Dancing In Rooms: Logan

You promised her you'd be across the border by now; you're not. Another delay; the usual apologetic message received at the usual designated pay phone. We're sorry, but the security is getting tighter. You'll have to wait.
At five hundred dollars a head, you expect better service. You hang up the phone and try not to look at the hope in her eyes when you shake your head.
 
(Not yet. Next week, they said.
Isn't that what they said last week?)

She rubs her hands together, you smell the cold on her. A thin, dry smell like old ice.

(So where are we supposed to go this time?)

A basement, a cellar, an attic room-- these are the places you have been, the places you have bought or begged to hide until the arrangements are finished that will get the two of you across the border into freedom. Such places are safe, unquestionably, but they are also expensive. You don't want to tell her you're running low on cash. The smugglers want a thousand to take you across the border, and even if you get there, it takes just as much money to live in Canada as it does in New York City.

You have to take her somewhere, though, can't expect her to spend the night on the streets, not when there's snow on the ground and registration patrols looking for anyone out past curfew. So you take her hands inside yours, pushing warmth into the stiff bones, and you take her to a motel you remember from the one time you hit New York on the fight circuit. That was a long time before you met her. You're surprised the place hasn't burned down by now, or been shut down by the police on drug charges. It's the first time you've done this, and it's a risk, but no one asks questions at this kind of dump, not as long as you can pay the bill. And you can. You slide the clerk an extra twenty to keep his mouth shut, grinning at him around your cigar.

(My wife wouldn't approve of the little lady.)

She smiles at this, a bored, beautiful smile that convinces the man you're not a mutant, just an adulterer. He nods and the cash disappears into his grimy sweatpants.

The room is a bad as you remember. Carpet the color of rotting spinach, spotted with beer stains and cigarette burns and even a little bit of blood in the corner. It smells of stale urine, of decaying teeth. A cotton spread covers the double bed, colored a dull yellow pink like a callus on the sole of your foot.

You drop your bags on the floor; a cloud of dust floats up. She's still rubbing her hands. It's colder in the room than it is outside.

(I'm sorry. You deserve better.
Don't talk like that. I don't deserve anything. Anyway, it's good camouflage.
We won't be here long. Just a couple of nights.
Then there's nothing to apologize for, is there?)

She tests the bed; bouncing as she sits.
 
(Did you lock the door?
It doesn't lock.
Oh.)

You notice a radio in the corner, battered and corroded as the rest of the room, but a relief nonetheless. The reception is poor; more static than sound, but eventually you find a station that is clear enough to listen to. Public radio; a violin playing something wild and beautiful and sad. She plays like that for you, sometimes, but most of the time now she just looks at her violin. Touches it, like a wish or a prayer.
 
(Keep it on that station.) she says. (I want that one tonight.)

Neither of you have to say a word about what happens next. It is routine, ritual, as familiar by now as getting out of bed or brushing your teeth. She stands in front of you, slides her arms round your neck, leans her head over your heart. You hold her around the waist, hands together at the small of her back. And you dance. It doesn't matter what kind of music there is. Rock, blues, classical, country. Or sometimes there isn't music at all; just your heart and hers beating out the silence.

A long time before this afternoon, she told you why she loved to dance. When a person dances, she said, they're free. Nothing else matters but the motion and the music and you can close your eyes and be anywhere or anything you want to be. She asked you to dance with her the first night after you left the mansion. Both of you were a little scared that night; she was worried she'd slow you down and you were worried you'd make a mistake and lose her. The dance was meant to calm nerves, to quiet fear.

Now you dance every night as a way to remind yourselves that all this was temporary; transient. A defiance, perhaps, but also an escape. A need to be somewhere else. It made it harder, though, when you knew that every time was, in a way, the last time. Because neither of you knew if you'd still be together by morning, or if you'd even be alive.

The time of the dancing in rooms lasted almost a month, but you never could quite figure out why she loved the sad things most of all-- the dissonant chords, the minor keys. Or rather, you knew all along but never wanted to admit it. You knew she heard herself in the music. She heard both of you, and she knew in advance how the song would end.

The Phoenix Compound
September 31
 
The world ended at high noon today. It exploded not with a bang but a with whimper, not with a whimper but with a flash of crimson that momentarily blinded the sun and left invisible scorch marks across the surface of my eyes. Even through the veil, it burned. The light itself made no sound, apart from the hiss of panicked energy, but sound surrounded it. A hollow popping of bone, seconds before the explosion. Seconds after, a woman's scream.

Scott's bones. Jean's scream.

And that is how their love ceased to be blind, how the eyes were torn open. It is like a scene from a nightmare: everything is garish, stretched out of proportion and distorted beyond belief. Even the colors are twisted; all I remember is white and red and black. White turning red....she was taken. Red turning black....he was left in the dirt, bleeding.

I am gray; it is not my nightmare. All the colors belong to him. I cry for them both, but not in tears. In hot, liquid, silence.

/Silence like his white-lipped calm when I popped his shoulder  back into its socket. My hands were on his muscles; I felt the spasm. The sudden pain. But I don't think it was enough for him. I think he wanted it to be worse. He craved the permission to scream./

William sleeps in the corner, in his tiny crib. The bed beside him is empty-- the mother is gone, and the father pushes his rage into the floor. Muscles in his back and shoulders quiver with each push-up. His body shifts to the right, punishing the weak shoulder, the Judas limb. The center of his visor glows a cold, dark red: the color of jewels. The color of stone. This much is revealed to me by the faded yellow lamplight. There are no stars tonight, no moon to soften the darkness.

I lie flat on my mattress, cocooned in my blanket so that no skin shows but my face, and I listen to a dead man talk. His teeth grind out each word like old coffee grains.

"Will the veiled sister pray for the children at the gate...."

The taste of his bitterness sours my mouth: sour meat, molded bread. His hate, his desperation seeps through the air like kerosene n the rain. I watch his body move up, down, up, down, and then we both close our eyes (or so I like to think) and, at length, allow our minds to replay the truth.

// Bones pop and the sky bleeds red. Scott roars but Jean screams.
"He cheats!" A bellow toward the Elder's platform. "The X-man used his power. He thinks he is better than the rules!"
"He's lying!" Scott's voice, but not so much in words as in short gasps distorted around sound. "He tore my visor away to throw the match."
"Ha! He lies to save his honor, but mine is secure! Why would I throw the match after I've broken his arm?"
Broken! I have to look up. Let them cane me.
Two men stand in the center of the square, streaked with dirt and sweat and blood. More sweat than dirt. Less sweat than blood.//

"Who will not go away and cannot pray..."

I shadow the words behind him. They are the words of Eliot, the author of hollow men and other disillusions. Scott never liked his poetry.

//One of the men is tall, a thick and gnarled dead oak, ugly with brute hate. His name is Levi. The only son of the Elder, and owner of four women. They all come to dinner with bruises, cuts, and sometimes even long, thin burns. Other nights they don't come at all.
This man holds a visor in his outstretched hand.
The man beside him is smaller, leaner, but hard enough to stay on his feet despite the fact that his right arm dangles uselessly at his side. His eyelids press into small lines of flesh, a mandatory blindness. It is the first time I have seen his eyelids. The shock is almost the same as if I had seen him naked. I wonder, briefly, if he thinks the same thing about my hands.
"My honor means nothing. I fight only for the honor of my woman."
Only I catch that he almost said "my wife".
"He defies the rules!"
"I obey them!"
The Elder raises his hand.
"The rules must stand. Voluntary use of a mutation in combat is strictly forbidden. Ownership of Bondmaid Jean
passes to Levi until the next Challenge, or until the bond is extended by the creation of a child."
Scott curses, words that he used to tell Logan not to use, and stumbles forward in Levi's direction. But a blind man can't fight. Levi's kick catches him behind the knees. Another kick to the  stomach, to the ribs. I wait for him to resist, but he does nothing.
He bites his lip and takes it all in. Stalling, I know, as long as he can.//

"O my people, what have I done unto thee?"

//"Levi."
Jean speaks, but not in a scream, this time, or a whisper, but with the cold flat calm of moonlight over a frozen lake. She moves, ice within the heat, rising to her feet. Ms. Sophia moves to subdue her, but Jean freezes the woman in place with one flick of  her icicle wrist. I am stunned as much as the crowd; the idea of a bondmaid displaying her mutation in public equates a vulgarity. An obscenity. I should not be surprised. See, the veil has tainted me after all.
Logan, forgive me.
She holds her other hand toward Levi. The carnation falls between her fingers to the dust, a damp and wilted pile of petals.
Her veil moves with her breath like a mist of snow moves with the wind. The melting, however, starts quickly enough.
A thin layer of wetness covers her next words.
"Enough fighting. Come, claim your bond. I'm waiting."
Levi recites the formulas and kisses her. She winces, but I'm not sure why-- the kiss of a stranger or the last surge of emotion she feels from her husband as she releases Ms. Sophia and follows Levi out of the square.
She could have stopped it.
I could have.
Even Scott could have, if he wanted it bad enough.
So that leaves the question, which one of us is to blame?
Or more correctly, which one of us is not?//

A baby's wail interrupts the darkness between Scott and me. Will is awake and screaming as if he just now realizes that his mother is not there. What is a baby's idea of a mother, anyway? Is it one concrete image, or many different impressions of soft flesh, kind eyes, lullabies in the dark? Which one of those things is he crying for? Or maybe none of those things. Babies cry, Jean said. They don't always need a reason. Sometimes I envy that. He is the only one of us allowed the privilege to scream just for the sake of screaming.

The baby cries, but Scott has gone deaf. The rhythm of his Exercise never so much as skips a beat.

I am not a mother. The idea of a child terrifies me: something small and innocent depending on my arms for security when my skin could drain it of life it hasn't even lived. My gloves might not be enough; accidents could happen. I don't know lullabies, or the secrets of quieting a fretting little boy. But there is no one else.

Without a word to Scott-- though I watch him out of the corner of my eye-- I cross the room to Will. If I wrap him in my blanket, he should be safe. He protests this with squirming limbs and a red face. I can't blame him; it is a hot night. After baited breath and a few narrowly averted catastrophes, he is bound into a neat bundle in my arms. Like an Indian baby. My little orphaned papoose.

He quiets within moments, the squalling paled to half-hearted whimpering that reminds me of the kitten I had when I was seven. I decide to take him with me to watch the desert, tonight. Maybe I Will tell him one of those nice fairy tales about princesses and peas Or pumpkin coaches and glass slippers. Or maybe we'll just sit in
Silence with the wind in our faces and wait for the ones we love to come home.

I pause at the door, turning back one last time to Scott.
Up-down.
Up-down.

Sweat in his hair, along his shoulders, dripping down behind his visor into his eyes. Lips moving frantically, reciting thin scraps of poetry he always claimed he hated.

He is kerosene in the rain. Cold. Flammable. Waiting for a match.

Two weeks pass, slow and dry like bones bleaching under the sun, Life does not end after all, not even for Scott, but instead it mutates to allow survival. I learn how to tell a baby's need by his cry, even though I don't always get it right. My clumsiness shows up in backwards Diapers and spilled formula. Scott never complains. Sometimes I wish he would say something or do something besides smile and thank me for my effort. *My* effort, as if his own child is no longer his responsibility.

Wait, that's not totally fair to him. He does the best he can to be a father and friend, but he moves and talks in a delayed shock. It reminds me of the numbness I felt between the moment Magneto hooked me up to his machine and the moment the real pain started. You're tensed, waiting for the eruption. But he learns how to keep it inside. How to bury his anger when his wife comes to dinner with bruises on her skin, when she can't meet his eyes. He learns when not to look.

The three of us learn to subvert the machine keeping them apart. I see her at different times during the day, and use the opportunity to pass messages between her and Scott. I memorize poetry from him and recite it to her as we wash clothes or tend the gardens. One afternoon, she gives me her wedding ring. I wear it around my neck with Logan's dog tags to make sure Levi never touches it. I give her his promise to win.

She smiles too brightly and thanks me. It is her way of crying.

Words and paper and rings are not the only things I smuggle. Other things change hands-- small packages of birth control pills, a finger-sized bottle of Valium capsules. The contraceptives were my idea, but she asked for the drug specifically. One pill prevents mistakes; the other allows her to stay sane. Scott helps me arrange the bribes for the pills, but he doesn't know about the sedatives. Jean swore me to silence. Even if I could tell him, I wouldn't; we all measure our sanity by the illusions we keep.

And all of us-- Jean, Scott, myself-- learn to survive the only way possible. One day at a time.

The Phoenix Compound
October 20

Twinkle, twinkle little star...

I bounce the baby on my knee, smiling in blank maternal
Affection at the happy gurgles and the dimples on the cherub cheeks. I smile so hard it hurts.

How I wonder what you are...

It's one of the only three rhymes I remember. I remember stars and hush little baby and one, two, pick up shoe. I know a few more stories, but tonight I don't want to think, only recite. A phonograph mother. A broken record.

Up above the world so high...

At dinner, Jean showed up with a bloody lip. It wasn't swollen Or even spilt, but bitten clean through. Bright red liquid coated her mouth and spilled down her chin like old wine. Only it wasn't wine.

Like a diamond in the sky...

Scott walked very calmly from the room, his face the color of ash in winter. He came back five minutes later, wiping the corners of his mouth with his sleeve. I smelled bile on his breath. He did not eat.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star...

He said nothing to me, but took a wad of bills from under his mattress and walked into the night, a red and black shadow between the shadows.

How I wonder what you are...

He has not come back yet.

I wonder what I'll do if Scott does not return. I tell it to myself
Like a story.

The girl isn't afraid anymore. She doesn't care what happened to her last time; she ignores it. She ties Will to her back and clips the barbed wire fence behind the room. Forty, fifty, a hundred fifty miles later, she stops-- most likely at one of those diners with greasy eggs and sludge coffee. No one cares enough to ask what she is. They feel sorry for her, a pretty girl with only one pair of jeans to be her name and a fatherless baby on her hip. So they give her a job. Will plays with the silverware while she washes dishes and takes Orders from truckers who like her short checkered skirt and Mississippi drawl. The cook, a middle-aged woman with wrinkles in her forehead and fat rolls around her waist, becomes her friend. They share a trailer. Life settles down the way life does, even after barbed wire fences. Who knows, she might even date a few of the local boys-- drink ice-cold beers in pickup trucks and line dance to the Dixie Chicks-- but it'll only be practice. Practice for when he walks through the door, chewing his cigar and growling at her customers. She's forgiven him everything, by then.

(What are ya doin' here, kid?
Waiting for you.
Am I late?
No more than usual.
C'mon, let's get out of here.
Okay.)

She smiles.

But this does not happen. Or it does, but in another universe. An alternate dimension of space.

In this world, the world still inside the fence, still behind the veil, I put a sleeping child (not mine, even though it feels like it) into his crib and then walk back to my bed. Waiting up is inevitable, but I should at least pretend to try and sleep. Scott never knows I wait for him, when he's doing his pushups or shadow fighting past midnight. He doesn't know I've been up until dawn, some nights, watching him pummel at his demons, just to make he doesn't
forget that the night won't last forever. I did. I forgot. I'm not going to let it happen to him.

I've already crawled under the blanket when the door opens and the shadow with the ruby eye walks into the room. A mix of moonlight and electric light does things to the mind; we stare at each other the way we did when he found me in the bar. Strangers. Ghosts. Then again, how much do I know about him? We've memorized the
same poetry and I've held his child, but I've never heard him talk about his favorite color, or food, or television show. He fights for me every month but he doesn't even know my real name.

He watches me a moment longer, the light bulb dripping a thin golden sheen over his visor. It makes the crystal look wet, viscous. Like blood, or is that what I see on the rest of his face? Not in liquid or color but in tangible sadness.

The wad of money lands on the table with a limp thud. All our regrets must be soft; the baby's asleep.

"He won't let me buy her."

I search for anger or hatred but the voice is disembodied from all feeling, from his body itself.

"Five hundred dollars and he wouldn't take it. Wouldn't even let me see her."

He sets a crinkled paper bag on the table and takes out a clear bottle filled with golden brown liquid. It is partly empty. Logan and I used to make bets on what Scooter would be like stone drunk. I don't want to know anymore.

"She told me she loved me. In my head. That I should go before I got hurt. Before she got hurt."
A grate of aluminum against glass; he unscrews the cap and takes a drink.

"I came so close to killing him. If we didn't have Will to think about, I would have."
Another drink.

"Tell me this is better than the outside. Tell me this isn't killing us just as fast."

He wipes his mouth with his sleeve and looks down at the bottle.
"You know, I really hate this stuff."
He picks it up and walks back out the door. The sound of liquid sloshing against sand.

I have said nothing because there is nothing to say. He's right on both counts. I could tell him my story, the story of the outside. I could tell him what they did to me. But I have also seen the blood on a woman's mouth. The desolation in a young man's face.

/Tell me it isn't killing us./

I can't.

The door shuts again. Footsteps echo across the room and the Sound ends beside my bed. I pull the blanket closer. A gesture of protection, like the veil, but not from him. Or not only from him. Shadows, I tell my mind. Instinct. He isn't the only one who's afraid of the dark.
 
"What does he call you?"

"Who?"

"Logan. What's your name?"

My name. I see. A gesture of intimacy, of trust. My name and my hands are the two things I have always hidden, for part of the same reason he hides his eyes. Partly necessity, partly fear. My fingers trace abstract art onto the blanket and I look at the window as I talk. I talk to the stars not to the man standing beside me.

"Marie."

The syllables dissipate into the darkness, tea leaves stirred up from the bottom of the glass.

"Marie." He rolls the sound across his tongue. "It's pretty."

"He thought so. I mean, he never told me, but I could see it in his face when he said it."

"I'm sorry we lost him."

"Why?"

"Why am I sorry?"

"Why did you ask my name?"

I turn my face to him, and find myself staring at unfamiliar territory. I haven't really looked at him since we arrived here (did that make it easier not to think of him as vulnerable too?) but now I don't know how I could have missed such differences. Wrinkles at the corners of his mouth pull his lips down into a lingering sigh of resignation. His muscles are harder now, more rigid, defined. I always saw him through Logan's eyes-- a boy trying to become a man-- but now I see him as the opposite. A man searching through the pieces of his life for the boy he lost. If I were to pull away the visor, I would imagine that his eyes have aged most of all.

How is my face different? My eyes?

"I wanted to know who you are..."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

Here he pauses, staring not at me but through me, looking out the window.

"You know the tests are coming up soon."

"Not something I'd exactly forget, is it?"

"They're going to find out you're not pregnant, and you're going to go back up for challenge."

"Yeah. I know."

"I might not be able to fight for your next month."
 
I try not to flinch, but my breath hitches anyway.

"I'm being honest with you....I will try. You know I will. But if Levi beats me again, I may not be conscious much less able to answer your challenger."

He must think I'm taking it well because I haven't said anything. Not true. I'm screaming but he can't hear. Not again. Not again.

"But I promised to protect you." His hands tap against his leg as he talks and his words are quick. Awkward. "So I will."

"How?" I'm not so sure I want to know this, but I have to ask.

"If you...." He swallows. "If you have a baby....you'll be safe for almost a year." The words rush out in a jumble like an overturned puzzle box. Fragment and obscure images of the whole.

"Where would I get a baby, Scott?" Speaking slowly, talking rhetoric because I know exactly what he means. I just want to see if he means it. My palms are starting to sweat beneath my gloves.

His gaze drops to the floor. "From me."

The sound of his voice implodes into a black hole of soundlessness, that sucks away all notions of speech and logic. I struggle to the surface, clinging to a few words and phrases that can be used to show shock. Or is it anger....or is it fear...

"My skin--"

"I can be creative just like he can."

My hand snaps toward him, a hard slap across his jaw.

"Get out." A hiss through my teeth. Hands twisting through my blanket, knees shaking. I press my back into the wall, blinking twice to rid my mind of past images suddenly springing to my vision.

/He doesn't know/

I repeat the words over and over again in my mind.

/He doesn't know what he's talking about. What it reminds you of. You never told them that part of the story.../

"Marie, listen....I'm not going to hurt you.--"

Exactly what they said last time.

"Don't do this." A whisper, strained and fierce.

"If I were Logan, would you--"

"It was never like that with Logan and me!"

The look on his face tells me he had not considered that possibility.

"I've tried to think of another way out." He shakes his head. "No choice."

"There is always a choice."

"Name it."

"I could leave."

He stares at me like I suggested running the border patrol in broad daylight ten yards from a patrol. "How far do you think you'd get?"

"Far enough."

"No. Just no. I'm not going to have that on my hands."

"I'm not on your hands, Scott. I can't thank you enough for everything you do, but I'm not your wife or your sister or your child. You don't have to be responsible."

"I know." He puts his hand on my shoulder, and I think it hurts him when I pull away. I know he's just trying to do what he's seen Logan do; the ruse would work better if his fingers weren't so stiff. "But there's no one else to do it."

"I'm a free woman. I can be responsible for myself."

"If you're free, then why do you wear the veil?"
 
I hate it when he's right. We sit and let the silence unravel into long cords before either of us get the nerve to speak.

"Just think about it." He says, in that same apologetic tone he uses to recite the bonding formula.

"No."

"I'll be careful."

I shake my head. "Do you hear yourself? Stop, a minute, and listen. This isn't the Scott I know. Where is the honor in this? What would the Professor think? And what would it do to Jean?"

"The Professor is dead. We left him."

It's the first time he's said it straight out. I wince, but he isn't finished.
"Jean will understand. And you talk about honor? It doesn't exist. Not here."

"You say that, and they've won. They've beaten you, and turned you into one of them. I won't believe you've given up so easily."

"Call this easy?"

His voice quivers and I wonder if there is a sheen of moisture behind the glasses. Does it condense on the lens, tears shedding tears, raining in front of his very eyes? And no one but him can see it?

"No one said it would be. But you listen to me, and you listen good. There is no use in protecting something if you forget why you're Fighting for it."

He absorbs my words, slowly. His face pale in the starlight. Translucence.

"Marie, I'm sorry."

"You don't have to apologize."

"Yes. Yes I do."

He sinks onto the bed beside me. A smattering of silence. Then a paper-thin whisper, low and ragged like a groan.

"What am I going to do if I can't get her back?"

I know that sound; Logan's voice held that same mix of terror and desperation when he came out of his nightmares. I never found what answers to give, but I learned how to put my arms around him and say nothing.
So that's what I do now.

I don't mean to fall asleep; I don't. But somehow I close my eyes too long, and just like that I slip away into darkness. Into a memory, a nightmare.

/Paralysis and no defenses and pain and the inability to scream because they stuffed my gloves into my mouth....skin doesn't protect..../

No...please...let me go..

/Skull banging against the dirty cement when he slams you down, a blow to the kidneys to make you stop kicking, a curse when you catch him in the jaw.../

Logan....don't let them hurt me...

/Logan isn't there. He left you. He left you with this man and with the other two who are standing and smoking and watching. waiting in line. Logan said he didn't have a choice. That one of you had to surrender to save the others. But why couldn't it have been you? Anything would have been better than this.../

Just let me go....I won't tell anyone...I promise...please...

/He pulls your scarf away, in one brutal tug, it was the one Logan gave you for Christmas last year....
Your skull meets the cement again; this time you do it. You don't want to be awake. You just want to die. You expect them to kill you when it's over with. But they don't. Maybe that's the cruelest part. They let you live.../

"No!"

I start from bed, cold sweat plastering my shirt to my skin, arms flailing until they connect with something firm. A man's face. Hands on my shoulders. Get away from me. I won't let you this time. I'll kill myself first. I'll get it right this time.

/Marie, Marie./

The voice hides its worry, trying hard to soothe, but you can hear it quicken, mounting concern.

/It's me. Scott. Open your  eyes./

I can't. I'm lost, and it's dark, and they'll find me.

/Marie, they won't find you. Not here. I won't let them, ok? Now open your eyes. Come on back to us./

Eyelids snap open; chest heaving.
Scott's face hovers in front of me, tinged with worry and a bit of fear. Once he sees that I am awake, he moves back, giving me space to breathe.

"What was that?" he says

"Nightmare."

Still gasping for breath, gotta slow it down. I'm okay now. I'm safe.

"You should tell someone. It makes it easier."

"How would you know?" Ouch, that came out sharp. I didn't mean it that harsh.

"Because if you keep it inside, it rots. And it comes out anyway, like it did just now."

"You have no idea what I..."

"Maybe more than you think. Do you think that just because I have to hide behind these glasses that I don't see what's going on? I've listened to your other nightmares too. I've seen you try to hold it back. What are you afraid of? Me?"

"No, it's not that at all." I stand up and tilt my face toward the window, trying to clear the blood from my head. "It's just..."

Here goes. Might as well clean it all out at once; maybe then it won't hurt so bad. I guess he deserves this, after all he's done. He deserves the truth.

"Scott, am I a bad person?"

"You even have to ask me that?!?"

"Momma always said that whatever bad things happen to us, they are punishment for our sins. I try to think of what I've done wrong to deserve this...why else would they..."

"Nothing, Marie. Look at me. You've done nothing. You don't deserve any of this, any more than Jean does. They're the freaks. Not you."

"You wouldn't say that if you knew."

"Knew what?"

I turn my back to him, walking away. "I'm going to check the baby."

"Marie? Knew what?"

"Never mind."

"No, I won't let you do that." He grabs my arm. Without wearing gloves. I'm wearing long-sleeves, but the cotton is thin enough so that he can feel my skin through it. And he's not afraid? "If you ignore it, it won't heal."

"I'm past healing, sugar."

"Look, I don't know exactly what happened, but I know that it's not your fault. No matter what they did to you, that can't change who you are-- a strong, compassionate, brave young woman who deserves a whole lot more than this place. You can trust me with it, Marie."

I believe him, yes, but I still can't look at his face when I talk. I can't even turn around.

"He left me."

"What?"

"I told you he was killed. But he wasn't. Logan left me."

Silence.

"When?"

"Six months before you found me."

Silence.

"And then what happened?"

"The same thing that's happening to Jean. More or less."

"Selfish ba-"

"Not tonight, Scott. Not anymore tonight. Please."

I'm drained; lead heavy on my feet. I don't want to say anything. I just want to lie down and close my eyes without dreams. "I just need to try to sleep again. I can't talk about it anymore now"

"Ok." He pulls back the blankets on my bed; tugs the pillow back into place. "I'll be right across the room. Ok?"

"Thanks."

You watch him go, then lie down, pull the blankets up to your chin despite the heat.

"Scott--"

"Yeah?"

"Don't blame him too much. He didn't think he had a choice."

"You don't have to justify him."

"But I don't have to accuse him either."

"What if he deserves it?"

"I'll decide it. Not you. Just don't hate him or anything. Okay?"

A hesitation.

"Ok. But if he ever comes here looking for you, he's going to have to come through me. I'll kill him at least once. And again if I have to. And again. You just tell me when you think it's enough."

You roll over to face the wall. Hard cement three inches from your eyes.
 
"Ok."

Jean's right after all, you decide. Neither you or Scott really wants to sleep. You want to ease your eyelids shut and die for a little while.

Both of you.

October 31
 
"Io vorrei liberarti domattina,"
 
He speaks in velvet black, a sound somehow softer than the silence when he first carried her to bed. This is after he bandaged the cuts, kissed the bruises, held a smile on his face the whole time so she wouldn't see his hands shaking. The words are Italian; I recognize the lilt from World Lit class when he made us memorize poems in both English and their original languages. This wasn't one of the assigned pieces, though. I found it scribbled on the back of a card in his desk. He told me Jean had given it to him when they took their honeymoon in Venice.

I copied it when he was out on a mission; took it back to my room and read it over and over until I knew both the Italian and the English by heart. I scribbled the words on paper and taped them on the inside of my violin case.

/I would like to free you tomorrow./
 
"E vorrei verderti volare sui nevai come prima."

/And would like to see you fly over the snow-fields, like before./

William is sleeping. I fed him a little more than usual to keep him quiet while Scott was tending to Jean. Everyone is sleeping, except for me and him and her and it feels like we are the last people alive on the face of the earth. Us and maybe Logan, wherever he is.

I lean against the wall, my knees drawn up to cradle my violin across my thighs, and I watch them. They lie face to face, wrapped in the dark blue sheet he bought for her welcome home present. Her hands rest on either side of his face, across his bare eyelids; tonight the glasses and the visor have been carefully set aside. His eyes are closed and her eyes are closed and their fingers work slowly across every feature on the other's face, like two blind people trying to tell the colors of a painting.

I shouldn't watch; I know it. They should be alone tonight. I should lie down and pretend to sleep, but something in me can't help this. It's an ache, the kind I get when I remember that Logan was never there to do this for me. Not only because he left me. I left him too, because I knew he would try to find me and I ran from him. I hid. I
lied and told myself it was never love at all, just need and desperation crammed together into small spaces. But maybe that's just what love really is, at least a part of it.

The two people across the room from me are desperate too, even though they are together again. Maybe even more now.
 
"Tu, cosi lontana, seppure orami cosi vicina."

/You, so far away, even though by now, so near./

C'mon Scott, keep it going. You almost lost it there for a minute. Trust me, you have to be strong for her tonight. You can cry later; I'll cry with you, but tonight, you have to make her feel safe and Protected and let her know that it will never happen again. Go ahead and say it, even if it might be a lie. Especially if it might be a lie.

You know, it's funny how small life really is. Even the big things-- love, honor, revenge-- can be condensed into nutshells, wrapped into extremely short sentences and then spoken as if they were mundane occurences. Example: Scott fought for Jean today. He won her back. He killed Levi.

I say "killed" not "murdered" because that is a secret between Scott and me. We knew going into the challenge that Levi wasn't going to walk away. Scott never gave him the chance to yield; he broke the man's jaw with one punch and then snapped his neck. No, we didn't plan it or discuss it ahead of time. He just knew what he had
to do, and I knew that I wasn't going to try to stop him. Until this morning, I had never seen him kill a man. I almost expected pity, a momentary hesitation or prick of conscience, but what I saw was a calculated action totally devoid of emotion or thought. Like he had hardened into the same crystal as his visor.

"E l'anima se ne va verso l'eternita."

/And the soul departs to eternity./

That is the only thing that saddened me. I wanted him to regret it. I wanted to regret it myself. I wanted him to be able to spare his enemy's life in the name of some higher, loftier ideal. I think he wanted that too, it's just that he wanted Levi to die more. It was logic as well as gratification--- if he proved he was willing to kill, the next challengers would think very seriously before challenging for me or Jean, at least for a few months. To judge him would be to judge myself; I have killed men before, for similar reasons. And I didn't do it so neatly.

It might have scared me that we were both dispassionate killers but I saw Jean's face when Levi's body hit the dirt. I saw the smile. We are sisters, her and I, both survivors. We knew it was not truly murder; only an execution. A judgment. Scott carried out justice for us both.

"Perche cosi sei piu vicina...a illuminar la vita mia,"

/Because like this you are closer and can light my life/

Across the room, his fingers find her lips. They stumble when they hit the scar. I can tell when his hands start to tremble again. His voice is strained on the next sentence; thin and muffled like it is passing through walls. Walls he has built to keep himself together so he can hold her together.

"E l'anima se ne va verso l'eternita..."

/And the soul departs to eternity.../

I drop my eyes when his words fail him, when he can no longer remember what to say because she has started to cry. A sound like rain on sand or on the ocean: it is swallowed up by the immensity around it until it is everywhere and nowhere all at once.

My fingers skim over the strings of the violin, rubbing them until they are hot, until it leaves marks on the skin. I run my hands over every square inch of the wood, feeling the grain, the remnants of polish, then moving to caress the bow. I lift the instrument to my shoulder, tucking it firmly beneath my chin, and hold the bow in place. And I wait. But there is no sound. No melody in my head or in my fingers, and I hold the violin in place until my arms are sore but no sound comes.

There is no music.

Dancing In Rooms: Marie

It's rained for three days; the world is steam and heat, like someone has draped a wet washcloth over the world and is slowly wringing it out. But not fast enough. It is still suffocating.

Violin music and restlessness burn in the air like cheap hash.

You bend your head forward, sweat plastering your hair to the back of your neck in damp curls, your eyes are closed and you feel the music in every pore of your skin, a second kind of heat. You inhale the music, you suck it in through the nose and through the lungs. Let it get you high.

This is your graduation gift from Logan: a month of places you have never seen, riding on the back of Scooter's motorcycle with new leather gloves and a map inside your head. New Orleans. Nashville. Dallas. Phoenix. Roswell. Seattle. San Francisco. Los Angeles. And finally, the crown of it all, Santa Monica. A week of golden sun and beaches and walking outside in bare feet and bare hands. Only the sun hasn't shone since you've been there; the rain has poured and you've stayed in your room with your violin and Sarasate's "Carmen Fantasy". The audition is three days after you get back. You've had nightmares of standing up to play and finding that the music has slipped out the back door of your mind when you weren't looking.

The song ends; your fingers are ready to snap at the joints.
You fall back on the bed.
The skin on the back of your arms and legs sticks to the sheets.
His knock at the door.

(Come in.)

The door opens and shuts; a scent of wet palm trees and damp cement floats in around him.
 
(Where'd you go?
Out.
Out where?
Had to get us some more money.
You fought?
Only once.
Logan, you promised. You said we had enough cash.
I wanted to make sure. And I had to get out and do something.

My bones were starting to hurt from sitting still.

I don't like it. You know that.
Blame it on the rain. It's making us both crazy.)

You walk over to the dresser, and fiddle with the radio. Big band music, a disco beat, a country ballad; finally you settle on a local rock station. Acoustic guitar hums beneath the humidity.
You look at him.

(So you wanna dance?)

You've never asked him before; the school prom didn't count because everyone danced and it was expected. But you need to move now, you need to move because if you don't you'll scream. This is back when something as trivial as rain and a hotel room makes you both claustrophobic. Before the two of you spent four days hiding in five square feet of space in the wall behind a washing machine.

(Yeah.)

He moves in front of you, arms sliding around your waist, thumbs coming together at the small of your back. You smile.

You dance to a song where a girl asks her man to stay with her, to come with her, wherever she's going, because she tells him it wouldn't be worth it if he didn't. Logan tells you that's how he feels. You suppose it is all right for him to say that because the song is about love and it is beautiful, but you can't get past the name. The girl called herself Ophelia. You read that story; you know where she ended up.

You don't take the time to imagine that you will one day be in the same place. Drowned and shining.

After the dance is over, he takes your hand and you walk with him through the rain to the beach and you swim in the Pacific for the last time. He picks you up at the shore; carries you into waves that surge up to his waist. You stand on his feet to keep your head above water; soaked on both sides, up and down. People stare at you both with amused disbelief. Crazy young lovers, they say, with a grin or a nod.

They are partly right.
You are not lovers, but you are crazy and you are young.

The dance, in a way, never ends. It disappears for a while, but then it reappears during the days of waiting when he is trying to take you somewhere safe. You dance in all the different rooms, the clean and the filthy, the spacious and the cramped. After the first few days, no more words are need. When you feel the darkness too strongly, you hold out your hand to him and he slides his arms around your waist and you dance. Your eyes are always closed, remembering wet beaches and rain on the surf. You always see this, even when he is no longer
there to dance with you, even when you are only dreaming of it.

But in the dreams it is different.
Your mind can't keep hold of him, the memory of his features shifts and slides like a breeze across a lake. He dissipates, into fractured colors, into ripples, then he reforms into his familiar body, but your hands pass straight through him when you try to touch. Around his body is a shimmering.

His absence is the shimmering; loneliness gives off its own light. A dull glow that illuminates everything around her. Her hands, her clothes, the walls, the room that is hiding them.

You learn that some people, like him, like you, have to spend their whole lives dancing in those rooms because they aren't allowed to dance on the streets. You could say that the point is that they danced anyway, but you don't believe that so much anymore. You don't think they have any other choice. It's like that for people who've been locked in a small space for a long time.

You have to dance because if you don't, you go insane.

The Phoenix Compound
November 18

"You have five seconds to step away from my doorstep before I blow a hole in your chest."

"Nice to see you too, Scooter."

I can see over his shoulder: the bronze lamplight, the threadbare but neat blankets, the shadows of two women and a baby.

"One. Two. Three--"

"Scott, what is it?"

Jean appears behind him, her hand on his shoulder. Her eyes widen when she sees me.

"Logan??! God, we heard you were dead...."

"He will be if he doesn't start moving back now."

"Don't be territorial, honey."

She only calls him that when she's aggravated at him and is trying to hide it. "Let him in."

He moves back three feet, just enough to let me stand inside the door. Marie stares at me a moment in something I can only describe as pure shock (or is it really horror?), paralyzed. Her eyes are too wide; too stark. She holds the baby her in arms like a cross over her heart, warding me off. When I see the kid, I panic. I admit it. But then I remember Jean was pregnant when we left, and I find a way to breathe again. Gotta get to her. Gotta ask her why she's afraid; why she thinks she has to keep me away from her. I try to move toward her; Scott's hand moves to push back on my chest. What exactly is he trying to pull, anyway?

"That's close enough, buddy."

"Marie?" She'll talk some sense into him

"Do what he says."

Oh, God, she sounds scared. Of me. I think I'm going to be sick.

"I just want to talk--"

"I'd say you gave up talking rights a long time ago."

Scott again. I ignore him, for the moment.

"Marie, just gimme-" I try to brush by Scott as I talk, but his hand stiffens and shoots out against my chest and suddenly I find myself on the floor. Ouch. That's going to leave a bruise. I grin up at him.

"You've improved."

"I've had lots of practice here." His hand slides to his visor.

"Move and you lose an arm."

"Scott!" Jean grabs at his arm; he doesn't budge. "Scott, stop it! What's going on?"

He doesn't even look at her. His gaze is fixed solely on me, and I suspect that if I could see behind the glasses, I would find something close to genuine anger. Or even hate. I've never got that from him before.

"Tell her, Logan," he says. "Tell her how you abandoned Marie in the middle of some god-forsaken wilderness. Tell her. Then she'll tell you how Marie was when we found her, what they did to her after you left her--"

"You're talking about things you don't understand, Scooter." I cut him off with a low growl.

"Get out of my house."

"You go ahead and take that arm. I'm not moving."

"If that's how you want it--"

Then I forget all about him because Marie moves. And speaks.

"Scott, it's ok. I'll talk to him." She hands the baby to Jean.

Scott turns his head toward her, but I get the feeling he's still watching me. "You don't have to do this."

Way to go, Captain Obvious.

"I know."

She shifts her weight from one foot to another; rubs her arms with her hands like she's suddenly cold. Her gloves have holes in them. That isn't right.

"But we'll just be a minute." She says Right outside the door."

"Stay inside."

"Let them go." Jean, intervening again. "We're right here."

She's looking at me with this strange stare that is both pity and accusation. And haunted, but I don't think that's me. I think that's something else in her memory, although tonight I'm not going to bother with what. Tonight is just about Marie and me. Let Scott tend to his wife.

He touches Marie's shoulder; where did he get that right? Touching her like he knows something about her that I don't, like he has to protect her from me. His voice softens when he speaks to her.

"We'll be right here. If you start feeling uncomfortable at all, come back inside. He says anything, does anything that you don't like, you say the word and I'm out there."

I glare at him, but decide not to push my luck with a comment as I stand up and walk outside. She follows me, silent on her feet. I don't remember her moving that way before. She always walked like she was ready to dance. Now she walks like she is ready to run, or disappear. That makes me ache. She should have never had to run. Never had to hide. I should have been there to make sure of it.

The door shuts behind us.
Silence.

The first moments are the hardest: razor wire tension and a Hundred words pouring through my mind. Things I want to say, things I can't say, apologies, reasons, justifications. Finally I settle on the one she might be willing to hear.

"I looked for you." I tell her. Just to make it clear.

She leans back against the door, hands in her pockets. The moonlight cuts her face in two; half silver, half midnight, and all I can think about is how beautiful she is, how much I missed watching her. She's the mature one of us, tonight-- her voice doesn't show an ounce of her earlier tension. It's calm. Tired.

"I know."

"Did you even want to be found?"

"By you?" She drops her gaze, watching her feet kick up small clouds of sand. "I don't know."

"Marie, what I did--"

"Don't say anything, Logan." The eyes come back up to meet me, magnum force, black and hot and aching. "I just brought you out here because I didn't want him doing anything I'd end up regretting."

"Like that kid would get his hands dirty."

"He's changed. We've all changed. That's what I want you to nderstand. You came here looking for someone you thought you knew. You even told her you loved her once. I'm not that girl. I'm not clean and I'm not beautiful and most of all I'm not innocent. Not anymore."

"You're wrong. You're still Marie. That's enough for me."

The left corner of her lip flips into a sad smile.

"But not for me." She stands up, arms folding into a barrier at her waist. "Look, I appreciate your coming back for me, but I think you should just go."

"No."

"This doesn't have to be harder than you make it."

"You actually want to stay in this place?"

"I spent six months on the outside after you left. I've seen all I care to see."

"It'll be different this time. I've got friends--"

"Just like before?" There is no arsenic in the question; it is merely a question and that stings more than bitterness.

"Better than before. They got me in. They can get us out."

"Please, just go."

"I'm not leaving you, Marie."

"It's a little late for that." The smile sharpens; the voice cuts deeper into the bone. "Now go. Go or I'll call Scott."

"So that's it? I don't love you anymore, Logan, thanks for risking your life and all to find me, but I'll be seeing you later. Then again I won't. Is that all you have to say to me?!!"

I'm shouting now; it can't be helped.
"Do you have any idea what it took for me to get here? What I let them put in me?"

She doesn't shout back; she whispers, but it breaks my rage down until it disappears. Anger isn't the only thing shattering, though; an throbbing starts within my chest from the moment she starts talking.

"I never said I didn't love you."

"Then give me this chance. C'mon." If I can just get a little closer to her, if I can just touch her face or her hand, then maybe she'll know that I'm telling the truth. That I love her, that she's beautiful, that I would never go away again.

Her hands shoot up; palms splayed open, a half-wild gleam springing to her eyes. "Stay away from me, Logan."

"You said you loved me and you won't even let me near you?"

"I didn't say I loved you. I said that I never didn't love you."

"There's a difference?" I could touch her now; stretch out my arm and brush her cheek with my fingertips, but I don't want her at arms length. I want her close.
She backs away until her head bumps against the door.

"Logan, that's enough. Enough."

"Tell me what the difference is and I'll go."

Her voice drops to a hiss, a growl. "Don't. Touch. Me."

Then I understand what wall is keeping us apart. What she's holding inside of her that's standing between her and me. I swallow the bile in the back of my throat at the memory and try to force the words out as gently as possible.

"I know about the farmhouse."
 
She screams.

Three seconds later, I'm lying on my back, spitting blood and watching a star supernova inside my head, bright and red and hot. When did Scooter learn to pack a punch like that? Or move that fast? I didn't even have time to duck, much less block. My claws itch, whine, beg to give back measure for measure, but I can't. Not when she's here. I have to show her I'm better than that.

I spit a mouthful of blood in Scott's direction and move to my feet.

"I've had just about enough of that from you tonight. I didn't come here looking for a fight."

"Then leave."

"Fine. But I'm not going anywhere."

I raise my voice so it carries over his shoulder.

"You hear that, Marie? I'm staying right here until I do whatever it takes to convince you that it's not over between us."

He turns back to her.

"Go back inside. You don't have to listen to anything from him."

She stares at me, her face whiter than her hair, dazed as if she's never seen me bleed this much before. For one second, I think she's going to say something. Anything. But she doesn't. She drops her head and walks inside.

Once the door shuts behind her, all pretense can be dropped.

"You think you own her or something?"

"If by owning her do you mean that I am responsible for her? That I'm supposed to keep her safe because you couldn't? Then yes. I do."
"Not if I can help it. They told me the rules to this place. Twelve days until the next challenge."

"You're going to have get through me first."

"Not a problem, kid."

"Has it occurred to you that this isn't what she wants?"

"It is. She just doesn't know it yet."

"Be careful, Logan."

He's calmer now; not so hostile now that she's away from me. I don't know what irritates me more-- his macho leader attitude before or his big brother attitude now.

"She's been plenty of places she doesn't want to go, and you don't want to become another one of those."

"I'd never hurt her. You know that."

"You already have."

I use my sleeve to wipe away the latest spurt of blood from my nose; I still haven't gotten used to bleeding this much from one punch. It's never easy to go from Superman to Clark Kent, even if it's for a good cause.
But the blood doesn't hurt near as much as the fact that he's right. I start to walk away, but one last thought holds me in place a moment longer.

"Tell her I'm sorry, at least? Will you? Tell her I didn't mean to scare her. And that I won't give up."
 
I walk away alone.

Nativity Scene: Logan

It's Christmas, tomorrow, she tells you when you both climb out of the back of the truck.

We'll be in Canada by then, you promise. A foolish reassurance; this is the last stage of your journey and of course it is the most dangerous. Like the last day of battle, when soldiers get hit by stray sniper fire or step on hidden mines right before they get onto the boat home. Like a tree limb breaking under your feet right before you can grab another branch.

The farmhouse is cold, but it is functional and anonymous and that is all you ask for. Baked beans for dinner, eaten straight out of the can. The other three travelers-- brothers-- pass around a bottle of cheap whiskey and sing Good King Wenceslaus in a key that she tells you doesn't even exist. The key of H major, she says. She
laughs. The sound is too high, too thin. She's nervous. Just like you are.

There's one mattress in the corner; dusty and moth-eaten but you stake claim to it anyway. You aren't going to let her sleep on the floor. And she'll want to sleep, eventually. Her body exhausts itself easily; she lives so much more completely than you do. A minute might pass in sixty seconds for you, but she always wants to stretch it out; make it last longer than it really is.

The transport won't be there until morning. A furniture moving van; they will hide in the back behind the boxes but it won't be necessary. The necessary bribes have been arranged; they should pass through without any more trouble than cramped legs and eight hours without a bathroom.

Dawn is five hours away; too much can happen.

You do not tell her this. You wrap your jacket around her and hold her against your chest, partly to warm her bones, partly to show the three brothers what they're going to have to go through to get to her. They pretend nonchalance, but you smell the intentions on them, like the scent of an animal that has been dead in the sun too
long. You might end up fighting one of them before the night is over. Or all of them.

(You know what this feels like?
What?
The Christmas stories my momma used to tell me when I was a little girl. We're a regular Mary and Joseph. Without the kid, of course.
That's one way of looking at it.)

So is that what you are? Mary and Joseph, sleeping in the barn because there is no room in the inn. There is no room in any of the inns; the doors are shut and barred and locked when they see you coming. Only in this story, there's no baby Jesus. No redemption.
 
(Hey, Wolverine!)

A man shuffles across the room, his shadow looming against the wall in the light of the two kerosene lanterns, his scent heavy with of lust and alcohol. You ease her weight to your left arm, ready to push her behind you and start fighting. This one's the worst; the oldest. Loud, pushy, arrogant, dirty-mouthed. It's his power that bothers you the most....he can neutralize other mutations with his touch. This means that her skin isn't the magic charm, this time. This means she could get hurt.

But you won't let that happen. Your claws aren't some mutation. They're real as steel can be. So what if it'd hurt a little more when they came out? The effects are only temporary.

(How about sending your little girlfriend over here for a while? Me and my brothers was thinking we could share her, y'know....have a little Christmas Eve celebration...)

Her fingers dig into your arm clean through the three layers of clothing you're wearing. You squeeze her shoulder.
 
(Go back to your corner with the other animals.)

You snarl at him.

(Not unless I take her with me. Or unless you want to do something to try and stop me.
You're about three steps away from being stone drunk. Do you really want to get into a fight?
I don't wanna fight. I wanna take your slut and throw her up against the wall and--)

He never finishes. Adamantium claws against the neck have that effect on a man. As does the smell of their own blood.

(Listen, bub,)

Your voice is barely audible, a growl.

(You want to go on being a man, you go back to that corner and keep your mouth shut until the transport gets here. I won't kill you if you try anything with her. I won't be that kind.)

He chokes out words that sound like yes, ok, whatever you want, but you're not really listening to him. First you glance at the other two brothers. No threat there. They're still staring at the claws, jaws lolling and eyes flared.
Then you widen your gaze until you find Marie.

She's not watching. Her forehead is resting on her knees; she's shaking.

Just for that, you should remove this freak's spleen and shove it in a new and interesting place. But that's too noisy. Discovery is still a viable threat. You settle for a nice, quiet, kick to the groin; he drops like a sack of wet flour, his mouth opening and closing like a fish. One more kick to the stomach adds a nice closing effect.

(You can open your eyes now.)

You crouch down beside her, stroking the back of her head, rubbing her back.

(He isn't coming over here again.
I'm sorry.
What could you be sorry for?
I cause trouble for you.
That wasn't trouble, darlin'. That was me playing around with a stupid drunk freak. That was easy.
I'm not talking about just with him. With everything.
What do you mean?
This whole thing. You would have been in Canada by now if you didn't have to take me along. I'm not stupid. I know how dangerous this is. What will happen if we get caught.
You let me worry about that. You just trust me.
I'm not worth it.
Don't even--
I'm not. You're doing this because you want to protect me, want to save me, but I'm not worth that.)

You bring your finger up to hover just about her lips.

(Don't ever tell me that. Let me believe that I'm able to save something. Just let me believe it.)

She leans into you, wrapping her arms around your ribcage and squeezing like she wants to pop your heart out of the bone and metal shell.

(We're in this together, right?
Right.
No matter what? You won't leave me.)

You kiss her on the back of her head, the smooth ridge of her skull.

(I won't. No matter what.)

Hope is more dangerous than fear. It gets soldiers shot on the last day of war, prisoners hung for trying to escape the day before they were to be released. It worms in your blood, a tiny white parasite, and before you know it, you are saying things you would never have said if you had just taken a moment to gauge the odds.

But it is Christmas Eve, and you love her, and she is in your arms; how can you stop to think what you were promising? How can you even suspect that it would be a lie?

The Phoenix Compound
November 18

I see him standing in the open doorway, long after his wife and his child are asleep, his face intently staring at something neither of us can see. I cross the room, bare feet padding without sound on concrete, and stand beside him. A night breeze pushes hot air through the weave of my t-shirt.

"Too hot to sleep," he says.

"Is that all?"

"No, not really."

"What did you say to him?"

"Nothing important."

"What'd he say to you?"

"That he was sorry."

"I've always known that."

The wind stirs the silence; hot and dry and empty.

"Did you see his nose?"

"It was bleeding. Good."

"It didn't stop."

"Maybe it was too soon."

"It always stopped before."

"What are you saying?"

"He said he let them do things to him so he could get across the border."

"You don't owe him, Marie. He made his choice."

"I know."

"And?"

"It should have stopped bleeding."

Fog: Marie

You're not naked; there is a cotton t-shirt and panties between you and the water, and there's no one in the room to see you even if you were, but you don't want to take that chance. The shower room is dirty: black mold in the creases of the broken tiles, brick red rust on the showerhead, a drowned roach in the corner of the stall. You wear your socks to prevent fungus between your toes, but you can't help feeling pretentious. Who are you to judge the building when you're just as filthy?
More filthy.

Black mold bruises on your arms (wrists and elbows and
Random spaces in between), on your legs (ankles and kneecaps and higher), on your neck, spreading along the side of your jaw.
Rust brown streaks of dried blood. More blood than you want to think about, in more places than you want to see.
Some of it you can only feel, like the patch of matted hair at the back of your head. It's swollen; maybe even a concussion.
Drowning roaches crawl in your mind, climbing over one another in waterlogged desperation to escape the chaos.

You are a victim; you are a killer.
You are defenseless, you are deadly.
Either way, you've lost something. You're just not sure what.
 
The water is ice cold, death on the skin in January, but it's okay. It hurts, at first, but it turns numb quicker than expected, and Soon you don't even notice it. This reminds you of losing him. Pain, then unexpected numbness, and then nothing. They say you are in greatest danger of losing limbs to frostbite if you can no longer feel anything. You wonder if this applies to him. If his memories will turn black, wither, and then fall from your mind into the snow, hard frozen nubs.

No; it won't be that easy.
Because you didn't lose him after all. He left. You want to say you are abandoned; forsaken, but you don't like the sound of those words. One is too helpless, the other too dramatic for this. This is too real for drama and emotion. It just happens, one awful event at a time, and you've survived it for five days now. Days or years? Time has always been relative for you; too long when it should be short and too short when it mattered the most.

You turn off the shower, watch the last bit of blood swirl down The sink with the soapsuds. You shiver uncontrollably as you dry the beads of water from your skin, but at least it's movement. Part of you just wants to sink to the floor, in the corner, and never move again. Maybe the shiver is an involuntary protection against that.

There is no way to dry your hair; you try with paper towels and an electric hand-drier, but it is too long and too thick. Outside it is winter; pneumonia will most likely set in. You think of it as an abstract: sickness is a plant shriveling up by a windowpane, coughing is the rattling of the frame when a train passes by, fever is the hot, moist air beneath a radiator that looses all its heat into the floor.

You dress at your normal rate even though it hurts; no point in indulging in unnecessary attention to weakness. The gloves go on last; they are all you have managed to salvage. They tore the cloak down the middle, they took his scarf. Protest was futile, then, and when it came time to leave, you didn't have the chance to look for it.
 
The door to the truck stop swings shut behind you; an old man is waiting for you outside, holding out a doughnut and a cup of coffee.

(What's this?)

You eye the food with suspicion and craving, then direct the scrutiny to his face. He found you on the road, you agreed to get into his truck because you saw the rosary hanging from his rear view mirror and the picture of the Virgin tucked against his dashboard. He is old enough to be your grandfather; this does not mean it is safe but it does mean you will take the chance. You have to get away, and this is your only option. If worse comes to worse, you still have the knife.

(Breakfast. You look like you haven't seen food in a while.
Yeah. A while.)

It's been five days; you don't tell him that.

(Then what are you waitin' fer? Eat.
I don't have any money to pay you for it.
I wasn't askin' for cash. You're too skinny as it is...go on, take it.
Thank you.)

You remember to smile when you take the food from him, remember to resist the urge to stuff the entire doughnut into your mouth at once.

(Where did you say you were going again?
Detroit. Does that matter?
No, not really. Anywhere is good.
You sure you're not in any trouble?
I'm sure.
Family problems? Boyfriend?
Boyfriend.)

Only a partial lie. He looks at the bruises on your jaw and doesn't ask again. His truck is just across the parking lot, but you can barely see it through the early morning fog. You follow him slowly, cautiously, checking behind and before at all times. A car door slams. You jump. It is the little things that will scare you now: bumps on the wall and footsteps outside the door, darkness without a nightlight. What else is there to frighten you? The big things have come and gone.

You are half inside the door, sitting on the step and drinking your coffee as the old man checks his cargo, when you see the other car pull up. It's a truck --faded green and beat up-- but the vehicle isn't so important. It's the man you see getting out of the passenger side, nodding in curt thanks to the driver.

Maybe it's the fog; maybe you're dreaming. He can't be who he looks like, but the details are there and they are concrete. A blue flannel shirt (just like the last time you saw him, only stained, you ignore the fact that it could be blood), sideburns, a scowl across his mouth. And beneath the scowl, fear. Or hope. Or both. You can hear it in his voice when he starts to shout.

"Marie!"

The sound is picked up and echoed by the fog, stretched out, lingering. You freeze at first, terrified he has seen you, but then you realize that his voice is not a statement but a question. He doesn't see you. He is searching for you.

"Marie, are you here? Marie!"

He is alive; this is a brightness, a flicker of a match, though not enough to light any candles or start any fires.

You watch your spirit run to him, flying across the snowy parking lot, arms outstretched. He catches you and hugs you so hard he lifts your feet off the ground. He cries into your hair; you cry onto his shirt collar. There is an inadvertent brush of a bruise; you will wince; the entire story comes out in bits and pieces later that evening, in a cheap hotel room. It is hard but you get through it without crying. He touches you and heals you, puts himself inside your head to drown out the other voices.

But this is not the truth; it is another dream, and you know it is because nothing is that easy anymore. You ache for him. You ache for your silence, but you do not say a word. What would you say? I'm here, come get me. Come find out everything that they did to me, everything that broke me. Come be with me so you can leave me again.

"You ready to go, miss?" The old man is back; he climbs into his seat and holds out his hand to help you into the cab.

You drop your empty coffee cup to the ground; crush the plastic beneath your heel. You don't dare look over your shoulder; you will lose your nerve and run back to the man calling your name.

This isn't me abandoning him, you say to yourself.
He left me first.

"Yes." You climb into the cab and shut the door. "I'm ready."

As the truck's engines roar to life, you risk one last glance out the window. He is moving inside now, no doubt to check the bathrooms and question the cashier. Maybe he'll find you later on down the road. Maybe by then you will be able to let yourself be found.

Your last glimpse of the man who said he loved you is of his back as he walks away.

He is surreal in the mist, a disembodied spirit, a lost prayer.

The Phoenix Compound
November 31

I look back over what I've told myself, what I've come to believe, and I know it's wrong not because of what I've
admitted but what I have conveniently forgotten. The things I have said do not exist come back to life between us, immaterial and material at the same instant. Like a cement floor, like the absence of light. It is something you can touch but not hold; glimpse but not gaze upon.

She believes she knows what happened between us. I believe I know. Somewhere in the middle lies the truth. We're not the only ones interested in finding out what that is. Scott wants it too, or thinks he wants it. He needs to put two and two together and have it equal four so he can find justification for hating me. For trying-- and almost succeeding-- to kick my guts inside-out earlier this afternoon. I've got news for the kid: two plus two doesn't always equal four. Sometimes it equals five, sometimes it equals nothing.

I don't know where I heard that; I think I remember it from a book Marie used to read a lot. It was named after a year...1974 or maybe 1984. She talked about it non-stop until I finally broke down and read it just to prove that Scooter's not the only one who can understand fancy stories. I understood it all, but I didn't agree with it, or even like it very much. A man and a woman tried to fall in love in a society where an all-powerful government controlled every thought. In the end, they gave up. Of course, there was torture and starvation and the usual
brutality, but ultimately they chose to surrender each other just to spare themselves a little pain.

(Never, I mumbled under my breath, rubbing my hands over my knuckles. No way they'd make me do that to her.)

I should be less rash with my promises. Maybe then they wouldn't break so easily. Ironic, I'd forgotten about that book until today. Until now, when I watch her wash blood from the rag she's using to clean my face, and I remember. I remember what the man and the woman said to one another when they were face to face again,
after the torture and the giving up.

/I betrayed you, she said./
/I betrayed you, he said./

I feel those words in my gut when Marie turns around; an expectation to say them and hear her echo them in return. But, nothing so direct. We've lost the ability to deal it out honest and take it in straight. We resort to lies of silence: lies because the truth takes words neither of us are willing to say, even if we knew what they were.
 
"You two could have pulled punches out there today."

A twist of the rag between gloved fingers; pink-red water drips Into the rusted sink. Some of it, inevitably, clings to the gloves.

She could have taken them off. A year ago, she would have.

"Tell that to Summers."

The kid wasn't lying when he said he'd been practicing. He hits with more force, more often, with less hesitation than I remember. Back when we sparred before missions, he always had a slight reluctance to his punches, a bit of strength held in check as if he had to justify each swing he took. Not anymore. He fights hard. Dirty. He fights like me. I wonder what finally convinced him to let it out.

"He was just trying to do his job."

"And what's that?"

"Protecting Jean. And me."

/No, darling,/

I want to tell her,

/You're not his job. You're mine./

Has he ever slipped up too? Or does she reserve that sort of memory for me alone?

"Why'd he drag it out for so long?"'

Even after I started winning-- it took longer than expected; my arms were starting to grow tired of finding new places to hit him-- he refused to give me so much as an inch. That made it harder. I used to watch hockey with the guy; I was in his wedding. We might not be on speaking terms at the moment, but that still didn't change the fact that I thoroughly disliked having to beat him unconscious in front of his wife. He wouldn't let me do it quickly, either. Had to hold on until a lucky right to the temple knocked him cold. She unfolds the rag, dips it into a bowl of boiled water (clean at least in theory). "It's hard for him to lose this kind of thing."

"It's happened before?" My stomach starts to knot up from something deeper than bruised muscles. Please don't let her say he lost her in a match. I'm not stupid; I know what that means here. What it'd bring back for her. A moment of anger....why'd he bring her here...why didn't he find somewhere else, safer....

/At least he didn't abandon her./

Leave it to my demons to bring up the obvious.

"It didn't happen to me."

She didn't have to tell me that, she didn't have to but she did.
But another thought follows, almost as cold.

"Jean?"

A nod. "Last month. It was...bad."

No, not Jean too. That's not fair. Now I understand why Summers hits so hard. Once you lose someone like that, once you realize how small and helpless you really are, you spend the rest of your life trying to make up for it. Every day, every fight. You could win it all and it would still never be enough.

"Has he ever lost you?"

"No."

She smiles, but no relief or cynicism comes to sight. Only an upward curve of her lips, cold and sharp like it was cut into glass with a stone. "No one wants a death warrant. At least no one here."

"You're not a death warrant. Not in my book."

"Of course I am." She sits down on the edge of the bed, one hand tilting my head back while the other dabs the cloth across a fat cut above my eyebrow. "For the first time in your life, I could kill you if I wanted."

"So why not?"

Our eyes collide; silent dares. I wait for love or hate but there is Only distance. A remote gleam, winter sunlight falling across coal.

"The last time I killed a man was back in January. I try not to exceed a quota of two murders in a  year's time."

"That wasn't murder--"

"Don't tell me what it was." She pulls her hand back abruptly. A patch of dried blood sticks to the cloth as she moves; a wound opens into fresh blood. Neither of us flinch.

I catch her hand in mine before she can get too far. "Marie,"
Her fingers stiffen into concrete, rigid, unmoving. The lines of her face mold into a similar mask. I try not to wince.
"Marie, look, you don't have to do this for me." I flick my gaze toward the bowl then back to her. "I've been beat up before, and I can take care of myself."

I want to know why she bothers, why she extends the motions when her hands and face turn stone underneath my touch. It's like the kiss when I claimed her; I never know if it is merely a form, an endured ritual, or if it is a promise of absolution. I need to know this. I want to put two and two together and have it equal four, just this once.

"Who ever said I was doing this for you?" She twists her hand free of mine. "It might be that I'm just selfish. That this is all for me."

"Why?"

"Because." The rag brushes a smear of blood at the corner of my lips, and I almost imagine that her fingers push through the cloth a second longer than absolutely necessary. "I never could stand to see your pain."

Her eyes crack when she says it, light spills from the edges, the kind of glow you can't look at for long because it damages your eyes. But even though I know that, I want to keep on staring. It's beautiful; it's gone before I even can believe its existence, but it is enough. It is enough to hope.

There are words waiting to pass between us: reasons why I left, reasons why I came back, reasons I took her from Scott. I'm not sure if either of us are ready for the first two, but I'm willing to gamble on the third. Pick a card. Roll the dice. I take a deep breath.

"Do you want to know why I challenged--"

"Tell me how they hid your mutation." She glides around my question as if she never heard it. As if it does not exist, not even in the past because she never allowed it to reach the present. Now she's moving away from me, walking back to the sink and the boiled water. The sides of my jaw tighten in frustration; I force them to relax.
Have to keep it open between us, have to keep the words coming.

"It's pretty simple. Drugs, first, about two weeks worth of heavy stuff, and then an implant regulates the effects long term."

"What about side effects? Didn't it make you sick?"

"Like a dog."

Her head flicks up from the bowl, almost looking at me, but her eyes don't quite make it to mine before they dive back to the rag twisting between her fingers. Her hair falls so I can't see her face, but when she talks, her voice is softer. Subdued.

"That bad, huh."

"Yeah, at first. Now it only hits every few days."

"What happens?"

"Nothing big....headache, dizziness, a little nausea here and there. Lovely stuff, really."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. You didn't ask me to do any of it."

"So why don't you take the implant out now that you're here?"

"I'll need to hide my mutation until we can cross the border back into Mexico. They'll let us through if they think I'm a human and you're my property."

"Guess that's what I am now, huh? Property."

"C'mon, darling. You know better than that."

"Maybe. Who says I'm going anywhere with you?"

I let my breath leak out in a slow, deep sigh, taking a moment to sort through the commotion in my mind, searching for just the right words. For once, let me find the right words.

"No one is saying anything, Marie. I didn't take the therapy and cross the border and let Scooter pound me so you would feel like you owe me something and decide to come back with me. I'm here because I had to find you, just one more time, to see if we still love each other the way we said we did."

She's looking straight at me now, eyes all big and dark and asking me if I mean it. I can't tell if she's hoping or fearing that I did. But I'm not finished yet. I'll show her I do mean it, but that she doesn't have to be afraid.

"If you want to go back to Scooter and Jean, I'm not going to stop you. You can leave right now, and I'll know that it's over and that I can stop looking for you. Or you can stay, and give me one month to prove that nothing between us has changed like you think it has. Just one month. That's all I ask."

Two full minutes of silence.

"One month. And after that you'll go."

"You'll never see me again, if that's what you want."

"And you'll give me space. You won't try to ask any questions or anything else like that."

"Nothing you don't want asked."

Outside I am doing an admirable job of pretending calm, but Inside my bones are shaking until they're about to peel out of the adamantium. Desperation does tend to have that effect on one.

She tilts her head to the side, watching the water droplets slide From the edges of the rag. The surface refracts the light, she captures it with her finger, soaking it into the glove.
 
"We have a month."
 
When she drops her gaze back to the bowl, I think she's smiling. Maybe not on the outside, but in tiny, hidden ways beside her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. For the first time since I walked into the compound, I think we might stand a chance.

December 10

"Close your eyes."

"Why?"

"Just do it. I have a surprise for you."

"But it isn't even Christmas yet."

"It's close enough. C'mon."

"Fine."

"No peeking."

"Put your hands over your eyes to make sure."

"And I used to wonder why they called you paranoid."
 
That earns a grin. She is gonna love this. Really. Just let me set it down at the right angle so I can watch her face once she opens her eyes....

"Can I look now?"

"Not yet."

"All that noise you're making certainly isn't helping the suspense."

"Gimme one more second."
 
Where's the plug again...ah, right here. This piece of junk better live up to the two hundred dollars I spent on it. If not, I'm going to beat a refund out of someone's hide.

"It's been a second."

"Count out three more and then you can look"

"Three.."

Straighten the antenna....practice my smile to make sure it looks real. Don't want to take any chances, here...

"Two."

Adjust the dial, thump it twice when it sticks. Fiddle with the volume to make sure I don't blow her eardrums.

"One."

Flip the switch. Watch her eyes fly open, lit up like the Christmas tree we don't have; follow the movements of her hands as they fly to her mouth, covering the dropped jaw.

Starting to smile now; waiting for her voice, the final approval.

"Logan..."

/C'mon, baby, say you like it. Say I made you smile./

"How did you find it? A radio? Here?" She shakes her head. "Not even the Elders have radios. It must have cost a fortune."

I shrug it off. "I have cash."

"You shouldn't spend it on me."

"You don't like it?"

"I love it."

"Then it was worth it. End of discussion."

"Thank you...I mean, really. Thank you. I can't remember the last time I heard music like this."

"Didn't I see your violin case under your bed?"

"Um, I don't exactly play much anymore."

"Why not?"

"How did you find this?"
 
Only a momentary tension between jaw and teeth at her evasion: by now they have become commonplace. Her excuses are prefabricated. Convenient. Plausible denials block every attempt I make to talk about any part of life after we left the mansion. Every day, every night, every moment between us passes in a struggle for things not to say. It even carries over into the night. I lie on the floor and listen to her uneven breath against her pillow, her relentless tossing between the sheets. That hurts, to know that she doesn't even want to close her eyes or let down her guard until sheer exhaustion demands it.
We're supposed to be something better than this.

The radio is meant to remind her of that something. It was our secret; a peculiarity we share exclusively with one another. Every couple has one. Summers quotes his wife poetry; I dance with Marie behind closed doors. We draw the curtains, prop a chair under the doorknob to keep out anyone and everyone, and we turn up the music until she feels it in her bones and I feel it in mine, and it talks between us. Saying things neither of us could ever put into words. It's a private show. No one else will see the desire, the wanting; no one else hears the secrets and the prayers. It's a ritual; by now it is also a last resort.

"This place has some pretty efficient ways of getting people things they aren't supposed to have."

"I see." She already knew this; she doesn't even try to hide it.

"So..." I attempt to inject nonchalance into my voice even though my bones are twisting into loops. "Want to try it out?"

This is the real test. The critical moment.

/Maybe she isn't ready...maybe you should wait...No, no time. All or nothing. Just don't let her freeze when I touch her. Don't know how much I could handle it./

"How?"

"Dance with me."

A shadow across her eyes, a slight recoil in the direction of the door. For a minute I stand convinced that she is going to run, but no, she's still. More than still; she is wax. We wait amid dead sound and the whisper of blood slowing to a completely stop, stagnating within our veins. Her eyes shift to pitch black, the color of oil, the kind that stains your fingers and lodges in every crease of your skin, and refuses to wash away. That is how her gaze sticks to me, coating me to suffocation point.

"Yes." She bends her head slightly sideways. "Let's dance."

"Do you like this station?"

"Just turn it up and let it play."
 
I edge the volume control higher until a slow, deep throbbing layers the air like a heartbeat. Ambient guitar. Disconnected emotion: a voice that sounds like rainy streets and turns everything you look at grayish-blue, a smudge on a photo.
 
/You in the dark, you in the pain, you on the run.../

She takes my hands between hers, one at a time, runs her fingers over the knuckles, soft enough to set the skin on fire, each bone burnt to ash. Just before combustion, she moves her hands to her elbows, peeling off the material shielding her arms.

"Let's make this honest," she says. "Nothing covered up. Nothing easy and nothing safe."

"You want it, you got it."

/Living your hell, living your ghost, living your end./

The black oil eyes thicken, oozing down into the type of grin I have never seen before. It congeals across the surface of my skin, my bare hands inches from hers, daring me to flinch away. Instead I push closer. Only fingertips away from touch.

"So what are you waiting for?" she says. "Dance."

/Never seem to get in the place that I belong. Don't want to lose the time, lose the time to come./

I slide my hands over her arms, a thin sheath of air the only thing holding skin from skin. She never gave off this kind of electricity before, when I healed. She never drew this kind of heat. My hands come to rest around her waist, loose, a circle she could break if she wished. She could break many things about me, now, if she wished. I would let her.

/Whatever you say it's all right. Whatever you do it's all good. Whatever you say it's all right./

Her face and body move with mine like she is close to me and far away at the same time. Like I am dancing with a shadow, something my hands will pass through if I try to pull too near.

/Silence is not the way. We need to talk about it. If heaven is on the way.../

Her hands rest on my shoulders, sometimes moving to brush my face with split-second touches. The temple. The cheekbone. The bridge of the nose. Not enough to drain but enough to test resolve. But whose-- mine to keep dancing with her or hers to keep from holding on until it hurts.
 
/You in the sea, on a decline, breaking the waves. Watching the lights go down, letting the cables sleep./

"Logan," There it is, again, that glass-stone whisper, hard and vulnerable at the same time, capable of shattering and being shattered in equal portion. Her lips are close enough to my ear that if she were to so much as slant her head sideways, our faces would touch. "Why are you letting me keep my gloves off?"

"Why shouldn't I?"

"I told you. I could hurt you."

"And I could hurt you."

"So what's stopping us? Both of us?"

"Trust. Love."

"I don't have either of those things. And I think you know why."

"What?"

/Whatever you say, it's all right. Whatever you do it's all good.
Whatever you say it's all right./

"About the farmhouse...were you telling the truth or just bluffing?"

"I wouldn't bluff about that."

"Then tell me what you know."

She pulls her face back from mine; I feel her spine stiffen into Iron and cement. The oil in her eyes has caught fire and is burning, or maybe all I'm seeing is the clouds of smoke from a deeper fire.

"Marie...we don't need to do it this way"

"No." She breaks away, shoulders back, chin razor taut. "I want to hear you say it. I want you to look me in the face and say it all out loud."

"Why?"
 
The gloves reappear in her hands with magical speed, she yanks Them over her fingers and up to her elbows in short, angry jerks as she talks. "You can't, can you." A shake of the head. "How can you say that nothing between us is different when you can't even say the word?"

"I can say it."

"C'mon then. I'm waiting."
 
I begin to form the word; I push it to the edge of my tongue, Up against the back of my teeth, and then I fall back. Paralyzed.

"You're afraid of it, aren't you."

Her voice is more glass than stone, now, the edges broken and sharp and cutting into me with surgical precision. My chest is neatly sliced open: my innermost organs viewed in contempt.

"You're afraid to say it because that means you have to accept it. Accept me, like this, not like the sweet little girl you remember. And you're not willing to do that, are you?"

Silence. And beneath the silence, heat. And beneath the heat, rage, starting to creep inch by inch over my mind, a wall of red dust like a desert sandstorm. Anger at the futility, at the walls between us she will not let me climb, at the tears in her eyes-- even now, even as her words sharpen-- and at the fact that I have no control over those tears. I could not stop them if I tried.

"I think you should take the radio back." She says. Twist, twist, twist, the blade corkscrews through my soft places, in between the metal bones and hardened cynicism. Into the fleshy places only she knows how to hurt. "We won't be using it."

I find my voice again, not in words but in an explosion.

"Ok, Marie, you want to hear it? Fine."

I take a step toward her, shouting loud enough to make her flinch, despite her external ice.

"You want me to say it? I'll say it. You were raped. You were raped and I couldn't stop it because I wasn't there. Are you happy now?"

She's shaking, the blackness gone from her eyes, washed out by the sheen of moisture spilling down her face. I see these things with my eyes, but they do not reach my brain. I stand in a red haze and  listen to myself scream.

"Are you, Marie? Does hearing it straight make it easier to blame me?"

She fixes her gaze straight on me, and I can see her visibly pulling together the pieces for one final blow. I do not attempt to block. I stand and let her finish doing to my insides what I've just done to hers.
 
"I don't blame you." No quiver; her stone voice. "Blame would require some part of me to care about some part of you. And that's not going to happen again. Ever."

Three seconds later, the door slams behind her.

I hear myself call after her, a roar, not her name, then watch the claws smash in the face of the radio, skewering the metal and wire. It sails, seemingly of its own accord, into the wall across the room, graceful and melancholy until the moment of impact. I am helpless as it shatters into pieces.

I am helpless.

The words come back to me again.

/I betrayed you, he said./
/I betrayed you, she said./

Sometimes, there is nothing else to say.

The Return: Logan

You lift yourself out of your grave with the dim suspicion that you will taste roots and earth and decay for weeks. There is still blood, a muddy red stream trickling half-heartedly from the corner of your gut wound. A surprise, but not a total one. You expected something like this from the syringes they shoved under your skin. You expected death-- cold, black, temporary, like a restless sleep-- but you had not prepared for the long moments before death.

The injections were not the worst: hasty, unprofessional, carried out by trembling gloved hands while five-point restraints bound you to the gurney. A functional brutality-- you killed five of them before the gunfire brought you down long enough for the capture; the needles provided reassurance that you would not be strong enough to kill again. The beatings were not the worst: clumsy, frenzied, revenge-lust, hitting in places you knew you'd never break. Metal bones, you told them, and you laughed.

It was the dying, this time, that added new chapters to your nightmares.

You tried to escape, of course. You had no choice-- she was alone and unprotected and you knew what that would mean. Perhaps you also knew that you would be too late, only you played ignorance. It's easier to die for something if you believe it will exist when you resurrect again. So you broke the straps, killed two more of them, made it a good five miles before the hunter-killer squad caught you. This time they were more efficient. Double-barrel shotgun blasts, aimed at both kneecaps, instant paralysis. A third bullet exploding into your
stomach. Cold air rushing in around soft organs.

Blood. Vomit. Cursing.
Then they surrounded you.

You landed on your back and stared at the winter sky and thought of how that color of gray would bring out Marie's eyes, you thought of the curve of her elbows in your palms when you danced with her. You thought this while they packed the gaping hole in your gut with snow, with dirt, packed it tight with their fists and laughed. You  did not scream but once, and that was only when they started to bury you alive. And that was only
because you knew, right then, that you would never reach her in time.

You ignored the thought that neither of you would have the luxury of time, anymore.

But you are awake, and you are alive, and you are healing, slowly but faster with each step. You will need this strength when you reach the farmhouse. Every scenario has passed through your mind ten times, every horror and every possibility. You have watched yourself step through the door and find her body, a discarded rag doll that will not respond to your bare skin. You've found her in the corner, silent and shaking with fingerprint bruises and eyes that will never be the same again. You've tried to picture her alive and safe, but this image does not readily come. You saw the faces of the men you left her with; you smelled their intent.

You watch yourself kill them until you are bored of it.

When the real moment comes, the murders will be little more than a formality. Over almost before they start. It's not worth wasting the time you'll need to heal her, if she can be healed. And, if not, then you'll spend the time finding a way to follow her back into the darkness you left not so far behind, in the shallow grave. And this time you'll find a way not to come back. Even if it means doubling back to the border and taking on every last one
of Uncle Sam's boys with nothing more than your claws and a grin.

Twenty-eight miles and fifty-seven mental homicides later, you see the farmhouse. It is standing and outwardly as idyllic as you left it-- one fear disappears. Your death was successful; no soldiers found her. A wind blows across your face: scent of beer and vomit and something hot and metallic like rust or dirt. The smell of blood. Her blood. Now the fear. Now the insanity. Now the instinct to kill.

The claws beg to do away with the skin holding them back; you consent, the sunlight shining off the metal as it cuts open your hands. You drop low to the ground and begin to run. Impatient. Terrified. But the neurosis is debilitating-- your vision clouds with images of her face that last night, your ears ring with the sound of the last words. Hissed, taut, razor-wire stretched across teeth; she was panicking but trying not to show it.

(It doesn't have to be you.
Marie--
I know you're going to say it. You're going to tell me it has to be you, but it doesn't. Let one of them go get themselves killed. You stay with me. You gave me your word.
It has to be me. I'm the only one who can survive it.
Then let me go with you.
No. Absolutely not.
I'm not afraid. As long as we're together it doesn't matter...it doesn't...
It matters to me. You go with them and wait for me at the house. I'll be back by dawn.
I don't think so. I don't think you're coming back.
Of course am I. Don't you trust me?
I do, but you don't understand. You can't leave me with them.
I'll only be gone long enough to do the job. Promise me you'll go back and wait for me.
I can't.
Promise. I've never asked you to do anything for me, but I need this. I need your word and I need it now because we're losing time. I have to find them before they find this place. You have to promise me so I can know you'll be safe.
I do.
Say it out loud.
I promise. But I won't be safe. You know that.
Baby, I have to go.
Logan...)

A kiss planted across her lips, harder than you intended because it comes and goes so fast, and then you ran before her eyes could break you. You promised yourself that the monsters you were leading away from her were worse than the strangers you left her with. You measured one pain against the other and tipped the scales away from her. You knew she would live, if she stayed. The mutants wanted her alive; the soldiers would want her dead, just like they killed you. Or at least that is how you justified leaving her alone, breaking every promise you had made to never forsake or abandon.

Now you smell her blood and you know that it wasn't justification at all. It was denial. And it won't be enough
anymore.

Stone wall pressed against your back, underneath a window, listening to the voices inside, heroin high on the scent of her blood, but it's not a pure dose. There's something else mixed in with it, someone else. A stranger.
The voices lend answers.

"How could you let her get away like that?"

"She had a knife, man, how could I stop her? I couldn't grab her...her skin. y'know?..."

"She killed Tomas! I don't care how you stopped her. Why didn't you just grab her when she made for the door? Didn't see her hands? Shaking so bad she could barely hold it. Forget using it."

"Tomas was stupid, man. I told him not to try it on her again. I told him, ya heard me."

"The little slut deserved it. Bout near broke my ribs last night. In two places."

"Maybe it's better she's gone, y'know? Tomas could only control her skin for so long. Like sleeping next to a time bomb."

"Time bombs don't have legs like that. Up to there, know what I mean?"

"Right on, man."

A dual laugh.
Your claws sing in the silence, a metallic call for release. One more moment, you promise them. Just one more.

"What do you think happened to that animal dude she was with? The one with the claws?"

"Uncle Sammy's boys got him locked up somewhere, in a little cage, or maybe he's just dead. I dunno. But he ain't coming back. We don't got anything to worry about."

"Maybe one of us should keep a look out anyway."

"For what? His ghost? C'mon."

"I don't know...I thought I heard something, man..."

"You're drunk."

"He's coming back for us, I can feel it. He's gonna find out what you and Tomas did and he's gonna come back for us."

"Dead. I promise. Gimme that bottle, anyway."

The next sixty seconds blur, distort, curl at the edges like burnt paper, wrapping you inside a glowing hot blur of motion and energy. Kicking the door down, feeding off their screams, grabbing the mutant with the bottle and unceremoniously-- exactly as planned-- slashing his throat through the middle. Smell of new blood, rotten and sweet like decayed fruit, rushing to the brain. Scent of her old blood jolts up another magnitude. Catalyst.

The other man tries to run, tries to fumble for the gun in his lap, but you pin him to the wall. Claws through the shoulder muscles. He screams: it is high-pitched and thin, like a dog yelping when kicked. You would think more of the dog. Your lips form the outlines of words but it is difficult to push them out through the red haze.

"Where is she?"

"....don't.....know...."

Twist the claws, just enough for another scream.

"What did you do to her?"

"....n-noth-ing..."

Another twist. His eyes bulge, wet balloons ready to pop.

"wasn't....me...man....didn't....touch....didn't cut..her....please"

Cut her. Oh, God. Oh, God.
You kill him, but it is an afterthought. A twitch of a wrist, a spray of wetness across your face that you don't bother to wipe away. Your brain disconnects from your hands, from your legs; you stumble, stagger back against the wall searching for a measure of control. Fighting to breathe, fighting not to breathe.
 
And that is when you see it.
 
The mattress you held her on three nights ago, pushed back against the wall, which is splattered with dark red paint. The same paint covers the mattress, and the floor beside the mattress, and the cloak lying spread open on top of the cement. Beside the cloak, a scarf, also splattered with the red. Only it is not paint. You realize this.

A third dead man lies in the center of the floor, a gash carved Down the center of his chest. She did that, your brain tells you, only part of you refuses to believe it. She, who is so fragile, capable of something so harsh and so ugly. But there is something uglier. When you pick up the cloak, it is ripped down the center. Torn completely from end to end.

Then it hits you, the pain, the nausea. It hits you straight in the gut, a pounding filth worse than when they packed dirt into you. Worse than the freeze of the snow against your soft organs, yes, worse than the suffocation that filled your lungs.

You move fast; you make it to the door before the bile hits your throat, before you drop to your knees and vomit in the snow until there is nothing left in your stomach. Until you taste blood but it is not enough.
 
From that moment on, it will never be enough.

The Phoenix Compound
December 10

It's winter, and the rain is cold even in the desert, and it provides a convenient excuse for shaking. I've been sitting on the doorstep for an hour, and I'm soaked through to the skin. At least it hides the tears, rain within rain, dangerously unpredictable after so long a drought-- I only cried once, after it happened, and that wasn't until the night Scott found me. I never cry when I'm alone. It's a survival instinct; you bottle up the tears until something in you feels safe enough to pour them out. Now Logan's back, and here it comes again, the pouring out. Does that make him safe?

He was always the danger, he was never the danger. I assigned blame, anger, because they were walls against the fear, but I always knew that I was the danger, the psychosis. He can't break me, I'm already broken. I can break him, though. I found that out tonight when I saw his eyes collapse inward when I said I didn't care. I lied. Didn't I? Or am I just empty, impotent, unable to care at all? Not even for him. Wait, I know that can't be true yet. It still hurts.

While we're on the truth thing, I'll admit panic. He got too close, and I wanted it so much that I let him, but as seconds passed, I lost sight of him. I saw the others. Their faces, not his. Their hands. It was not fair, this invasion, but I could not stop it. So I threw it in his face. I hit him where I knew it would hurt. To be fair, he did exactly the same, but for once, I think I hit a little harder.

Why? I never wanted it to go down this way. I wanted to love him just as much as he wanted to love me. It's just too late, that's all. Too many bad memories, too many scars.

I close my eyes, the liquid between the lids hot and stinging despite the chill on the rain around them.

"Marie?"

Scott's voice; he's back, an explanation will be in order. Pull yourself together, Rogue.

"What are you doing out here?"

I try to smile at him, nonchalance we both know he could see through blind. The important thing is that I tried. "Nowhere else to go." The smile collapses in the rain like wet tissue paper.

"You're soaked." He unlocks the door, nudges it open with his foot while he helps me to my feet, hands full of my arms and elbows and my shivering. "You're coming inside."

I don't know what I am to him now that I am Logan's responsibility and not his. It feels like outside, like returning to a country from which one has been accidentally banished. The official mistake has been admitted, apologized for, revoked, but you're still a stranger. You've forgotten the customs, grown rusty with the languages. Paperwork can't change that. Only now he's looking at me and I'm not sure which one of us is the exile. Maybe we both are.

"Am I allowed? Won't it get you in trouble?"

"Doesn't matter."

He's still holding my arms and steers me through the door before I can protest. I drip water onto the cement, listen to my teeth knock together, as he strips the blanket off his bed.

"Wrap up in this." He said. "Jean will kill us both if you've caught pneumonia on my doorstep."

I obey, slower than I should, the cold has made my bones ache.

"Where is she?"

"Will's been running a fever...today it got kinda high....she's staying with him at the infirmary."

"Is he going to be okay?"

"Just a cold, she says. She's the doctor, she's usually right." He says it more like a prayer than a fact. "Sit down, I'll make some coffee. Can't guarantee it'll taste like coffee, but at least it'll take the edge off the chill."

This is what I owe him for the most....the way he knows how to simply exist when I need him to exist, without prying or demanding reasons or asking questions. He just waits for me to open up on my own, lets me know in his own way that's it's safe.

"Tell me what I have to beat him up for this time." His voice hovers over the whistle of the coffeepot, not serious at all, but casual to the point of revelation. I've got him worried, this time. Then again, I'm betting I'd be a little scared myself if I got a good glimpse of a mirror; I must be a mess. Didn't even stop to get my coat.

"It's not him. It's me."

"How so?" He drags two chairs out from the table, offering one to me then sitting down beside the stove, within easy reach of the coffeepot. The flame from the gas refracts itself across his glass.

"I can't do it. I can't be with him anymore."

"Two days ago you said things were improving. What went wrong?"

"Everything. All at once. Bang."

"So let's start at the beginning and work toward the bang. Tell me what you did this afternoon."

"He bought me a radio. It was a piece of junk, but he spent a lot of money on it just because he thought I'd like it. Because we used to dance."

"Did you dance?"

"Yes."

"He didn't pressure you--"

"No, I wanted to. Or at least I thought I did. But then he was so close and I didn't see him anymore. I saw the others. It was too much...I panicked. Said things I never should have."

"Like what?"

"I made him admit what happened to me. I made him say it all out loud, even when I knew....what it would do. And then he yelled that I blamed him. And..." I blink to chase away the moisture still leaking from my eyes; can't blame the rain in here. "I told him I couldn't blame him because I didn't care enough for it."
 
He reaches for the coffeepot and pours the steaming black liquid into two blue plastic cups. White curls of smoke rise into the air, bony fingers pointing accusation in my direction.

"Is that true?"

"God, no, it's the opposite. I don't know why I said it...awful... but it just hurt and I wanted him to hurt the same way. And it worked. That was the worst part. It worked." I watch my fingers occupy themselves with loose threads on the blanket, unraveling as I am unraveled. "You can go ahead and say I'm horrible and selfish and cold and I'll believe you. Just go on and say it flat out."

But he doesn't say it, not in the first few seconds, not even in the next minute. He presses a cup of coffee between my hands, a diffuse warmth that seeps through the plastic and through my gloves to defrost the first few layers of my skin. It's too hot to drink, but I consider swallowing a mouthful anyway. Just to feel the burn.

"I'm not going to lie to you just to tell you what you want to hear. You're not those things, Marie. You've survived things that would have killed most people, because you've refused to let those things beat you." He takes a sip of the coffee, grimaces a little as the bitterness hits his mouth. Cream and sugar are luxuries that require money that could go to things like extra blankets and medicines for sick baby boys. "So you've changed a little, just like Jean's changed and I've changed. That shouldn't matter because you're still holding on to what's really important-- who you are-- and they can never change that."

"You believe that? About any of us?"

"I have to believe it. If I didn't, I'd have quite a long time ago."

"Believing something doesn't make it truth." I test the contents of the cup in my hands: metallic, black, mouthful of heat that scalds the taste buds on the tip of my tongue. This urges another sip. Penance bought on the edge of a plastic cup.

"Today just proves it. Proves we aren't going to get through this one."

"What makes you so sure?"

"He can't accept that it happened, and I can't pretend that it didn't."

He takes another slow drink. "I don't think he wants to pretend."

"He wants to treat me the same way he always has. It's all he knows." Another sip; disappointment that it has already begun to cool. "But I don't know how he even looks at me, if he really knows what they did..."

"Logan looks at you the same way I look at Jean."

"How?"

Now he sets his cup down, and slides back into his chair, staring into the bright blue flame of the stove. His jaw tightens, then relaxes, then tightens again as he searches for words.

"He wishes that it never happened, or even that it happened to him, that's how much he wants it because he knows nothing will change. But that doesn't mean he sees you as anything less than beautiful." His voice has dropped until it is low, a soft hissing of breath like the sound of the gas flame.  "It's not you that he can't accept, it's himself. His failure..."

I listen to him drift into silence, watch his knuckles grow white around the cup. My hand twists free of the blanket to rest on his knee; I want him to feel I'm telling the truth. "You didn't fail us, Scott."

A pause, too long. "I lost her. I couldn't even protect my wife. Or you."

"Ever stop to think where we'd be if you hadn't brought us here? Where I'd be if you hadn't found me?"

"I always believed we'd win. Xavier tried to warn me about the other possibilities, but I wouldn't hear it. I was so sure we'd be able to save them. But look at us." A snort, disgust. "Real heroes."

"No one can save everything....no one. But you have saved the important things, and that is what you need to focus on. Your wife, your  son. You've held on to what you love."

"Isn't that what you think Logan's trying to do?"

I set my half-empty cup beside the stove, toying with the edges of the blanket. I've stopped shivering-- on the outside-- but I still want the chrysalis around me. An enclosure, a barrier, a place to hide. With some effort of the will, I stand, dropping the blanket back into the chair.

"You think I should go back."

"Doesn't matter what I think about it, or about him. You do what you think. If you want to stay here, you're
welcome."

"You'd get in trouble."

"I already told you, doesn't matter. It's your decision."
 
My decision. Mine, not his, not Jean's, not Logan's. Mine. But what if I don't know what to do? If I am the one holding my life in my hands, why am I so afraid I'll drop it? I know I'm supposed to say something hopeful and uplifting here, something to give him a signal that it will be okay. I don't; there is no need to compound lies. Neither of us knows if it will ever be okay, not even Scott for all his philosophy of chin up and stiff upper lip. I'm not doing this because I'm sure. I'm doing it because I believe what I said to him. You can save the important things. It's too late to save myself, or Logan, but maybe we can save us. What we have together that makes up
for everything going wrong individually.
 
He walks me to the door; I expect a last word, an attempt to change my mind, but he doesn't. A smile for him, plastic like the coffee cup but it will have to do for thanks until I locate the real thing.
Then it's back into the rain.
 

Part three