself with her arms tight around your middle, clutching your white t shirt on each side, her thighs gripping the back of yours as you gun the bike, too fast, through a shady mountain pass. You should slow down, but you feel distinctly like you're running again. You're not sure what from. You should turn back, but every mile away from the mansion feels like you're rediscovering something you didn't realise you'd lost.
Her cheek presses into your back and your stomach clenches in something you vaguely recognise as guilt.
But you're not facing her, so you can ignore the guilt and why you might feel it in the first place.
You pull into a diner for something to do that doesn't require you touching.
You realise then that some of your guilt is because you know that since she got the cure, she wants to touch you, at every opportunity. Just a hundred incidental times in a day. You, more than anyone else you know. More so than Bobby, when it should be Ice Boy that she runs to now. But she doesn't. It's so bad sometimes you can smell the desperation on her; so sharp that sometimes you give in and squeeze her fingers, or touch a finger to her cheek.
You slide into a booth, propping the menu up in front of your face, postponing facing her for just a few more minutes. After you order, you lean into the corner of the booth and throw your arm along the back of the seat. Why she's become like something too bright to look at all of a sudden has you agitated, but you ignore it, fiddling instead with the napkin holder.
She's tapping away on the table with the salt and pepper shakers. You think of grabbing her hands to still her, but you remember how it feels to touch her skin now.
It's almost worse than before.
You're too aware of the feel of her flesh, the smell of it. Smooth, cool, soft.
You suppose it's just because you haven't been able to touch it before - that's why the sensation is so strange. So magnified.
But you shouldn't hold back because of that. She needs people to make her feel normal now.
You're just about to reach out when she ducks into the little bag she wears slung diagonally across her shoulder. She pulls out a purse and her fingers dip inside it to take out a small compact mirror and a tiny stub of a black pencil.
You watch in a kind of morbid fascination as she leans into the mirror, and lines her eyes with the dark coal colour. Again you feel that disapproval kick in; she's always using that stuff. It makes her look older, and you don't like that. She brings out gloss next, and you can't watch that as she starts to coat her lips with a glossy sheen.
You shake your head and laugh a bit, and she brings her head up.
"What?"
"Whaddaya need that for."
She shrugs, and your eyes are drawn to her bare shoulders again. Damn it.
You look away, but can't resist saying one more thing.
"It makes you look too ...grown up."
She's watching you closely and you rub your face, not entirely sure why you said that out loud.
"Hmm. Well, I am, Logan. Grown up, that is."
And it hits you like a slow bullet. That feeling you used to get with Jean. Breaking through the protective veil you place over Marie in your heart, a new feeling, painfully cracking through the wall of automatic denials you've constructed carefully around her since you first found her in your trailer. In that very instant, it shatters through you, exploding in slow motion and ripping through your soul.
Grown up. Still here. And the only person you'd easily die for.
Ironic, because as of right now; now that you realise this, that's what you are.
You're a dead man.
o00o
Part TWO Here