You Know Me

The usual disclaimer, I don’t own the characters, just borrowing them for my own personal enjoyment. I have to no rights to money etc etc from this story… you know the drill.

You Know Me
By: Dutchess67

Chapter One

Marie’s Room, a dimly lit afternoon, she sits at her desk tapping away on her laptop, lost in thought…

He knew me from the very first moment that our eyes met in that darkened bar room in the frozen North of Canada. And I knew him. There was something lonely in each of us that the other recognized as kindred, even at first glance. We identified silently with each other on a level too elemental to be explained in words. And then I saved him. Oh, he still doesn’t admit that I was of any help and now I know that he would have been fine without me, but at the time, I was certain that I had saved his life. The sight of that knife blade drawing from its sheath is burned forever in my memory. I knew I was about to see a man die. How could I know that he was virtually un-killable? Then he saved me. I was freezing in that trailer keeping company with his motorcycle and I knew he didn’t want anyone’s company, especially mine, but he saved me all the same.

I think I knew from the start that I would love him, but I never thought that he would love me, not even for a moment. The way he called me “kid” just said something to me, it was almost dismissive. And in all fairness, I was a kid when we met. Barely 16 years old and scared as hell, alone for the first time in my life. I was determined to reach Alaska at any cost, but fate had a different path in mind for me, a path that I would never have foreseen.

The first boy I’d kissed had nearly died and I was afraid to let my parents touch me for fear of killing them. The only thing left for me to do had been to leave. The morning after David came out of his coma, when my Father caught me coming down the stairs will live in my memory until the day I die. The relief that was so plain in his eyes when he saw that I was carrying a bag cut straight into my soul leaving a scar that will never heal. My heart bled and my soul screamed in agony that the man responsible for my being on this earth could look at me so. I never looked back.

I haven’t seen my Mother since the call came saying that David was awake. I think she was afraid of me. The way I screamed at her when it happened. The way he seemed to dry up and almost become a husk of the boy he was. The look of horrification on her face petrified me. And I knew that my life would never be the idyllic one that I had known for so long. For more than two weeks nothing was said between us in that house. How could I not know that my only alternative was to seek life on my own? I would never again lie upon my bed feeling the sultry Mississippi breeze drift in through my window as the sound of my Mother’s fingers dancing over piano keys wafted up the stairs to soothe my soul.

There were days when I felt like an emotional wasteland. I was never again to know the touch of another human being upon my skin. Never to know what it felt like to love a man, or to nurse a child. It would leave me bereft if I allowed myself to dwell on it. How is a person supposed to live without something as basic as human contact? How can you let someone close enough to love you if your touch can kill them? How can you let yourself love anyone knowing that something as simple as a kiss could mean death?

Yet I’ve loved him since that very night when I awoke in the night to the sound of his moans. Nightmares were a familiar demon to me and I only wanted to comfort him, to let him know that he wasn’t alone and that the demons in his dreams weren’t going to catch him that night.

When I went into his room there were images of the possibilities of such a situation filling my head, as would be in the mind of any teenage girl who was entering the bedroom of someone that she had a crush on. Images of his hands upon my skin and flashes of things that was I too naïve to consider swam in my head. I may be a freak of nature, but on that score I’m normal.

When the snick of his claws unsheathing rent the silence I knew that our lives would never be the same. The searing pain of those adamantium blades piercing my body was unimaginably white hot and all consuming. My lungs no longer functioned with that metal invading them. I could not draw breath and my heartbeat began to slow, even as it tried to race with panic. Everything that I was or would ever be was coming to an end and the only means of preventing that had been to borrow his power. Only it wasn’t just his power that I got.

Everything that was or ever had been Logan came into me that night. I understood him in a way that I didn’t even understand myself. I didn’t sleep that night. I was too preoccupied by the memories that were invading me. Memories that weren’t my own.

I knew how it felt to be a man. In my mind was the memory of Logan making love to a woman and the all-consuming climax that he had experienced left me breathless. Just the memory had the power to make me tremble. What woman wouldn’t love to know what a man’s climax felt like? I could, just for that night, recall how it felt to have no breasts and to have male genitalia. An odd feeling, as I recall.

Those memories faded with time. The images became impressions, but the knowledge of the man remained. I could not forget the tenderness of the memories of him lying with a woman. The way he touched her and kissed her stays with me to this day. I don’t know who that mysterious woman was and her identity doesn’t matter. It was long before I met him. What made the impression on my young heart was the tenderness that such a man displayed and that the harshness that he wears like a second skin was gone from him completely. How I’ve longed to know that gentle touch upon my own skin all of these years.

I still have the occasional nightmare of Logan’s own personal hell, vague images of water tanks and surgical knives. I can see men toasting his pain and feel the helpless outrage of his experience, but I can remember no more of that time than he himself can.

The blades left no scars upon my skin, a benefit of Logan’s healing powers, but the marks upon my soul will forever remain. That night was almost ten years ago. Long years of toiling for the good of all mutants have passed since that night, years of loneliness and solitude.

I am one of Professor Charles Xavier’s X-Men. I joined them on the eve of my nineteenth birthday and I have never once regretted it. Professor Xavier has worked diligently with me to help me gain a certain amount of control over my powers, something that I needed desperately in hopes of gaining some sense of normalcy in my life, though I am, in truth, far from normal. He has become a surrogate father to me and I respect him as I can few in this world. Yet a balance between my life as one of the X-Men and my life as a woman had to be found somewhere before the X-Man became all that I was.

For six years now I’ve been working to leash my powers and, finally, I have met with a certain amount of success. I have been able to hold the Professor’s hand for well over an hour to no ill effects for either of us. It has taken time, but I finally feel like I can be quasi normal. I have kept our successes a private matter between Professor Xavier and myself, as I want desperately to be certain that it will be something that I can control and maintain. I could not bear to reveal it to anyone before I know that I can maintain the threadlike sense of control that I have gained.

The Professor seems to think that, given time to gain greater control over my powers, that I might, one day, be able to reverse the flow of energy and possibly become a conduit to transfer powers from one person to the next. Such a gift is a scary thing to consider. For so long I fought to cope with the repercussions of the lethal gift that I already possessed. To be able to take someone’s life with only a touch of my hand is an awesome responsibility, I can only imagine what it would be like to be able to bestow powers upon someone else. In many ways, I think that simply gaining control of the flow of energy in my body is enough. I have no desire to become so powerful. I long so for simplicity in my life. I long for the things that other people take for granted. I long to be loved by a man who would treasure me above all things and show me a tenderness more incredibly beautiful than any I’ve ever known… I long for Logan.

I do plan to share my news with Logan… eventually. I feel that there are many issues that he and I must confront and the time is growing near. I know he loves me. I can see it in his eyes when he looks at me and feel it in the way he watches over me. Rarely a day has gone by since he returned from Alkali Lake that he has not seen me or spoken to me, making certain that I am well, even if he‘s away searching for clues he manages to call. He’s never forgotten to keep the promise that he made on a darkened train to take care of me just moments before Magneto drugged me and stole me away, while Logan growled with the agony of helplessness that he had only known once before in his life, a victim of the metal fused to his skeleton. I have never forgotten the agony he felt and transferred to me that night when he held me in his arms atop Lady Liberty’s torch and touched his fingers to my skin, thinking all the while that I was dead and lost to him forever because he had failed to reach me in time. In my heart, I believe that, if it hadn’t been for his touch upon my barely living skin, that I would have died that night in the cold wind atop that copper statue. The pain that rent his soul will stay with me forever, intangible proof of feelings he may never admit to.

He’s left for months on end in search of clues to a past that still eludes him, but he always returns to me. I am always the first and last face he sees as he comes and goes, always the one to receive his calls in the middle of the night, feeding his need to reconnect and hear a voice that cares for him, always here for him. I am the one person that he knows will be here waiting, no matter how long his search drags him away from me. I am the one person that he knows would climb onto that bike behind him and head out into the unknown with only the crook of a finger, not because I expect anything, but simply because he wanted me to.

I love Logan. It seems that it has always been thus and so shall it remain for eternity. I wish…



Marie was startled from her reverie at the sound of a knock on her door. She clicked on save and closed the journal file in her laptop before lowering the screen until the locking mechanism clicked. She cinched the tie on her robe closer and rose from the chair behind her desk drawing her gloves on with a frown to answer the door.

When she turned the lock and opened the door she was surprised to see Scott standing in the hallway, his usually formal demeanor seemed particularly stiff. Unless you knew him you wouldn’t be able to tell that he was uncomfortable, but after ten years, she could see it immediately. There was something wrong.

“Hey, Scott. What’s up?”

“Sorry to bother you, Rogue, but there’s someone here to see you. Professor Xavier asked me to come for you.” No expression showed on his face and he held himself still as a statue. He exuded nervousness, something that was certainly a rarity for him.

“What‘s wrong, Scott? Who is it?”

“I don’t know, Rogue, but the Professor asked that I bring you downstairs right away.”

“Alright. I‘ll just be a few minutes..” She started to close the door, but paused. “You don’t have any idea who it is?”

“No. I’ve never seen her before.”

“Her?”

“An older woman.”

Marie nodded her thanks and closed the door with a frown, wondering who on earth could possibly be there to see her. In all the years that she had been at the institute there she had never had a visitor that hadn’t been expected and even those few had been rare.

Fifteen minutes later Marie skimmed quietly down the massive staircase, her movements fluidly graceful and virtually silent as she rounded the corner to the door of Professor Xavier’s office, her trademark black silk scarf trailing on the air behind her. She knocked quietly and opened the door when the Professor’s voice, ~Come in, Rogue~ bade her enter in her mind.

Nothing could have prepared her for the sight of her Mother sitting across from Charles Xavier. She felt the blood rush from her face and felt with a certainty that she was about to faint. Her Mother looked so much older. The long brown hair that had once been her Mother’s pride was gone, replaced over the years by shorter graying locks more suited to an elderly woman. “Mama?”