Terri's Peep Hut ~~ Fiction Archive

Comments: First of all, I feel that I have to give you a couple of warnings. The first one is about the Logan/Marie relationship in this one, which you may find squicky because she's younger than usual. More about that in a second, but suffice it to say, I'm slapping a pedophilic themes warning on this one. The second warning is a BadXavier one. You won't like him in this fic, and if that's a problem for you, feel free to skip it. Now, back to our regularly scheduled, way-too-long-already notes ;) This fic was prompted by a bunny from an anonymous reader that asked for a fic where Logan is attracted to a clearly inappropriately young Marie. What would he do? Would he act on it? What would she think? Would she just be totally afraid of him and freaked out? I didn't follow the bunny exactly (I know, you're all shocked..) but here we have a Logan who thinks a pre-teen Marie is his mate. Let me say right off that this is a *story* - I'm not necessarily promoting or condoning the relationship depicted here, or saying that everyone's behavior is fine and dandy. This story is pretty much a dysfunction-o-rama, but I do think that Logan and Marie come out reasonably OK in the end. Which, clearly, is not often the case in similar circumstances. That said, this was also prompted by an observation from a friend who helped me move. She said that she didn't think it necessarily took two perfectly mentally and emotionally healthy people to make for a good relationship; in fact, she said that no such animal exists (but I do think I know one or two myself; they're irritating what with all that inner stability, believe me..) and that if two people have problems, it doesn't mean that they can't still make a stronger pair out of their separately damaged halves. Of course, my fic brain applied that to Logan and Marie ;) Last of all, I'd love for someone to take up the bunny (it's a little one, really!) that I was left with at the end of this story - where does Scott go and what happens to him?

"She cannot fall into Erik's hands again," Charles intoned, wheeling back and forth - his version of pacing - in his well-appointed office. The object of Charles' concern, a small, big-eyed twelve year-old girl, sat in a chair that practically swallowed up her tiny form, while the object of Charles' address, a large, muscular, narrow-eyed man, pegged the girl with a piercing stare, causing her to squirm a bit. "It is far too dangerous. We narrowly averted a complete disaster this evening."

"I am charging you, personally, with ensuring that Marie never becomes a weapon in Magneto's arsenal again. I am entrusting her safety to you. I shall expect you to carry out this mission over and above any other operational priorities, do you understand?" The big man made no response to that. "Logan - Magneto could very well have murdered half the population of New York City tonight in his failed quest to mutate them. Yes, he is incarcerated now, but I know Erik. He will find a way out of his plastic prison eventually, and he will try again, having had months, perhaps years, to refine his plan. His plan cannot succeed without Marie. You are best suited to ensure that he does not get her. Do you understand?" Logan still hadn't responded, but he took a few steps closer to the girl, sniffing at her then baring his teeth. Her eyes widened, and she scuttled back in her chair. Charles sighed. "What?"

"Very well," Charles replied with a sigh, finally bringing his wheelchair to a stop behind his desk. "Now, Marie - " He addressed the girl in an entirely different tone of voice. "You shall listen to what Logan tells you, and you shall obey him. Are we agreed?" The little girl shook her head no, causing her curly, wavy hair to fling in all directions. "Marie.." Xavier stiffened his tone considerably. "You shall do as Logan tells you." Marie didn't shake her head again this time, but those big eyes were still saying no quite strongly.

"You're not gonna get hurt anymore. I'm gonna look out for ya," Logan offered when Marie finally did sneak a glance at him. She only stared back. Logan slowly raised one hand to hover in the scant few inches that separated their faces, and, after a small hesitation, sprung his claws. Marie gasped and started, but her curiosity outpaced her fear and she found herself leaning forward and placing a small, dirty-gloved hand atop the dull side of the claws. "I got these and I heal. From anythin'. I'm gonna take care of you."

"Oh." Marie really couldn't think of anything else to say. Mystique was the only parent she'd known, and she'd been killed in Magneto's failed attempt to mutate half of New York. Marie wasn't actually too sad about that. The fact that her mother had willingly handed her over to Erik hadn't exactly endeared her to Marie, and they had never been close. To Marie, Mystique always seemed angry, always hateful, always mean. So far, her other parent seemed much less emotionally volatile and negative, but no more loving.

A year later, Marie had settled into life at the mansion fairly well. And it was quite literally a life *at* the mansion. She was never allowed to leave the premises, although she asked her father to on each of the rare occasions that he saw her. Xavier always gave the reason that it was too dangerous, especially with the human/mutant conflict heating up as it had been in recent months. While the other kids went to the mall or the park or to a movie, Marie remained ensconced in her private room, the one next to Logan's.

Tonight, there were strange noises coming from Logan's room. Marie had noticed early on that nocturnal grunts and even a few groans were normal. However, tonight, his sounds were more along the lines of moans and whimpers. She didn't know him well - he seemed to keep a deliberate distance between them - but of all of the people at the mansion, she liked him best. He watched over her, she saw it often, and he was always - well, if not pleasant, he was always kind to her on the occasions that they did speak. He was certainly the only one she trusted here. Pursing her lips and setting her nerve, she resolved to go over and knock. He could be having a nightmare. She should wake him.

After scurrying over in her long nightgown and softly knocking a time or two, she tried the doorknob. Opening the heavy oak door just a crack, she cautiously peered inside. "Logan?" He was tossing and turning on his small bed, the sheets tangled around his torso. Marie was mostly thankful that the sheets hid his private parts - it didn't appear that he'd been wearing anything to bed - but she also felt a twinge of disappointed curiosity. Watching him strain in his sleep a moment more, she huffed and decided to approach him, entering the room quietly and closing the door behind her.

"Shit!" Logan supplied the profanity for her. "Shit!!!" She made a faint gurgle and tried to breathe in, figuring that some breathing was better than none and air in was better than air out. No luck. The movement of her chest, though, prompted Logan to withdraw his claws. More blinding pain followed, and Marie thought she may pass out. She felt strong arms gripping her, holding her upright, and her head lolled back, bringing Logan's terrified face into view.

Something happened then - something that Marie would remember later as clearly as anything in her entire life. Logan's entire expression changed in a heartbeat. It went from completely panicked to utterly calm. Marie would always remember wondering at that - not the quickness of the transformation, but the calm written across him. He shifted his hands, moving one to circle her waist and pin her to him, and another to cup the back of her head and press her bare cheek to his.

Marie tried to tell him no, that she'd kill him, but she still couldn't breathe. She heard him grunt as the pull of her skin kicked in and she wondered if he was in as much pain now as she was. But in a moment, she felt him begin flowing into her. It was unlike any of the times it had happened before. Sabretooth, her mother's lover, had agreed to transfer his powers to her prior to Erik's experiment, to ensure that if something went wrong, Marie would have a better chance of living to see a second try. But he'd fought the pull, hard, and when he was inside her, she found his thoughts to be vile, terrifying, disgusting. Magneto had touched her too, to transfer his power and make the machine work. Marie felt his coldness, his icy rage, and that terrified her too, in a different way. And, with Erik, there was again the reluctance - despite his desperation to make his plan work, the deepest parts of his soul and psyche were fighting her pull. She didn't like it when they fought - it hurt her more and made her feel rejected, an anathema, something a lot like death itself. Some part of her realized it was simple, indelible self-preservation on their part, but that didn't ameliorate the hurt.

Logan, though, wasn't fighting the pull, not even on that basic level. On the contrary, he was throwing himself into her without reservation, wholeheartedly. Instead of the sharp hurt she'd come to associate with being touched, she felt a blanketing, soothing warmth. His thoughts and feelings came into her next, and those were a little less uniformly comforting, but Marie could feel a strong desire to protect her, to save her life, and a flood of sorrow at how badly he'd hurt her with the claws. She felt all that, and needed to tell him it was OK, it was an accident, she understood. Only, she remembered that she wasn't breathing yet, and so she tried again, tried to make the air go in and out so that she could get some words out too.

Her chest expanded and contracted with a breath. Through the connection, she felt his relief and she wondered at the strength of it even as she took another breath. The pull was gaining velocity now - she could see his veins and tendons stand out in sharp relief from the rest of his face and neck. That made her decide that there was a matter more urgent than reassuring him that the stabbing was accidental. "Let go!"

Logan did as she asked, falling backwards to the bed with a soft thud. He began to seizure, just like they all did, whether they'd fought her pull or not. Marie gulped down several more deep breaths and carefully sat by his side, waiting for the spasms to slow. With Sabretooth, it had taken only a few minutes for him to recover; she hoped that Logan's healing powers would provide a similar rebound. After about fifteen minutes, during which the only sound in the room was their breathing, each of their bodies laboring for different reasons, the seizure stopped, and Logan began to breathe regularly. A few moments later, he came back to consciousness.

"I think so. I'm - the wounds closed over and everything feels OK." At that, he let out a sigh and sunk into the bed. They sat in silence for a long time. Marie's eyes never left Logan, and his never left her. Finally, Logan swept out a clumsy arm, landing it on her waist and drawing her head down to his chest. She was very careful to shift her long hair to provide an ample barrier between them as she acceded to his gesture. Placing her ear right over his heart, she was relieved to hear it beat at a steady rhythm. Soon, she felt his other arm encircle her body, and sleep came for them both.

After that night, they never spoke of the incident again - not between themselves, not to anyone else at the mansion. Logan was lodged in Marie's head permanently now; in the days and weeks that followed, she sorted through what she got from him, noting with some amusement and even more affection that the piece of him in her head actively kept her shielded from his harsher memories and thoughts. He was protecting her, even there, in her own mind. She also experimented with his powers, but only to a certain degree - giving herself paper cuts and watching them heal seemed less daunting than giving in to what felt like the urge to pop her knuckles right out of her skin. They both regarded each other a little differently after that night - if anyone had caught on to the subtle change, they might have said that there was a comfort, a familiarity bred by the deepest kind of intimacy between the two. But no one did notice, and both Marie and Logan seemed to instinctively realize that what had happened that night was best kept to themselves. Marie washed the blood stains out of her nightgown and assumed that Logan had done the same with his sheets.

"You cannot stop me, and I shall obliterate your mind if you attempt to do so. Is that an experience you wish to repeat?" Sensing that Logan's anger was only escalating, and realizing somewhere in the back of his mind that he still needed all the able fighters he could get, Charles changed his tactic. "Logan, I realize it is distasteful, but it is the only way. I shall take control of her mind. She will not feel a thing - no pain, no distress. She will not consciously know what is happening to her. I shall simply put her to sleep, as it were, leaving only her body, not her mind. She will not suffer. It will be as if it has not happened at all."

At that, Xavier seemed to catch on that something was amiss, and Marie felt him reach out to her mind with his, gently probing. She let him. She'd actually become quite adept, not only at shielding from the various telepaths living in the mansion, but also at using her own latent telepathic abilities. They were a genetic inheritance from her father, but it was really her putative mother, Jean, that had helped her develop them, albeit unwittingly. Actually, Marie had never gotten along with the woman; she always felt a sense of barely-hidden resentment from Jean, perhaps because she'd gotten so very accustomed to playing the role of Xavier's daughter that the real thing coming along seemed like a usurpment of her rightful place. It didn't seem to matter that Xavier still behaved as though Jean were the favored child. In any case, as soon as Marie realized that she was hearing voices in her head that hadn't come from the touches, she ignored her dislike of the woman and developed a plan to approach Jean, to feign an interest in her 'amazing' control over her telepathic powers, and to get her to talk about her methods for exploiting and harnessing them. Marie hadn't lived with Mystique for the first twelve years of her life without developing a little cunning.

Jean was only too happy to talk about herself and her prowess with her powers, and Marie was scrupulously attentive to every detail. It had earned her a notch up in Jean's estimation and scant affections, but it was about to really pay off in spades for her now. After Charles completed the probe of her mind, during which Marie was careful to show him only confusion at suddenly being summoned to his office and concern at Logan's slightly-higher-than-usual tension levels, he sat back in his wheelchair and smiled up at her a little. That smile unsettled Marie. She'd never seen quite this expression on him. It was almost..warm, or at least it was trying to be. Xavier had never attempted affection before, not with her. That anomalous kindness set off all kinds of alerts in Marie herself. It was a familiar trick of Mystique's, and it usually heralded something very, very bad for Marie. Yes, something was definitely wrong. Marie strengthened her shields, and tried, for the first time, to shield someone else as Jean had once described to her - Logan.

"Thank you for coming, Marie. I must ask a favor of you. I would like for you to lie down on my couch, make yourself comfortable." Marie nodded, inwardly struggling to shield Logan's rapidly escalating anger. She couldn't reach into his mind to see what was the matter while maintaining her shields - she wasn't that good, that practiced, yet. She had to either trust his reaction and his instincts, or look for herself. After one more glance at the Professor's sweetly expectant expression, she made her decision.

"For now, just relax. Relax and open your mind to me." Xavier wheeled to her side and Logan paced into her line of vision behind him, in full snarl now. Marie tore her eyes away from him and focused on her father. "Just relax, dear." Logan loomed large and close behind Xavier now, and with a twitch of his hands, the claws unleashed. Xavier heard the distinctive sound, and acted immediately, reaching into Logan's mind and paralyzing his movement with a single thought. Charles was disappointed in Logan, but not entirely surprised. He would have to be dealt with later. In desperate times like these, Charles thought, perhaps a little mental reconstruction would be best, for the greater good. He twisted in his chair to face Marie once again.

His torso never completed its reorientation. Marie had reached out to him with her bare hand, placing a lone fingertip on his cheek. She'd known she couldn't fight him, mind to mind, but her other powers would do the trick effortlessly. Or so she thought. Xavier was fighting the pull with everything he had, which, given his potent telepathy, was a lot. It brought incredible pain to Marie. Her shields around Logan failed quickly, and she now was fighting to keep Xavier out of her mind. With more than a little panic, she realized she was losing that fight. The full force of Xavier's efforts bore down upon her and she felt as though her mind was beginning to fly apart at the seams. She thought she saw the corner of her father's mouth quirk upward.

He shouldn't have been so quick to declare victory. Xavier's complete and total focus on Marie had left one element out of his purview. Unfortunately for him, that element had six metal claws, a snowballing homicidal rage, and absolutely no qualms about unleashing both on the man who'd once taken him in and made him an X-Man. Just before Marie thought her mind would finally snap, she blinked her eyes open to see a flash of metal behind Xavier, then quickly blinked them shut again in anticipation of the gore that would follow. She was wise to have done so. Logan decapitated the man neatly, scratching Marie's still-extended hand and forearm a bit in the process, but killing her attacker nonetheless. The fact that he had also been her father did not seem of concern to either one of them at the moment.

"Grrrr.." Logan simmered and growled before getting any coherent words out. "He was gonna - he was gonna - ahhhh!" Losing his facility for speech, Logan expressed his displeasure via claw, shredding most of what was left of Xavier's body and his wheelchair before sating his anger. Marie turned away from the grisly scene, and crept along the perimeter of the room, searching for something of Xavier's memories to answer her questions while avoiding the mess of Logan's onslaught. When she found it, she promptly scurried to the wastebasket by his desk and threw up in it.

"Yep," Logan answered concisely. "We gotta get outta here. Now." Most of the other X-Men were in prison, but New York was rapidly degenerating into nothing but one big war zone, and the nagging urge to grab Marie and flee this place that Logan had felt for months was finally getting an audience. If either of them were arrested by the human police for Xavier's murder, that would be it, they'd be done for. "C'mon."

Marie eyed the coughing, sputtering waitress that served them their breakfast, wondering if she was a mutant. The news broke, a day after they were out of Westchester, that mutants all across the northeast were filling hospitals, complaining of a flu-like illness that rapidly worsened to include a brain-boiling fever, severe vomiting, and respiratory failure. From start to finish, the disease did its work in three days, sometimes less, and the end result was invariably - *invariably* - the death of the patient. That had caused more than a little panic among the mutant population, and sporadic reports that the flu also made mutants lose control of their powers had caused the same level of panic in the human population. It all made for a sharp acceleration of the simmering human-mutant conflict into a full-scale civil war - police and military authority were beginning to round up mutants and sweep through the cities, declaring martial law along the way, and it was only here, in very rural parts of the country, that civilization as it was once known still existed. Marie suspected that even places like this little corner of upstate Wisconsin wouldn't be calm for long if the flu and the chaos it caused wasn't stopped. Marie wondered, though, if that was really the goal of the mostly-human authorities - the flu didn't seem to be affecting the humans at all, and their Evening News assertions that everything possible was being done to stop the spread of the disease felt hollow and flat to Marie. It made her tend to believe Logan's claim that this was no mere flu with horribly bad, but nonetheless coincidental, timing - it was Legacy.

She'd heard rumors about Legacy around the mansion - the super-virus that could wipe out every mutant on the face of the earth. Logan told her, interspersed with a lot of growling, that one of the reasons Xavier had wanted so badly to spring the X-Men from prison was because he thought they could stop Legacy from being released. Judging from the timing of the first reported cases, that ship had probably already sailed, even as Xavier was luring her to his office.

Logan had actually talked to her quite a bit about Xavier's motivations for attempting what he had, much more than he'd ever talked to her about anything at all in sum total of their past conversations. Marie wondered if he was trying to explain it, to make her feel better about it somehow, but she decided that no, Logan was just trying to be straight with her, honest. After all, he had to know that whatever the explanation or motivation, it wouldn't make her feel any better about her father's betrayal.

"Oh. Sure." Marie tore herself from her thoughts and tried to smile a little at Logan. In addition to all the talking, his solicitousness of her was something new as well. Before, he seemed to watch over her a lot, but now, it was as though those impulses had been given free rein. He was never more than an arm's length away from her, and he tirelessly monitored whether she was resting and eating enough. Marie wondered if it was because they had left the cocoon of safety that the mansion formerly provided. She felt like laughing a little at the thought - ironic, wasn't it, that it had been there that she was in the most danger.

"Mmm-hmmm," she mumbled through a mouthful of toast. Logan eyed her with those unyielding hazel eyes for a long moment before turning to his meal. Maybe it wasn't being away from the mansion - maybe he's so watchful and solicitous because he's afraid I'll get the virus, Marie thought. That sobered her, but she was fairly confident that she still had a lot of Logan's healing power. It hadn't seemed to have diminished at all since they'd touched, and she thought that if it would protect him against whatever genocidal micro-bug the humans had devised, it would probably cover her too. Then it occurred to her that Logan might not know that she still carried his powers; they'd never discussed the ramifications of their touch. She mentally searched for a way to tell him, even though doing it in a sparsely populated, run-down diner over eggs and bacon seemed inappropriate to the profundity of the subject matter. Logan, however, wasn't willing to wait for her to figure it out.

Logan got a very determined look in his eye, and something about his expression told Marie that she'd made an accurate guess. "That's right, you won't get it. I'm gonna take care of you. I promised. When you - when you start to feel sick or somethin', just tell me. Tell me and I'll touch ya and fix it." That surprised Marie - it wasn't that he feared she *might* get Legacy; he was certain that she would, it was only a matter of time. A cold, sickening feeling began to settle in her gut. She'd assumed that the idea that Legacy could kill *all* the mutants in the world had been hyperbole, a sick kind of urban legend or even a purposeful disinformation campaign by the humans. But Logan seemed to believe it would inevitably reach her. That shook Marie to her core - not because she'd lost confidence in Logan's healing powers and their ability to ward off the illness, but because it registered with her that, if he was right, it was altogether likely that they could be the only two mutants left in the world in very short order. Logan seemed to catch on to her sudden distress. "It'll work, I think. When they had me, they tried everythin' on me - all kindsa diseases. Nothin' took. It'll work, don't worry."

They tried crossing the border to Canada several times. Logan seemed drawn there, as though by some invisible homing beacon, but the border had been closed for a long time - long before they'd ever left Westchester. Now, they skated along its edge, going ever-West, trying to keep ahead of the snowballing war and trying to find a way north. Marie thought that they'd be reasonably OK until they got to Idaho or so. According to the news, the big cities out west - Seattle, Portland, LA - were seeing the same kind of human-mutant conflicts, if not the massive flu outbreaks quite yet. It felt a lot like they were racing death across the continent, and both Marie and Logan got progressively more nervous as they headed further west.

But, on the bright side, Marie wasn't getting sick. She'd told Logan, shortly after the diner, that she thought she might still have some of his powers. He'd greeted that information with a grunt, one that she couldn't read. He still seemed to be watching over her closely, expecting her to fall ill. Marie wondered at his behavior but didn't question it. Logan was quite literally all she had in the world now, and, truth be told, she felt roughly 98% reassured and only 2% freaked out by his incessant hovering over her. If she had to choose between being ignored, the reaction to her that Xavier had perfected over the past couple of years, and being hovered over, hovering was just fine.

For his part, Logan's mind and senses had been working overtime since they left Westchester. He told himself that his mission was still the same, still just as it had been ever since the day Xavier brought Marie to the mansion - Protect Marie. He knew that, even though she had a wealth of experience that no fourteen year old should ever have, both transferred and personal, she still didn't quite realize the seriousness of their situation. Even if her theory that she'd retained enough of his powers to avoid the flu was correct, he couldn't take any chances; he'd have to be vigilant for signs of any symptoms and act immediately. He couldn't let the virus get a foothold and take the chance that his powers wouldn't be enough. He also had to get her away from people, all of them. The world was already teetering on the precipice of hell and Legacy was about to give it a good, solid shove from behind. Once it fell, anything could and would happen. The humans would run amok, and if any of them discovered that he and Marie weren't human, well, they'd find a way to override that healing factor eventually. Logan couldn't let that happen, and the best way to make sure it didn't was to get the hell away from the humans, all of them.

The problem was that there weren't many places in the world you could still do that, and there were even fewer on the North American continent. Logan thought it would have to be Canada, and somewhere way the hell north. Cold was livable - it would be uncomfortable, but he could keep Marie warm enough until he could build a makeshift shelter for them - and the population was sparse once you got north of the 49th. Yes, it would have to be Canada; there was just the not-so-small matter of finding a way to get across the military patrol at the border.

Leaving Westchester, and, more than that, killing Xavier, had cut off any realistic hope of getting forged papers. Logan didn't have any connections or resources that would be able to provide that kind of help, and he doubted that he'd trust anyone enough to go to them now, even if he did. That eliminated the possibility of bluffing his way across as a legal Canadian resident, but Logan was actually OK with that. Sneaking across seemed less chancy than the possibility their papers wouldn't be good enough, and that he and Marie would face a hail of bullets at the border.

That left him essentially two options. One - stay put, and wait for the war and chaos to catch up to them, or head east, and catch up to it. It might leave a chink or two in the border patrol, and giving them a chance to sneak through. That option didn't sit well with Logan for lots of reasons, but mostly because it seemed to expose Marie to more danger. There were lots of variables that couldn't be controlled (chaos was kind of like that) and any number of them could adversely affect Marie's safety. Even if she would heal, even if her pain and wounds might only be temporary, that wasn't what he'd promised her. He'd promised protection, not just survival.

Option two was the one he'd chosen in light of that promise - go west, hope for a chink in the patrol in one of those big spaces, and sneak through. If they didn't find one, they could still try option one; the war and Legacy panic was spreading like wildfire, and would catch up with them soon enough. Hopefully, the sparser population and bigger stretches of land for the military and police to cover would translate into fewer Marie-unfriendly variables than the congested east was offering. In any case, they had more places to hide out west if things did go badly - more open land. He felt a hell of a lot better about his chances of living up to his promise out here than he had a few states ago.

The promise he'd made was also the slim thread that had been keeping him distant from her at the mansion. He recognized her for what she was the moment they met; his gut never lied and this time, it was swearing on a stack of bibles piled a mile high that this girl was his mate. Only, fate had thrown him a monkey wrench - his mate wasn't ready to be that to him, not yet. He had to wait, to be sure she was safe and remained under his watch until it was time. And he couldn't get too close to her - he didn't want her to mistake him for the father figure he knew she needed, the role that was rightfully Xavier's but one he seemed woefully uninterested in playing, and he didn't trust himself to be too close. His mind and his heart told him to wait, but the animal in him kept insisting that she was a female, one whose body was giving off signals of fertility, and one that belonged to him. The pull from those animal instincts was strong, and it was compounded by the allure of long-latent emotions in him, emotions like belonging and affection. Marie - twelve, scared, and sitting in that leather chair - surfaced his hopes for so many things that he secretly very desperately desired but would never admit to - love, warmth, a mate of his own. Xavier hadn't known it, but he'd handed Logan everything he'd been looking for throughout all of his remembered life when he brought Marie to Westchester and asked him to guard her.

When he had heard Xavier's plans for her, that day in the office, the animal in him raged. The thought of giving her over to someone else, anyone else, was enough, but to give her over to not just one man but many, and under those circumstances made Logan's blood boil. It was a testament to just how much control he had over the animal and just how strong his desire to protect Marie was that he didn't simply snap and lose control then and there. Somewhere in his mind, he knew he'd have to keep control enough to find a way to stop Xavier, and stop Xavier they definitely had. Logan distantly wondered what the remaining students and teaches thought when they found the unmistakably claw-marked body and wheelchair. He supposed, though, that it didn't much matter. He'd never worried over what anyone thought of him, and now wasn't the time to start. Well, maybe there was one exception to that rule - he cared much and worried often over what Marie thought of him.

She seemed to like him, and she seemed to have some faint echo of his realization that they were mates. From the very beginning, she'd never resisted his attempts to guard her, and she always seemed to him to be pleased to be under his protection. She smiled at him, and seemed to enjoy it when they talked. Her scent held hints of innocent curiosity and, in recent months, something not quite attraction but perhaps a growing awareness of his masculinity and presence. He was convinced that she was beginning to realize she was his. The debacle in Xavier's office sealed the matter in Logan's mind - it seemed to him to be a violent, bloody, yet somehow appropriate remake of the traditional ceremony of the father giving the bride away at her wedding. Only this time, the father wanted to defile the bride instead of giving her to her rightful husband, necessitating that the ceremony involved be more funereal than matrimonial. To Logan, the details didn't matter. Marie was his now.

The question - aside from survival, potential mutant genocide, war, and all the like - was how to proceed with Marie now that he had her. Before they'd left, Logan had told himself - seventeen. She'd have to be seventeen before he'd lay a hand on her. It would mean she'd have five years to grow up, five years to become ready, five years for him to shape her as his mate. Seventeen was also not coincidentally the age of consent in New York. Leaving Xavier no legal recourse against him when he finally could make his move on Marie had a definite upside. But now, the animal in him kept bargaining him lower - it said now, right now. Marie's constant closeness since they'd left and her demonstrated willingness to kill Xavier to protect her mate - to protect him - had made the beast rise strongly. But Logan was, after all, a man, not a beast, and so he mentally settled on sixteen - sixteen was only a little more than a year off, and it would be old enough, given everything that was happening around them. They would spend the intervening time alone together, and they could do some things, once he thought Marie might be ready. But it would be sixteen before he mated with her. He was determined of that.

They spent a few weeks probing the border for a weakness and, finding none, Logan decided to lay low a bit, to wait. They came as far west as Idaho before turning south and eventually finding themselves in the Sawtooth National Forest. He actually quite liked it here - it was what he'd pictured Canada to be like, essentially. There were very few people, rough terrain, and civilization had made minimal inroads; that was probably even more true deeper into the forest, away from the recreation areas. This spot might do, Logan thought, and the timing was good. Winter was coming, but it wasn't quite here yet; he might not have time to trek across Canada in search of a suitable place, but he figured he had enough time to build at least a rudimentary shelter here. The first thing to do was to lose the SUV. Logan suggested ditching it and heading in on foot. It would be way too obvious for anyone who might be looking for them.

Not that it seemed anyone was. Logan guessed that he'd been implicated in Xavier's death by now and that he must be wanted by police back in New York. However, the SUV they'd been in was a 'cold' one - one that no one save Logan had ever seen, heard of, or known about. They might know that their murder suspect was a steel-clawed mutant fitting his description, but they didn't have a clue about what kind of vehicle he was travelling in and Logan had been careful to minimize contact with the public, careful not to show his face, until they'd cleared the great lakes.

He supposed that the police probably had far bigger fish to fry than one filthy mutie who, in their eyes, had done the world a favor by offing one of his kind, and a 'dangerous' mutant rights leader at that. And the police were, in fact, very well occupied with larger matters at the moment - according to Logan's scratchy AM radio, the first cases of human infection with what was now out in the open as the Legacy virus had surfaced earlier in the week. It seemed that the dark geniuses who'd designed the nasty little bug hadn't counted on a very obvious, altogether inescapable factor - they hadn't counted on nature.

Legacy, designed to invade bodies just a DNA quirk or two away from human, had run through the mutant population quickly and now needed a new host population. No living thing loses the fight for survival easily, and Legacy was no exception. Faced with its own extinction, the airborne, microscopic creatures followed the examples that millennia of evolution had laid out before them, managing to also deal its creators a nice bit of poetic justice along the way - in order to survive, it mutated. A strain of the virus began surfacing in human hosts a few days ago, and those hosts were now joining their mutant counterparts in hospitals and cemeteries in record numbers.

Logan figured - quite rightly as it turned out - that Legacy's successful battle against extinction would mean much darker times ahead for humanity. Before the TV news stations stopped broadcasting, they'd said that Legacy killed 99.92% of all mutants in a heavily infected area within two weeks. If that was true, and if the rate of infection and casualties among humans were similar, things were definitely about to change. The world population would go from billions to a few hundred thousand in a matter of months, and Legacy wasn't going to do its hosts a favor and be sure to leave behind those who could serve as a frame for a new civilization - the doctors, plumbers, carpenters, scientists, and the like. Those left would be lucky to figure out how to operate a generator without frying themselves silly, and God forbid any of them got appendicitis. For most intents and purposes, the few who would survive were about to step into a time machine and gun it in reverse. Modern civilization, and all of its attendant conveniences, were about to recede into the far distance.

Logan could tell that Marie was slowly figuring that out. Since they'd heard the news about the humans, she'd asked lots of questions - will there still be electricity? can the hospitals handle all those people? will it all be OK? Logan's answer to most of those questions was no, which didn't seem to comfort her much. He was quick to reassure her, however, that she would be just fine; he would see to it. He could tell she was still afraid. He didn't blame her - the breakdown of civilization, the collapse of the world as you know it, is some pretty scary stuff.

For him, though, it wasn't nearly as daunting. He had Marie - she'd never exhibited any signs of illness and, aside from concerns about the war and the virus, she was fine. Now, Legacy would do most of the work of keeping her safe and away from potentially dangerous people for him by neatly (or not so neatly as the case may be) killing them all off. He and his mate would have a home soon, thanks to his strength, instincts, and claws. Actually, Logan thought that the forest was an ideal spot to be while the world died around them - it would have animals to hunt, unspoiled land and water, and Logan was fairly sure that whoever survived wouldn't want to linger in a place most habitable for wild beasts, not humans. At the moment, Logan pretty much personified the old song lyric, 'it's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.'

It took a week longer than Logan expected - five weeks total - to get a rudimentary cabin built to house them both. The first snow hit just before the roof was finished, so Marie and Logan were treated to a few rather uncomfortable nights, but all things considered, Logan's plan had gone well. In fact, he was feeling downright optimistic. It was an unnatural state for him, but one he was enjoying exploring.

And today was an especially good day for it. It was a milestone day, a day that marked the clearance of one more hurdle separating him from his mate. It was Marie's fifteenth birthday. Logan had purchased a small present for her, as he had done every year since she came, and it was one of the few things he carried with him out of Westchester. He hoped she liked this one - she seemed to like the other ones he'd gotten, and this gift was in that same vein. In fact, it would complete a set. First, he'd given her the emerald earrings, then the bracelet, and now the necklace. It seemed fitting that the only piece missing would be a ring.

Her whole bearing shifted, and, without thinking, she leaned forward and laid a gentle kiss on his cheek, on his now very bushy sideburns. His hands settled on her waist and pulled her near. Soft, gloved hands wound around his back and without either one quite intending it, they were now locked in an embrace, gazing into one another's eyes. The only coherent thought Logan had was that this was right, very right. Marie, for her part, was simply swept up in the unusual and very pleasurable sensation of being held, of being touched by and close to another person. They stayed frozen that way for a long time, but finally, Marie's eyes fell away from Logan's and to the floor. "Thank you. For everything. I don't think anyone but you has ever given me a present. Or remembered my birthday. Thanks."

Those words registered with Logan and made him uncomfortable. He had remembered her birthdays mostly because he was waiting to take her on her seventeenth, now on her sixteenth. He suddenly felt like quite the dirty old man. "Yeah. Uh, good." He coughed, and eased her back away from him, his mind repeating 'sixteen, not fifteen' the whole time. His animal instincts howled one word in response to his inner mantra - 'soon.'

Winter was well settled into the mountains by the end of the month, and Logan and Marie were settling into a comfortable relationship as well, even if everything around them did seem to be falling apart. The AM radio broadcasts had stopped about a week ago, and sometimes, on a quiet day, they heard the faint echoes of explosions or gunfire. Logan seemed unconcerned. Each day, he went out for a walk to scout their location and make sure they had no visitors, but other than that, he seemed quite content to stay in their small cabin and let the world outside deal with its troubles on its own.

But just as they had begun to really become comfortable in their new place, their cozy winter hideaway was rudely interrupted by a most unwelcome intruder. Logan caught the first glimpse of him, on one of his daily patrols. It was Scott. There was no mistaking that it was him - he still wore the same ruby glasses he'd worn as Cyclops, leader of the X-Men. Logan cursed his luck - it figured that the one person most interested in avenging Xavier's death and the one who Logan had found most irritating would be among the .08% of the mutant population to survive. He couldn't even get rid of the guy in a worldwide holocaust.

He actually wasn't too surprised to see him here, in the forest. Scott might've been a prick, but he wasn't a dumb prick. He'd probably done exactly what Logan had - drift west, look for a hole in the border, don't get too close to Washington state and Seattle just in case, drift south and lay low in a quiet spot until winter passes. Logan mentally cursed all the way back to the cabin after sighting him for the first time.

Scott's presence left Logan with three basic options. One - stay close to the cabin and hope Scott finds another spot somewhere in the 2.1 million acres of forest to settle. Ordinarily, that would be a good bet - the odds were definitely in Logan's favor. However, he'd never trusted luck, and luck had already given him a pretty good ass-kicking by plopping Scott down right in front of his nose. Option one wasn't getting a vote.

Option two would be for Logan to kill Scott - just ambush him and take him out. He felt fairly confident that he could do it. He'd fought along side the man and he knew his strengths and weaknesses. Scott lacked Logan's animal senses and would be susceptible to a surprise attack out here in the woods. It would preempt any ideas of revenge that Scott might be harboring, and it would ensure his and Marie's safety and privacy. Option two had a lot going for it, but in the end, it didn't receive a vote either. Logan was a killer, yes, but not a murderer. In his estimation, there was a difference. Xavier had been a killing - necessary, justified, and not premeditated. Scott would be murder, done for the sake of convenience. Yes, there was the miniscule chance that Marie might be hurt in whatever Scott might try to avenge Xavier's death, but Logan doubted that he blamed Marie or even knew she was involved. For all Scott knew, Logan had kidnapped the girl and she'd had nothing to do with it at all. That, plus Logan's own confidence that he could beat Scott in a fight if it came down to it, left option three the winner - grab Scott, explain what's what, and give him a merciless ass-kicking if he tries anything. Logan reviewed his logic one last time, and headed down the mountain on his next daily patrol.

He found Scott soon enough - he'd made a shelter of sorts from some branches and must've started a fire using his optic blast. Logan watched him for a few moments before approaching. Part of him wanted to be stealthy and come up on the former X-Men team leader by surprise, but in the end he opted for the straightforward approach. Scott caught sight of Logan walking down the mountain when he was about a hundred yards away. Strangely, Scott didn't seem to be very surprised or bothered by Logan's presence. It was as though they were back at the mansion, and he'd encountered Logan in the hall or in the kitchen. Logan wondered just what the hell that meant.

"You got outta that prison then?" Scott didn't answer, except to cross his arms over his chest and turn away from Logan. "Guess so," Logan observed, taking the opportunity to close the distance between them a little. Scott had the advantage as long as he was out of Logan's claw range, and the strangeness of his response to Logan was unsettling. "Guess you found Xavier too." Scott still said nothing, but took a big breath in and out. "Hadta be done," Logan said firmly, as though that were all the explanation for it that he would ever offer.

"Wanted to do the same thing to Marie. Wasn't gonna let him." A lone, mirthless, bitter laugh tumbled from Scott's lips. He didn't say anything more, he just returned to kneeling by the fire, gazing into it. Logan seated himself a few feet from his former teammate, and settled into watch him. He was sorry to hear about Jean - Logan had always had a little thing for her, but it had been clear that she was Scott's woman. She didn't deserve what Xavier had done to her.

Logan watched him a moment longer before deciding what to do. "Marie and me - we're in a little place over the hill. We're stayin' there, if you need us." Honestly, he didn't want to offer Scott a place any closer than where he'd chosen to set up camp, no matter how sorry he felt for the man, but after what he'd learned, he didn't want to just up and walk away. It wasn't that Scott was a bad man, just irritating and self-righteous. Logan reflected that he seemed much less so at the moment.

As the winter snows intensified and the temperature dropped, Logan made it a point to continue his daily patrol. The distant sounds of explosions and gunfire they'd once heard had been absent for weeks, and Logan doubted that there were now very many left on the outside at all. Still, something in him got him out of bed each morning and down the mountain. Even though each time he patrolled he checked on Scott's makeshift shelter, he told himself his reason for going out was to ensure his safety and Marie's.

Marie was a subject that Logan found himself alternately trying to repress in his thoughts or obsessing over. She'd made small advances - little touches, holding his hand, a kiss on the cheek to test their accidental discovery that her skin no longer posed a threat to him. Marie said she wasn't sure if it was him, something about the touch itself, or whether she'd been so close to death that had neutralized the effect her skin had on Logan. All Logan knew was that his hands and his hands alone were now free to roam her body bare, and that thought was best let loose only here, out in the snowy mountain pass.

He'd vowed to wait until sixteen. Sixteen, definitely. Sixteen, no matter what. But lately, his mind seemed to have turncoated to side with his instincts - it was constantly feeding him endless justifications for not waiting, for going ahead now. Her own little flirtations, innocent and curious, were not helping to bolster his resolve either. He wondered often if she ever noticed his efforts to relieve himself at night, after she was ostensibly asleep. He knew that sometimes he woke her with his heavy breathing and pounding heart - her senses couldn't be any more oblivious than his to those sounds if she still had his powers. He wondered if she realized what he was doing, and more importantly, that it was because of her.

And he wondered why she never did it, or at least never that he'd caught her at. He knew from various comments that she'd made that Sabretooth and Magneto had passed sexual thoughts to her, that some of Sabretooth's involved her as an unwilling participant (a concept he seemed especially fond of), and that she had gotten a stray sexual thought or two from him through their touch. When he asked what his were like, she only blushed and said, "Kind of nice." But he'd never caught her exploring her own body. He hoped that Sabretooth's thoughts hadn't scared her, and, really, he didn't think that was it. She just seemed somehow too shy, too innocent. It's not that Logan wanted to change that; on the contrary. However, he didn't want her to miss out on the joy and pleasure that sexuality would bring her either, and Marie's own exploration of her body and its sexual needs might be a way for her to ready herself for a relationship with him. Of course, he couldn't exactly come right out and suggest that she start touching herself, and he had few other ideas on how to approach the topic.

Marie was actually much less oblivious and much more sexually exploratory than Logan feared. She not only knew what he was doing at night and that it was because of her, she'd noticed that if she did certain things - touch him, snuggle up with him in front of the fire, show her body off a little - the likelihood of him doing it increased dramatically. At first, she'd been awed by the power she had over him and his body, but the more she thought about it, she realized that she shouldn't tease him, shouldn't wield that power to bait him, no matter how subtly she was doing it. She had to wait until she was ready to do a little more than flirt and tease.

And she thought she was becoming ready. The piece of him inside her head was slowly feeding her more and more of his thoughts and fantasies about her, and they were getting more and more advanced and explicit. Marie found the last one he'd let slip through, the one with her lying on the animal-skin bed with his hand between her legs, very arousing. She was actually a little miffed that her inner-Logan had cut it off when he did.

In a way, exploring with inner-Logan was a no-risk, much less scary way of learning about sex than doing so with Logan in the flesh. He could show her things, let her look and feel things, without her worrying about her end of the bargain. And, truth be told, that's the element that made her the most nervous - could she please him, and what would it really be like to be with Logan? Sabretooth seemed to view her sexuality as something for his personal use and abuse; Magneto - well, let's just say that women weren't his thing; and, most damning of all, her own father also saw her as fit for abuse. Even though she had few doubts that Logan harbored any of those same feelings, those experiences hadn't exactly boosted her confidence.

She wondered sometimes if she shouldn't just plunge in all at once; rip off the band-aid instead of peeling it back slowly as it were. After all, it wasn't as though there was any question that she would be Logan's lover. They were virtually the only people left in this part of the country, with the exception of the solitary and morose Scott down the hill. Even if the mountains were filled with mutants, every one of whom she could touch, Marie thought it would still be Logan that she wanted. He'd said a lot when he told her that his loyalty would always be to her; that was *the* critical factor in Marie's estimation. Love, or at least the rush of endorphins and emotions that signal attraction, can fade; lust certainly wanes eventually; even companionship can get old. Loyalty was different, Marie thought, and it was what had been lacking in all of the other 'love' relationships in her life. Her mother, father, friends at school - all of them had at one point or another turned their back on her, sometimes over petty and trivial things. Logan, on the other hand, had laid his life at her feet and would do anything, literally, to keep her safe. He seemed to love her even when it was least convenient for him to do so, and that sealed the deal for Marie. She decided then and there that she would love him the same way.

The ceremony itself was very nice. Marie dressed in a lavender gown that was one of her favorites, and Logan put on his best jeans. They lit candles around the cabin and made the small fireplace mantle into a makeshift altar. Marie promised to love, honor, and cherish her mate, and Logan did the same. They blew out the candles at the end, and began exploring each other in the dark. Even though it was still quite some time before they actually made love, from that day forward, the Wolverine was sated. He finally had his mate.