[Wolverine]

That was all he needed. For someone to tell him no. For someone to tell him that the right thing for him to do was wait. Even if it was Jean, even if there was a possibility that she was right. But no. No, he'd waited too long, too long for everything, and he'd be damned if he was going wait even another minute more.

So he didn't. He heard the news that Laura was once more bound in the arms of the mansion, that both she and Pup had returned and been cared for, convinced into such a secure state by the woman who so occupied all of him. He made sure that Carol was safe in the care of Jean, that she’d have food and clothes and a shower. There was a room with a roof and four walls, as well as a promise that come morning he’d be there for her, he’d be there for them all. To Laura he’d make up the months he’d missed, to Carol he’d help her to find what had been lost. To all of them he’d make the sacrifice of time that he had infinite amounts of, vowing to do what needed to be done, and doing it whatever the cost.

Tomorrow, he’d do it all.

Tonight, though, he existed for someone else entirely.

All of the women in his life were mirrors or dilutions of women that came before them, or the women that would soon follow. With the memories that he now had, with the lifetimes of experience that he possessed, he could see the pattern, using a mind more often bent towards the tactical and the strategic to see that which he’d lived through, that which he’d done, and that which he’d repeat again. Blonde or redheaded or brunette, they were all just slivers of each other, and none of them were original or unique, nothing set them apart from the rest of the world, or the memories that came before or after. None of them except for her.

If he’d had all of his memories earlier, if he’d realized such a thing before, maybe then things would have been different, maybe then he wouldn’t have stayed silent so long, maybe he wouldn’t have allowed himself to be so easily distracted by the life that came his way. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Nothing could change what had passed by, though, and part of Logan, the accepting, realistic part, knew that he wouldn’t even given the opportunity. They all had their paths in the world, their reasons, fate though he’d never been one to be sure he believed in it. All the little bits of fuck ups and wants for mulligans were what made everyone what they were. Scars and all, bumps and bruises. Logan might not always like who he was, what he’d done in his life, but he accepted it, and in this he’d be no different.

Or at least that was what he told himself as the bare sole of his foot came into contact with the worn wood which made up the stairs to her loft. If he was too late here, if he’d screwed up too badly and she’d never forgive him, if she wouldn’t ….

He’d been there before. Dozens of times, hundreds. She was his closest companion and confidant, the woman, the person he went to for everything good or bad. It was she he’d gone to when he’d found out about Laura, furious and excited and scared that he’d fuck it all up. That he’d fuck her up and ruin her, this young thing that was his but that wasn’t, this girl that he needed to protect from the bad of the world like he’d never needed to protect anything before.

He’d been there the night that Shawn had died, three years prior, some brave kid who’d only been at the mansion a few months, some silly mutant that didn’t know any better. She’d been there, too, as Logan gouged holes in her floor with impotent claws, Shawn’s blood still tacky on his arms. Tears borne of frustration and rage had run over his cheeks then, soaking into the cloth of his uniform, a mask he hadn’t even taken the time to remove as he’d sprinted from the basement to her rooms, crashing through the door and reaching for her.

She’d seen him like no one else had, seen parts of him that Logan hadn’t even known had existed, and she’d taken that and broken him. Remembering her choice, the tone of her voice, the steal of her eyes as she picked Scott’s option over his, Logan paused on the landing, feeling the own echo of his heartbreak, the reflection of a betrayal.

Damn, he’d never been more stupid. In that moment she’d had a choice. Betray him, or betray the children, and she chose the choice that she would choose, taking the option that so made her who she was, that made her Ororo Munroe, the woman he loved. The children would always come first, always, and for a moment he hadn’t been okay with that. And in that moment he hadn’t been okay with her.

No. In the end, looking back on the cold and metallic moment, a moment that would forever change their lives, it had been he who’d so done the betraying, he who’d not accepted her for her she was.

Her door was solid before him, foreboding. Dozens of times he’d just walked in, and if this had been before, before it all, he would have, growled something about needing a beer and let himself in, fresh from a mission, or an adventure, or just a night away. It was after now, though, and that alone made it all different.

Dirt clung to his skin, and Scott’s too slender sweats pulled tightly at his hips. There were no shoes, and there was no shirt, but he didn’t mourn the loss of clothing. She’d seen him in less, she’d seen him worse. Well. Almost. Gingerly his fingers went to his scalp, looking for hair that was no longer there, feeling the alert points of the quarter inch that existed. Never a man to be truly vain, never a man to really give a damn, Logan suddenly felt insecure. His hair.

Now or never time, the jump zone, those seconds when you had to go, to do it, or the chance would be lost. He’d already lost enough of them, chances, seconds, moments, and he wouldn’t loose another as he stood and worried about the state of his hair. With a breath he cleared his throat, removing the dust and ozone that so remained from his flight back to the mansion, with fluidity of movement he raised his hand, fingers curling into a fist which rapped sharply at the wood before him. “Ororo?” He called hoarsely, loud enough so that she could hear him, soft enough so that others wouldn’t, using her full name for the first time since … ever. “You in there?”

[Storm]

Ororo was no telepath to sense when people returned to the Institute, returned home. She was not someone whose mind could receive messages or warning of the impending arrival of those who had fled from here, taking pieces of her in the process. She was not Jean, essentially. And had she been aware of all that was falling into place on the frosted lawn behind the Institute, she may have felt something she had never felt for her heart-sister before in her life. Jealousy.

But as it was, circumstance made a mockery of all that was important in her existence. For, while a new chain of destiny birthed itself in her life, Ororo was blasé enough to be asleep. Such important events and revelations were occurring and the woman slept, having sought an early night a few hours ago. She had gone to bed with the lingering memory of Aiden's goodnight kiss upon her lips and the calm certainty that tomorrow would be steady and consistent in its routine. Because what would change? What could change between the dusk of one day and the dawn of another that would wreak havoc on the precarious harmony that had grown up in her life?

Everything, apparently.

Complacent in sleep and dreams and the winding labyrinth of her own sub-conscious, Ororo was roused from slumber. She shivered awake, started into consciousness, and her silver hair fell like snowfall around her bare shoulders as she sat up. The light sheet that was her only cover at night fell to settle in the curve of her waist, revealing an expanse of brown skin that looked black in the leeching light of the moonlight. She slept bare, always had and always would, her room the last sanctuary in which she was free to be comfortable in her own skin after a younger version of Jean had finally persuaded her that nudity was not appropriate in this closeted, curious western world.

Her eyes blinked away already-forgotten dreams and it was with a sleep-muddled mind that her ears caught the dying cadences of a voice at her door, of a knock on polished wood. She was hazy with sleep, still with a foot in the realm of her Bright Lady it felt like, but her lips knew enough to shape a familiar, bitter line.

Even in dreams, she was remembering him apparently, to imagine hearing his voice upon waking.

The ache in her breast was an old one by now. Logan's ghost still haunted her, ingrained as he was into her memories of this place, of her home. She had known many of her peers for longer than him and Scott and Jean and Hank certainly had the oldest places in her heart and head. But Logan...he was so full in her memories that he could not be ignored. In scent (clean sweat, tobacco, the smell of cold metal on a winter wind), in sound (gruff laughter, grumbled resignation, the way his tongue took the syllables of her name and made them his own), in touch (hugs, a thousand hugs, the way his skull felt beneath her fingers when she laid her hand on his head like forgiveness, like sympathy, like love) he was there. She could not escape him. He was, in so many ways, etched onto her heart, as if he'd taken those adamantium claws of his and carved his mark on who she was.

He was her friend. Her best friend.

Was.

Clinically, Ororo knew it was because of her guilt that she rounded corners and expected to see him, looked towards his cabin and was surprised to see its windows dark, woke up hearing his voice. She wanted to see him and missed him with an aching, miserable dullness that had not decreased in intensity over time. She found happiness in others - in her students and Jean, in the returned Scott and her new and strange bond with Charles, in Aiden, in Aiden the most. And yet she missed him because Ororo's heart had always been divided into very separate pieces and one of those was infinitely, indelibly his. That would not have changed, could not have changed, and that meant that when she was the one to drive him away, in doing so she let a piece of her heart slip out of her life.

'Foolish, foolish woman,' she told herself, slipping out of bed - even if it couldn't be him because she was pathetic enough to be imagining ghosts of people she had betrayed coming back to knock on her door, there had still been a noise to rouse her from her rest and she was used to being disturbed at odd hours by necessity, by students, by Scott calling the X-men together because trouble did not restrict itself to working hours. 'Everything else has righted itself in your life and you still persist in acting as if you are the wounded party in this.'

Because she wasn't. Because she had been the betrayer. Because she had looked her best friend in the eye and told him that the cause, that the school, that her children were more important than him. She had made a decision as Storm and not as Ororo and, in the process, she had lost him.

And she had deserved to.

'But you have Laura,' she reminded herself. 'And Charles. And Scott. People do come back.' And even as she pulled her robe on over her nudity, white silk so very stark against the rich darkness of her skin, she allowed herself one moment of wistfulness...for if people came back, why had he not? Familiar worry sparked within her for she had promised a weeping Laura, a girl who would have found her way into Ororo's heart as a daughter even were it not for her connection to the missing man they both loved, that she would find him? 'And what if he does want to be found, but not by you?' Jean had seemed firm in her belief that he would return, but Ororo had not been as sure. Not when she'd seen the wounded look in his eyes, heard the condemnation in his voice, had witnessed the severing of any fondness he had had towards her.

If Logan came back, it would not be to her.

But these were self-pitying thoughts. Only in these dark, ambiguous hours of the morning would she even let herself think these and Ororo shook her hair free of the neck of the robe in an effort to also shake some sense back into herself. The garment gaped loosely at her neck a little and draped over the bold curves of her hips, but it covered what was necessary and Ororo had always been the slightest bit impatient with these western attitudes towards 'shame'. She was thinking of the fights she'd had with Jean when they were both much younger as she walked towards the door, hurrying a little in case whatever lay on the other side was urgent - a sick student, a summons from Scott, Linda caught in the aftermath of another nightmare - and laid her hand on the door knob to open it.

It was then that she knew. She could not explain how, for she was no Jean, no Charles, no one with any power to sense who lay on the other side of a closed door. And yet somehow - impossibly, inexplicably, she knew. And she froze, struck by a revelation as if it was one of her own lightning bolts.

What did you do when faced with a dream come true?

What did you do when faced with your own greatest sin?

What did you do when your hand trembled and your breath caught in your throat and your heart thundered in your chest in anticipation of this one, suspended moment? The one that waited for you on the other side of the door?

...you opened the door.

Even in spite of the burning, impossible knowledge lodged behind her breastbone, Ororo hadn't let herself believe it until she saw him. Not until the timeless familiarity of his face could etch itself onto her eyes after so long, after too long, after longer than she thought she could have ever borne it and yet she had.

Ororo Munroe stared at Logan with aching eyes, wide and unbelieving and hopeful and terrified and raw. She stared at him with all of her shields ripped away from her by the visceral shock that came from having him here again. He'd been a ghost in her life for so long that the sight of him, the knowledge that here he was was physically painful.

She stared at him - took in the lack of shirt and shoes, the shorn head, the features she knew by heart - and her heart broke in a way that it somehow hadn't while he'd been gone. Logan leaving had not shattered her all the way. No, it was Logan returning that did that.

So instead of apologising, instead of embracing him, instead of allowing herself to just be glad that he was here, that he wasn't dead, Ororo's hand rose to cover her mouth and it wasn't until hot wetness splashed over her fingers that she even knew she was weeping.

What do you do when faced with all that you've ever needed when it comes to you too late?

You cry.

[Wolverine]

Sometimes superpowers could be forgotten. Sometimes when other things were more important, when there were distractions, mental and physical, it was easy to fail to acknowledge those little extras that had been with one for a lifetime. Or lifetimes. As Logan stood before her door, the wood solid and strong, no more than three inches thick, separating them from one another as his own flaws had done for years, he so forgot to pay attention to the gifts that he possessed. Just as one might look for their glasses while wearing them, or inquire after the location of their phone while speaking on it. Such things were natural and human, but still they were weaknesses, flaws.

Later, afterwards, he would feel foolish. In the morning he’d make excuses for his own stupidity, for not being aware of his surroundings. He’d blame exhaustion, adrenaline, preoccupation. Standing there, though, as sure and true as the entryway before him, the blood in his veins thrummed at the sudden remembrance as color rushed to cheeks that were far too pale, skin having been banished from sunlight for months on end. Sound flooded into his senses, sound that had always been there, able for him to hear, but sound that was so easily ignored. The rhythm of her heart as she slept, steadily accelerating as broke the surface of her dreams, coming once again into the world of the living.

She had heard him, his knock, his voice, and yet she failed to respond. She was awake, that much he knew, able as he was to hear her as she breathed in and out, able as he was to hear the almost silent rustle of her sheet as it fell to rest where it did. What was she waiting for? Why didn’t she respond? Had he screwed up so bad that she wouldn’t even tell him to leave?

Reaching out for the only thing he could, Logan’s fingers splayed across the pattern of polished wood, his thoughts racing along with the pounding of his heart, the surface cool and firm, whereas she would be warm and soft.

Ororo.

How could he so loose her? To find himself, to find Carol, to find once more his home. To find all of that, but find it without her … such rediscoveries would be meaningless.

The silence, however, one that haunted him as it drew out, her breathing and her heartbeat the only sound in a house than slumbered, it did not last. Soon, but not soon enough to save him from the anxiety of having lost it all, soon more rustling followed, the fall of one graceful footstep and then another, the swish of silken hair.

Her hair, her smile, the angles of her face. How all of these things had keep him sane as he was so suspended in his capture, how all that was her had saved all that was him. She couldn’t know how much she meant to him, how important she was, how stupid he’d been to brush all of it off, all of what he felt off, allowing it to be for the better. He’d tell himself that he hadn’t realized, that he had been blind to it until he was able to reclaim all of his past, but that would be a blatant lie. He’d always known, always, from the moment some years after they’d met one another.

It was a simple thing, his great revelation, and one to which he’d never admit. She’d been walking across the grounds, that was all, and he’d been seated against a tree, enjoying the sun and the outside, blade of grass hanging lazily from his lips, book left forgotten in his lap. She’d been there for a reason that was her own, and they hadn’t even spoken, she hadn’t even stopped. But she did smile at him, an upward pull of her lips as she walked by, something that she likely did to everyone else, a smile that she shared with the rest of the world. But for him it was everything. In that smile, that one alone, he realized that he loved her.

Fear was a funny thing, and courage even funnier. They say that courage isn’t a lack of fear, no that was just stupidity. Courage is the ability to face those fears, to face them and soldier on.

With Ororo he’d always been a coward.

He’d said it was better, thought it, hiding behind other women, hiding behind things that were easier. He could loose her, he reasoned, loose what they’d had. And it was true, it would have been a risk to the strange utopia of friendship that they’d built. But now, now it was different. Now they’d already lost it, the dynamic had shifted and the world had changed. As she approached the door, one step after another, Logan knew he’d be a coward no more. No hiding behind lust, no waiting for another moment.

Now or never time.

Shock went up his spine as the knob turned, the moment and movement stretching out into eternity, a moment that he couldn’t wait to be over. A moment that ended with her standing before him, eyes of brilliant blue expressing wordlessly handfuls of things as he simply stared back. What did you say in a moment like this? The one that you’d be waiting for? The one that you knew eventually had to happen?

Elegant and slender fingers fluttered to her face as the sharp smell of tears permeated the air. Seconds, he’d only been there seconds, and already he was making her cry. Soundlessly he moved his lips, having so much to say and no way to say them. Words just weren’t enough.

Slowly he reached for her, his fingers blunt and short in comparison to hers, stocky like the rest of him, rough where she was all polish. Her hands were what he sought, bringing them to his mouth, kissing away her tears as if that could somehow make it better. She was perfect, she was everything, and he wasn’t. The weight of it all was too much, the emotion too great, and suddenly he was sinking to the floor. Still he clung to her, to her hands, holding them to his cheek as he fell to his knees, leaning into her, using her for support as he had all those months prior, as he had before he’d ruined it all. Face pressed into the flat planes of her stomach, the stubble of his face scratching against the silk of her robe, Logan begged for forgiveness, silently but not, the soundless movements of his lips against her hands saying more than he was able to.

[Storm]

It was very easy to say what Logan had once been to her if Ororo was asked - he was her friend. Maybe her truest one. Because Jean and Scott and Hank had grown up with her, but Logan had chosen to make her a part of his life and Ororo would liked to have thought that it was she who had helped temper his adjustment to life at the Institute when he'd arrived. It was she who had quietly been there for him while he chased over Jean, sympathetic even as she made it clear that she stood by the relationship she had seen her friends craft from when they were children. She had soothed him when he was feral and chided him when he was too antagonistic towards Scott. She had fed him and laughed with him and found more quiet, bottomless contentment in his presence than she would have ever first guessed. She did what friends did with him.

And yet, actually defining to herself what the wild man was to her...that was most impossible.

She wasn't Jean, a woman for men to instantly love. She knew that. Ororo honoured her oldest friend's beauty (inside and out) and understood why men wanted her. Why Logan had wanted her. Did want her. It had been with almost sad amusement that she'd watched the three of them - Scott and Logan and Jean in the middle - dance around each other, even as she'd supported them all as best as she could. It had been from that, she thought, that hers and Logan's friendship had formed, born out of the ashes of any hope he'd ever had with Jean. She had empathised with the man who had wanted more than he could have and it was in her nature to offer comfort wherever she could.

It was not easy to define what she was to Logan. It was, however, easy to define what she was not. She was not his lover. She was not one of his women, his conquests. She was not someone he flirted with with any real intent - not like Jean, or Betsy, or the women whose perfume she could still smell on his skin the morning after he'd snuck away from the Institute to some smoky bar - only for fun. Because they were friends. Because that was how Logan communicated.

And Ororo was okay with that, mostly, because it set her apart. Even if it felt as if she was the one woman in the world he had never made a pass at, she was his friend and that was an honour she did not treat casually. He was not a man to trust easily and yet, somehow, she had earned that, that and an openness and an honesty that she did not actually know whether anyone else in the world got to see. She had made it clear that her door was always open to him and he had taken her up on that so many times in the past that the sensation of looping her cool arms around his warmer skin to soothe him was so deeply ingrained into her sense-memory that it was as familiar to her as her own face.

It was better like that. Really. Because even if there was something in both of them that did not like being contained by these cages of stone and steel, that yearned for chasing horizons and the rawness of the elements, even if he was a man who appealed to the baser instincts at the heart of herself, Ororo had always summarily dismissed it as an impossibility. She was not a woman that he lusted after or wanted in that way and, yes, maybe it made her inferior to the beautiful women that he took to his bed (or wanted to), but it also set her apart. They worked because he needed her and she needed him - his durability, his intensity, the way he of all people had always been best at making her forget her hauteur and responsibilities and her past to convince her to live and laugh in the moment - and anything else...it would have ruined it.

She was his friend. And she would have done anything for him. Or so she thought until it came down to a choice between him and the safety of the Institute. One person, her one most important person, and all of her people.

In the end, Ororo Munroe had been proved a liar and a Judas, and Logan had left the Institute. Had left her. And in doing so he proved to Ororo that being the one woman he could be truly friends with because he didn't want to bed her wasn't enough to have kept him here.

...and yet here he was and his return would forever taste of salt to her as tears were her first reaction to his face filling her vision. She had wanted him to come home, had needed him to come home and yet why was the sight of him breaking her heart? She had thought that she would have given anything to have him come home because then they could pick up where they had left off, going back to normal, as if nothing had changed.

Except it had.

Ororo Munroe's heart broke because it took losing something to make you realise how much you needed it. It had taken losing Logan to make her think that, no, she hadn't been content always waiting for him to come back to her as he occupied himself elsewhere. That she had only been okay being the patient one, the untouched one, the unwanted one because she'd always been so complacent that, at the end of the day, when he washed those women from his skin, he would come back to his friend, the one who really mattered. And so long as Ororo had felt as if their friendship was as important to him as it was to her, she had been content...

Then he had gone and that complacency had fallen in on itself. Losing Logan had ripped something out of her, something base and essential. It had rocked the foundations of who she was at heart and Logan's absence had taken an independent woman and made her crumble a little with the realisation that she needed to not be alone. And that she hadn't been, not with Logan by her side, only she hadn't known that.

But now he was back and the pieces should have fit, but they didn't. Because Ororo had changed. Because Ororo had grown. Because Ororo had done her best to move on and--.

All of this roared behind her eyes and this was why she cried. The realisation that his homecoming could never be the solution that she had wanted it to be. That him being here again would not be simple, could not be simple, that the easy and effortless option of being Logan's friend was denied to her.

And there was a brief, jagged moment where she wished he hadn't come back and made her realise that the comfortable, trusting certainty of what they had once had was lost to them forever. While he was gone, she could have let herself hope that things would go back to normal. But confronted with him and the burning, aching want in her chest and the knowledge that she could not have him...that hurt more than losing his presence ever had.

So she cried. And so he reacted to her tears as he always had, and Ororo shivered and stung as he touched her. It was bitter and sweet and it stabbed her to the core, all at once. It was too much, too too much and she wanted to pull away. She wanted to throw herself at him. She wanted to go back in time and make sure this never happened, that he never left, that nothing changed. She wanted to go back even further and not let him make her the only woman he'd never wanted enough to try.

Ororo simply wanted...and she didn't know what.

There was a storm inside of her and it was not one she could hope to have controlled. With his lips on her skin and his eyes and her and guilt, guilt, shame running through her, Ororo was unravelling at the seams. They hadn't even said anything and his presence alone was enough to tear her apart and it was unbearable, intolerable, too much to take when he was her weakness made human...

Except Ororo Munroe was only weak when others were strong, when they had no need of her. She hadn't been going to bend, to let herself touch him as he was so clearly willing to touch her...and then he broke first. All in silence, aching and impossible silence, but Ororo was faced with what she did to him and it was enough to make her selfless once more.

She and whatever lay between them...it brought him to his knees and how could it be that she could humble him so? Ororo stood there as his lips shaped sorrow against her palms and knew she had a choice once more - protect her own heart, her happiness, her life that she had built in his absence...or protect him.

And because she was Ororo - teacher, mother, darlin' - she also knew it wasn't a choice.

Her free hand tried to tangle in his hair, forgetting that there was none to twine her fingers in as she had done so many times before, and she blinked down at him in momentary helplessness. His face was buried in her stomach, pressed against the silk and skin of her abdomen, and he made her ache with the realisation that he had missed her. He made her hurt with relief, with the knowledge that he did not hate her, and the logistics and semantics and everything could be left for later.

In this moment, it was just 'Logan, Logan, Logan' in her head and nothing else was as important as the fact that he was here. Whatever else happened after this, whatever wrack and ruin of balance he represented, he was here.

Logan had fallen to his knees, but Ororo willingly went to them. Like this, they were almost of a height, and she freed her hands to find his chin, to cradle his pale face in her palms. She looked at him, felt him and it was with a happiness that was sharp enough to be agony that she finally let herself see him.

Ororo wept still and her eyes were bright with tears, her cheeks wet with saltwater. But she looked at him, really looked at him and made no secret of the sorrow and joy and pain that all greeted his return. It was not a perfect thing or an easy thing and his presence here hurt her. And yet she held his face in her hands and crowded close and laid her forehead against his...

...and sighed, like a slave finally allowed to put down a heavy burden. It was weakening, desperate, relieved as she let herself trust that he was back here with them, that whatever else his return heralded, he was here. Ororo closed her eyes then and her fingers tightened slightly against his face, one thumb sweeping over the corner of his mouth and he was solid beneath her touch, solid and familiar and alive.

Only then did she realise she was talking. Low and rushed and pleading. "--can't do that to me again," she heard herself saying. "You can't go away. You can't leave me ever again."

In this moment she was selfish and thought only of herself, of the damage his absence had done to her. But, in this moment, it truly was just her and him. Ororo and Logan. And as much as she could not have him, not the way they'd once been, in this moment he was hers and hers alone.

[Wolverine]

In all of his life, in all of the years that he had lived, never had anyone accused Logan, sometimes James, often The Wolverine, of being a man capable of intimacy. He’d been lustful, wanting and needing to the core of him, aching for someone or something; passionate, willing and ready to give or do anything to achieve his goals, to obtain what he so sought; intense, going after it all with a lack of self-preservation, accepting and overcoming whatever may so stand in the way. He’d been all of these things, all of that and more, but never had he been so bare, so open and so true. Never in his hundred years had he so exposed the entirety of himself to one person, one woman who he so cared for, loved. Never more than he did in that moment, cloth covered knees coming into contact with the worn wood of her threshold, him half in and out of her rooms, still not quite having crossed the boundary, the lines, that last obstacle which so remained.

Not yet, not yet, not yet.

Fingers that he knew flexed against his scalp, him able to feel the hesitation in her touch, the shock at what was missing, at what should have been there. Several times since his awaking Logan had done the same, but it would grow back. With time all things did, all things grew and healed. All things, but maybe this.

She had not rejected him, and she had not banished him from her sight, but she had yet to forgive him, to accept his return, and even as he felt her touch his own uncertainty still remained. Never had they been like this, never had such a rift formed. They had always been so together, in sync, inseparable, even through all the small fights and the big, the disagreements and the differences in opinion. They had been friends, companions, more. But could even that overcome all of this? Could it survive through his leaving and his extended absence?

Even if it did, even if it would, could he even then be bold enough to ask for more?

In an instant his hands were empty and for a second the warmth of her was gone. A heartbeat, a lifetime, a pause in which he was alone and drifting, only to be grounded as she came to him once more, knees bent to the same angle of his own, the silk of her palms against the roughness of his face. Contact, so much contact, and he was drowning in her, drowning in the woman that was his only lifeline. How had he been so foolish, how had he waited so long?

The scent of her surrounded him, the smell before rain, sharp and promising and clean. And in that, in that moment as she knelt before him and wept, clinging to his face with hands that he loved as much as the woman to whom they belonged, Logan felt himself cleansed. Just as rain would come and wash away detritus from the earth, so did her mere presence rid him of the horrors that his most recent journey had so left him with. It was no cure all, no salve which would save him from the nightmares that would come, but as she leaned her forehead to his, skin touching skin, the sweetness of her breath ghosting across his face, Logan found some peace, some relaxation, freedom from the sterile smells and incurable cold which had so filled his metal-ridden bones. He was still dirty and tired and worn, the wetness from the transfer of her tears leaving trails against his skin, but he was clean, clean and free and once more saved by her.

For it had been she who had always saved him. It had always been her which had so reminded him of a humanity that he sometimes lost. She had been the one to bring him back to himself, to quiet the animal within, to show him the rest of what the world had to offer.

Without Ororo, Logan would have never found the joy of a child’s laugh.

Without her, he would be nothing.

How had he been such a fool?

“Never.” He agreed roughly to her words, words that he was so relieved to hear her finally speak, words that left him wanting to say more, wanting, but unable. “Never.” He repeated again, shaking his head against her own, fingers moving to find her face, tracing the strength of her jaw, the sharpness of a cheekbone, the line of her hair. White. Hair that was silken and glowed in the moonlight, hair which begged to be touched, leaving Logan with an ache that he couldn’t resist as his fingers carded deeper, combing through unruly and sleep tossed strands. It felt as he might have imagined, as he remembered from brief and accidental touches, but never like this, never with such purpose, never with such meaning.

“Ororo.” Her name fell as a whisper from his lips, soft and hesitant, the wholeness of it used again in such a moment, in a time when half of anything would not be enough. “Darlin’.” The fingers in her hair tightened as he broke free from her own grasp, leaning back enough to see her, to allow the moonlight to spill across his field of vision, further illuminating what he’d so been waiting for, what he’d so kept himself from.

Coward. Traitor. Failure.

Words were not his forte, never had been, never would be, and in this night, in this moment it would be no different. Words would not be what he used.

Her lips were soft beneath his, soft and warm and wet with the saltwater that she had shed, tears that he had caused her to cry. Never had he kissed her, never had he crossed the line between their friendship and the other possibility, the seriousness and the promises that lingered further on. He’d kissed other women when he shouldn’t have, and had regretted it, but here he only regretted in having waited for so long.

[Storm]

She would have been content to stay like that for longer, eyes closed and the removal of sight doing what it could to keep reality at bay. If she couldn't see the world then it couldn't intrude on them right now, it couldn't remind her that it wasn't like her to be so...selfish. Or so focussed on one person. With her eyes closed and the roughness of his jaw beneath her softer palms, it was easy to lose herself in the perfect, aching quality of the moment. And Ororo let herself forget all that she owed to the world beyond the circle of their touch.

Ororo shivered with agreement when he made a promise out of one word, shivered as his voice and his honesty made her veins run with molten relief, hot and burning and not necessarily pleasant, but intense. There was so much about this that cut both ways - the burning behind her eyes, the newness of the quality to the way she could touch him, all that was different and strange and welcome and not. She wanted this. She didn't. She wanted him and how could she have refused to let herself see this until now? How could she have not known that he meant more to her than she'd thought?

Or maybe it wasn't more. Maybe this was just the natural culmination of something they'd always known. Maybe she hadn't before and now she did. Maybe this was just his homecoming playing havoc on her heart, and the endless string of maybes marched through her like an invading army.

A thousand maybes and just this one certainty - that she wanted him to stay, needed him to stay, felt like the wick at the core of a flame in his presence. Ororo did not have the mental faculties now to examine the complicated, uncertain snarl of what they'd been to each other in the Before time, but now, now, after he'd ripped his way into the fragile life she'd been building around the foundation of the emptiness that his absence had represented...

She shuddered slightly beneath his touch and it was as if he touched rawer, more vulnerable things than her cheek, her hair. This was something they'd done a thousand times before, the casual brush of his skin against her own and it hadn't meant anything then. But this newness, this...intensity. It scorched her and scalded her. It hurt, sucked the breath out of her lungs, and yet it sustained her. And Ororo could not hope to unravel the maelstrom at the heart of her, all of the conflict that he evoked within her, but she could at least look at him even as he said her name. Her full name. That was enough to make her open her eyes.

He never called her Ororo and her name on his tongue made her lips part, made the air still briefly in her lungs and she looked at him with eyes that were wet but no longer crying, truly looked at him. She saw her friend and comrade, her confidant and companion, the man she'd always trusted to have her back until he didn't. She saw the man who'd left, the man she'd driven away, the man who was now inexplicably back.

She saw the man who'd wanted every woman but her.

It unsettled her this newness, this intensity, the way she who was so used to being untouchable felt pulled towards him with every atom of her being. She had simply wanted him home for so long that she hadn't realised she wanted him and that hurt. The indignity of it, the fickleness, the weak woman it made her into when she realised that she was no better than the rest of them. She had valued being different and she wasn't and that meant that she'd failed him. Because Ororo had been certain that her importance to him had rested on the fact that she was simple, that his relationship with her had none of the complexities of the women he tumbled, that he could rely on her to be the one to not let him mess up what they had by wanting him when she was meant to be his safe haven.

It felt as if, in wanting him, in realising she wanted him, Ororo herself was the one who had ruined this. And that slammed into her heart like a spear, even as he murmured a much more familiar name. He pulled away from her (and she already missed that familiar, unfamiliar closeness) to let the moonlight fall between them and her full mouth was bitter, unhappy, ashamed. Because he was going to want to see Ororo his friend and now she was just his. And not his. So even if it didn't matter that she was not a woman who called to him as others did, or she had thought herself to have moved on while he was gone, she was still failing him because of the blooming, wanting ache behind her breastbone.

Ororo looked at him, drank him down in this moment before she had to admit to ruining everything. Before it became clear to him that their friendship from before was tainted by her own imperfections and maybe then he wouldn't look at her as if he'd actually missed her. Before she had to face up to the yawning gulf between what she wanted of him, what he wanted of her and what either of them could have.

Then he kissed her.

Logan kissed her as he had kissed so many women before her, and yet Ororo - startled, stunned Ororo - felt him. He was all there, perfectly intent on her, and you couldn't lie with a kiss. You couldn't fake wanting someone and oh, oh.

There is a moment in everyone's life where what you thought was a fact, a constant, turns out to be something else entirely. A moment where the world tilted on its axis and chose to spin in your favour once. And this was Ororo's, with Logan's fingers in her hair and his lips upon hers and her heart thundering in her chest as if it would burst.

Heat exploded within her. White lightning. It turned her veins to fire, her core to molten want, and disbelief could only last so long in the face of such incontrovertible truth. She did not do him the dishonour of wondering whether he meant it - because Logan, Wolverine did nothing that he didn't want to do - and then she was in motion. There was an urgency to her pliancy and the way her body shifted and leaned into him and they fitted. Somehow his solidness and her extravagant curves, they found a way to bend around each other, and she was supremely aware of all the places they touched - breast and thigh and urgent hands. And yet nowhere fitted as well as his mouth on hers and Ororo kissed him back with a fierce grace, like he was kindling and she was a fire bursting into life.

This was ground they had never ventured towards before, ground she hadn't even know existed. There was a blind exhilaration running within her veins, an almost exultation that he wanted her. And the lines were confused between friendship and passion and what it meant to be someone else's most important person. It was wrong and it was right and it was new and it was like coming home and it was all that she had never, never dreamed of.

And it was perfect, right up until it wasn't.

The moment Ororo remembered herself, remembered who they'd always been to each other, it showed. Her frame - so eager and earnest before that - stiffened and, in spite of the sweetness, she dragged her mouth away from his. Ororo pulled back and it was with a wrecked expression on her face that she looked at him. It wasn't regret or repulsion that showed in her eyes, not when so much aching want was splashed across her normally subtle face for the world to see, but agonised confusion reigned supreme on her features. "I don't understand," was what she said and words had always had the capacity to ruin things. Being kissed by Logan had been all blind need and impossible heat, but speaking, that was less about instinct and gave conscious thought a chance to creep in. "You've never--you left. And now you're here and you just..." She was a creature of winds and lightning, not of words and she didn't have them now, not when she was completely undone in a way she hadn't been since the night he'd left. Only Logan, it seemed, could so completely drag her control away from her. "You called me Ororo," she said, as if that somehow explained everything and with her voice cracking like shattered glass on her own name...and maybe it did. Maybe that refusal to do anything in half measures had everything to do with quite how much things had changed them. Because Logan never called her Ororo--. And the woman froze inside. Because Logan never called her Ororo, but Aiden Cross did.

Somewhere within her chest, the first sense of horror at herself and what she'd just done began to bloom.

[Wolverine]

In that moment, as moonlight fell across the perfection of her skin, shone in reflection from the silk of her hair, Logan realized he could never, would never, love another woman as he loved Ororo Munroe. His love for Rose had been innocent and juvenile, born of normalcy, of comfort and sameness. She had been aware of both sides of him, before and after, the death of one, the birth of another. The sickly James who so sought his father’s love and was shunned by his mother for not being his brother, for being a constant reminder of the betrayal she had so made. She had so known of the moment when his ability was shown, when the feral side of him surfaced as bone claws sprung free from flesh. She saw the man who was born of such things, of being thrust into such situations. Rose had been there for all of it and loved him in spite of, accepting as she had, but never had she loved him the way that he had loved her in return. The way he thought he loved her. The way he thought that love was supposed to be.

Then Jean, and Jill and a handful of others who he so badly wanted to love, who he so needed to be loved by. He found it, or a mockery of it, searching so as he did for it, Logan never having allowed for it to occur, to grow. Needing it like he had, he had forced it, faked it, loved the idea of finding love, then hating himself, and most times the her involved, when the relationship, when the emotion, was found to be wanting.

With Ororo, though, with his African Queen and his Weather Goddess it had been so different. Their friendship had formed, natural and easy, her never having to accept him in spite of. She had decided to be his friend, his confidant and his companion, knowing full well who he was, taking in all of him, the good the bad and the in between. She made no sacrifice by tolerating these parts of him, she just did what she always did, with him, with others, with the world, her benevolence part of who she was, at least in the way that Logan saw her.

It was through that, the lack of strain, the absence of force, the pure honesty of it, no need for falsities or fantasies, that it all had bloomed. It was that which made Logan discover his cowardice. All the times before, all the women before, all the need and want for love that had come before, how could this one be so different? How could it be so frightening in it’s uniqueness?

As light caressed skin that his hands had just touched, as the core of him was so opened and raw and bare, none of the questions mattered, none of the before, none of what would come after. It was just her and him and the culmination (natural, normal, late) of something that he’d felt for years. A steel thread which bound them, and one that kept them apart.

A distance which would remain no longer.

Her lips, her mouth, they were different than he would have imagined, were he to have ever thought of such a moment prior. Ororo had been apart from the rest, safe, placed upon a pedestal of the one woman who was forbidden, even if only by himself. The kiss, her acceptance of it, the fire which fueled passion that she poured into him, into it, all of it was made better by the fact he’d never dreamt it, never fantasized or envisioned the moment before them. It was pure and organic and the lack of all the build up, somehow, it made it all the better, as close to perfect as any kiss could be for a man who was so severely flawed.

Love, not lust; the need for connection, not satisfaction; was what back the physicality of his affection. As she fit her body to his own, Logan curved back, needing more, needing to feel every part of her, to blur the lines of where he ended and she began. Fingers and palms traveled from the strands into which they’d tangled down and over neck and shoulders, feeling the ridges of the solidness of her spine, the curve of her waist, the small of her back. All of her, every piece and every part, he needed her, and wanted her, for once not as the animal needed to mate, but as a man who needed something greater, something that was more than corporeal, something apart from the carnal base of human and beast.

Drowning in her Logan drank her in, the scent of her, the taste which mingled, the flutter of her heart against his chest, the rhythm of her breaths. How had he been so frightened? How had he been so feckless as to hide from something such as this? If only, if only, if only …

No. If it had come before, if he had not truly known himself, or even just begun to traverse all of that which made him who he was … No. Then it would not have been the same. Then it would not have meant what it did. And it meant so much.

Her urgency, her white-hot lightning of response was met with a solid calmness, Logan far from rushing, anything but pushing, him more than willing to kiss her for hours on end, to so pour himself and his emotions into her. The kiss, their shared kiss, a vehicle of expression, on which so exposed the depth his feelings in a way that his words, his lack of vocabulary, his grunts and clipped accent would never be able to.

It was she that pulled away first, though, breaking free from his lips and his grasp, cold rushing into the space which had so been heated by her body, his heart aching at her sudden absence. Her features were not a reflection of his own, serenity so suddenly tainted with pain, the fear of looming rejection, of her realizing just who it was that was so giving the whole of himself to her, of her pushing him and that, the man and monster and coward, all of it away. No, her face was instead so expressive of desire and confusion, eyes the color of the sky in summer, eyes so capable of ice-cold and scalding heat, eyes that were not saying what he wanted, what he had expected, what he’d so seen before.

But that would have been too easy, wouldn’t it? If she had responded like all those before her, so ready and willing and lamb-like in their acceptance. If she had acted so like the women that he thought he’d loved, that he’d wanted to but hadn’t, wouldn’t that have just been the same? Wouldn’t that be just more falsities, more fantasies, things that never worked out in the end …

Logan didn’t have an end, he’d never found it, and for a dozen decades it had not come. Sometimes that truth was unbearable to him, sometimes more than others. With her though, with her it would be okay, without her … there would be no reason.

She, Ororo, the woman before him and who his hands still remained on, his grasp on her waist light, but present, she was worth it all. She was worth convincing, the time it would take to make her understand, the effort and honesty that lay behind it all. She was worth the risk, more than anyone before her had been, and that was what mattered most.

Words were never something that Logan had succeeded with, so once more he remained silent, fingers trailing over her hips, his hands finding her right, bringing it once more to his mouth. A kiss against her palm, slow and soft, before dragging it down, over stubbled cheek and solid clavicle, both kiss and palm relocated to rest over where his heart pounded furiously against his chest, the rhythm distinguishable through muscle and adamantium, transferring into her hand.

How did you tell someone you loved so fully the simple truth of it? How did you say the words you’d said a thousand times, never having meant them as much as you did now? How did you voice it, without them coming out trite, the syllables not nearly enough to express the wholeness of it all?

“I came back.” He said, by way of an answer. “Not for me, or them.” Words rumbled through his chest as he spoke, his tone deep and words free of accent or slang as he concentrated so fully on what he was saying. “I remember everything, everything.” A revelation she might not understand, one that he wasn’t trying to explain, just fact.. “And still, the first thing I thought of when I woke up … It was you.”

written to this.

[Storm]

It was like a bubble had been popped - an opaque, impenetrable, insulating bubble that had made it so that, for just a few moments, the world consisted of herself and Logan and the non-existent space between them. It had shrunk selfishly down to the heat of his skin against hers, the way his stubble dragged against her palm when it moved against the familiar strength of his bone structure. It had been just them and it was cruel of her, unkind, unfaithful and she made no excuses for herself when she was in the wrong here, when Logan didn't know any better, and yet...

It had been a good bubble.

But it was gone now, leaving the world free to rush back into her awareness again. Reality was like being doused in ice-water, except Ororo wasn't all that susceptible to extremes of temperature, so maybe it was more like being struck around the face. Reality hurt because as it swamped her so too did memories of Aiden - and, really, she should never have allowed herself to forget him in the first place - and abject horror was her first reaction. Aiden was a good man, a man she loved, but apparently all it took was a friend turning up at her bedroom door to make her unfaithful. And Ororo, who was always usually so certain and sure and steady when it came to her own beliefs, had just done something that took her reputation as a moral compass and turned it to so much fickle dust.

She taught her students about honour and kindness and the strength that came from being a good person. How was she meant to continuing doing so when it seemed as if she was so ready and willing to betray the trust of one of the best men that she knew?

In the same way that Ororo's head and heart had shut Aiden out completely while she was so wrapped up in all that was Logan, now it was his turn to be the one banished momentarily from her awareness as guilt and shame swamped her. It was all she could feel, the taste of rising bile in her throat and a churning in her stomach that was based in being appalled at herself here. For a moment, Ororo burned with shame...

...and then she was back again, grounded once more. She was crying no longer, as if all her tears for the year had been spent in weeping over Logan Howlett, but her face was wracked with such a deep misery that it was clear her heart was torn in two by all of this. Yet, for all that it was so clear to her that it was wrong to be wrapped up in Logan like this when she had tied herself to Aiden Cross with words and whispers and the way in which the old priestesses had worshipped the Goddess with their men, the look on his face made her ache, made her want to soothe him. Because, just as before all of this had grown messy and complicated and heart-breaking, she knew just how much in Logan's life had let him down, had abandoned him, had left him alone when he'd needed company most. The face that filled her vision now was one that was waiting to be failed and, Goddess, she had already let him walk away from her once before, how could she not want to prove to him that the woman she was at her core was on his side in all things? All Ororo wanted to do in that moment was chase away Logan's ghosts, the ones that matched his true age and not the way that he looked for all that his memories of that life had been wrested away from him before she'd even met the man.

So there it was, the dilemma. The two rocks between which she found herself pinned. For she could not be there for Logan the way he clearly wanted her to be (and she still could not believe that, could not believe that he actually considered her this way after so long of being his woman-apart, his woman-untouchable, his woman-friend), not while staying true to what lay between herself and Aiden. And she could not be loyal without letting Logan down here, without making the fear she saw in his eyes a reality. And, more than that, she could not pretend that there was a clear choice here, that she wasn't already being unfair to each of them here by having a heart that currently felt as if it was in danger of being torn in two.

She was meant to be saying something. She was meant to be saying no. She was meant to be saying yes. She was meant to be being something more and better than this indecisive woman who had no answers, who wasn't even honourable enough to not allow weakness to make her fickle or decisive enough to at least commit to following the heat in her veins right now. Either way, she wasn't being enough of anything for either of them right now and how was it that one woman, one who'd almost given up on ever finding space in her life and heart for a man, was somehow faced with two who wanted her?

Ororo - who had always been relied upon at least to know what her heart said if nothing else - was torn, that much was plain to see.

But, Goddess, the way he was looking at her now--. It was as if her shields were useless, gossamer skeins of mist and he was the blazing light of the sun, cutting right to the quick of her. All of these revelations, these realisations, they were nothing so simple as 'good' or 'bad'. The new knowledge born in her breast sliced at her heart even as it sustained it. Bittersweet was too subtle a word for the way in which this situation was something she both needed and was ripped apart by and her pain, her passion, surely Logan could see that with those impossible, familiar eyes of his. Ororo had always felt as if he'd seen her truly, when so many were distracted by her poise, her regalness, by the way there was a certain untouchable distance to her even when she had you wrapped up in her arms.

Logan had always been able to touch her. That had been her problem and her salvation both. He'd never seen the Goddess she'd been or the mother she'd become so unexpectedly to so many of the children in this place or Storm. Instead, she had been just 'Ro. 'Roro. Darlin'. And even at his most difficult, he was the person in her life around whom it had been the easiest to simply be, with him having no expectations of her or she of him other than the bottomless certainty that they would be there for each other.

It was most certainly not easy to be around him in this moment...but then he had expectations of her now, didn't he? There were new wants in both of them and - since for every gain there was a loss - less trust as well. Because he had walked away and she had let him, had stayed with Scott and the Institute and Aiden, and she did not think that she could bear it if he left her again, did not believe that a part of her could survive losing Logan twice...

So what was she to do?

She stared at him with so much palpable anguish. Seeing her like this, no one could have accused her of coldness, of having impenetrable walls of calm when her face was a picture of heartbreak. There was nothing so soul-destroying as knowing that whatever she did right now would hurt someone at least and to Ororo, a woman who fought so determinedly to shelter her loved ones, that was abhorrent. She had done wrong here because she had kissed Logan with knowledge of what she was doing - maybe she'd forgotten in the face of the fierce, overwhelming something she had felt born within her when she saw him, but that didn't change the fact that she was Aiden's, that she had told him she loved him, that she did--.

Only she'd also told him that she could never give all of herself to one person and this was proof of that, wasn't it? That as much as she still felt a quiet, wondering awe for this new and wonderful thing that had bloomed between her and Aiden, there was something older and less sweet between her and Logan, something that had maybe always been there but hadn't actually been real until this jagged, perfect, painful moment. And what burned for Logan in her was less kind, less honourable, less easy than the heart's path she'd been forging with Aiden, but it was more overwhelming. She'd never felt as if she could drown in Aiden, when Logan's fierceness and the way she felt as if her very vitality was keyed into having him near her was almost too much to bear, she'd never looked at Aiden and been unsure whether what she felt was joy or agony. But then she couldn't look at Logan and believe that he wanted nothing more of her than she was willing to give. She couldn't look at him anymore and know in her bones that he would always be there to remind her to come back to earth sometimes as she could with Aiden. She couldn't look at him and imagine lazy love-making in the morning or sharing a love of order and efficiency or, or...froyo dates.

They were so different. Logan inflamed her and Aiden grounded her. Logan made her heart race to the point it hurt and Aiden healed it. Logan looked at her now as if he would die without her and Aiden had never asked anything of her other than to be herself. Logan was her sword and Aiden her shield and, at the heart of all of this, she could not imagine a life without either of them in it.

There was so much running through her head, through her heart that it felt as if hours had passed when in truth even her racing heart had only thundered a few times as she was lost so selfishly within her own head. She hadn't even said anything yet, aside from those blurted, thoughtless words that he'd ripped from her with his very presence. She'd pulled away, but only so far and that was the thing she was almost the most ashamed of - not that, in a moment of high emotion she had kissed Logan, but that now, when she was well aware of how unfair her actions were to Aiden, she was not a good enough person to stop all of this there and then. No one made Ororo Munroe do anything she did not want to do at least on some level and the fact that Logan was still touching her, that she hadn't moved away from the cradle of his hands at her hips...that was more damning than any of this.

It had something to do with the way she shuddered involuntarily when his hands trailed over her hips and she was shocked by the intensity of the want he evoked in her, but she was also appalled by it. She who had never been ashamed of the passion between a man and a woman before, she was suddenly ashamed of how even a single touch as that came close to driving reason and rhyme completely out of her head. Her lips parted, her breath hitched in her throat, but she closed her against the guilt that followed in desire's heels, miserable with herself...

...and she only opened them again when she felt his heartbeat beneath her hand. The brush of his stubble against her skin had made her shiver again, the surprisingly soft kiss had made her ache in her heart for this tenderness that so few knew or believed lurked within the man, but it wasn't until she felt how his heart raced at the same pace as hers that she simply had to look at him. Because, as much else was wrong and awful about what was going on here, there was something so heartbreakingly perfect about that part at least of them being so utterly in tune that she was inexorably drawn to him, lightning strike to tallest tree in the forest.

Then he talked and broke her heart some more.

"Logan..." she said huskily, but it was all she could manage. Ororo had no tears left in her it felt like, but how was it that finally being told that she was his most important person could hurt so much? How could the Goddess be so unfair as to have Logan tell her this now? She ached, selfishly, for the mess that they were in here, the mess that he wasn't even aware existed and that her Aiden didn't even know was going on. And it felt as if the pain of this would never end, but then he said something that actually jolted her out of her misery. Because, whatever else was threatening to tear apart what they had been before, Ororo had been Logan's closest friend once and how could she not understand what he meant by what he'd just said. Her lips parted in surprise, a low gasp slipping into the quiet, charged air between them and the hand he held against his heart tensed. "You remember?" she echoed, but the question was needless between them because she knew his meaning in her bones, knew to her core to what he was referring. And, even amidst all that she'd had faith in crumbling to sand around her, Ororo Munroe still found it in her to be honestly, selflessly, completely glad for someone who'd had their life given back to them.

For a moment, it was like the sun came up in the sky of her eyes. "Goddess, Logan, that's..." And she had no words, nothing that could convey the awe and joy she felt for him, but for once it seemed he knew what he wanted to say when she didn't and one sentence hit her in the chest like a sledgehammer. It left her mute, stunned and...disbelieving. Because after she'd driven him away, after she'd betrayed him, it was incomprehensible to her that she could be so important to him. She who had always been the one he came to after he made his mistakes, not before, she who'd thought he saw her as some curious amalgamation of mother and sister and comrade and sexless friend, she had been his first thought.

No. She couldn't have been. Not when he had all of his lost life back in his head, not when he finally and for the first time ever since she'd met him knew all of who he was...she could not be the first thing he wanted.

"But...Jean...Jill..." she said haltingly, unthinkingly, automatically. Ororo winced then though, aware of how weak and pathetic and unsure that made her sound and she would have thought it impossible before to feel like this, so hopelessly fulfilled that she was this important to someone and ashamed of herself all at the same time. So filled with love and terror and agony and guilt. So rent in two because she had fallen in love with Aiden while Logan was gone, freely and sweetly and truly, and yet she needed Logan with an intensity that scared her as newly realised as it was. Her head and heart were both overfull and she bit her lip, bit her lip and looked at him with no one expression in her eyes. To feel one thing would have implied she was sure and certain and a good enough woman to want only one thing.

She was none of those things. She could not offer either Logan or Aiden all of herself. But she could not choose either, not with him having been gone for so long and Aiden's kiss still a taste upon her lips and all she could do, really, was be honest, was to try and see if her heart would tell them what it wanted, since it certainly wasn't telling her.

"I missed you," she heard herself saying and Ororo's words suddenly came like a flood as she did what she so rarely did and simply surrendered to the chaos that lay at her heart. She'd strived for control over the years, had a bottomless sort of calm as the layer she presented to the world, but this was the true Ororo, the wild, fey, elemental maelstrom that lurked beneath the woman, the mother, the teacher, the lover, and yet was somehow all of those things in a fiercer, purer form. "I survived you leaving because I don't think there's a person that I could lose that would kill me, not so long as there's someone alive who needs me to hold it together, but Logan, you leaving broke a part of me. The part that's always been yours, you knew that." Because Ororo had never, would never be able to give all of herself to any one person, but the soul who had the most of her to call just their own? Logan. "And you being here now, this...I thought I was okay with being the only woman you didn't want because at least we were friends and I was the only one who ever seemed to have a chance of getting through to you sometimes - you know Scott used to call me the Logan-tamer? - and truth be told I quietly loved that because it meant that you and I shared something. I thought we were friends and that was what I wanted." And, look, her belief that she'd run out of tears was as true as her loyalty to Aiden because her eyes were wet again, only barely holding back the hot floor that apparently her lips could not as these words, these feelings rushed out of her with no coherency or structure or restraint to their name, "Except now you're back and I'm looking at you Logan and it's as if I've been blind for years because I need you. I need you, Logan Howlett, and it took me driving you away from me to make me realise that. It took you being gone to make me see that I can live without you and function without you, but how am I supposed to be happy when you're not there?" Her voice cracked then and there was nothing smooth or graceful about her then. She had red eyes from weeping and tousled hair from sleeping and her face was twisted with too much pain to be anything beautiful. But she was broken and real and there and, in that moment, her heart may as well have been in Logan's hands as vulnerable as she was making herself. "I never knew that I wanted you as much as I do until now." And his bare chest burned beneath her cool palm, her body acutely conscious of how only air and a flimsy layer of silk separated her from him. She hurt with how much she wanted to act on impulses she hadn't even known she had...and yet...

Ororo took a breath and him going hadn't killed her, but this? Hurting him? Hurting Aiden? That was what felt like an arrow through her heart. "But you were gone for so long, Logan, and things...things are not the same as when you left." That was it. The moment when it felt as if her heart had actually split itself into two, jagged pieces and she couldn't bear to look at the man who'd come home for her any more. And, involuntarily, her gaze flickered towards her bed - large and white and with sheets still rumpled and unmade from her sleep this evening and all those nights with Aiden before this one...

She would tell him because she was honest. She did not know how to be anything but. And yet simply being herself was agonising because she was about to hurt him, she was about to hurt both the men she loved and what if he left again because, once again, she had betrayed him?

At least she'd betrayed them both, in different ways. At least neither of them could claim that they had fallen in love with a woman who was good to them.

[Wolverine]

He’d seen the pain on her face, the dichotomy in her eyes and he’d tried to understand. What had happened while he’d been gone, how could his revelation bring such agony to her? Was this the rejection that he’d so been fearing? The way she’d returned his kiss though, and the fire that had burned there, her body molding so perfectly to his … How would she deny him now? Why would she not have pulled away? Was this all so that she would not hurt him? She should know him to be a stronger man than that.

She should, but maybe she didn’t.

Ororo knew him more than any other, and because of that, because of the intimate nature of their non-intimate relationship, perhaps she was privy to the weaknesses that so existed within him. When she had chosen Scott over him, Scott’s option and the safety of the children, then he’d been the one who’d been stupid. It had not been her betrayal, at least not really, but still Logan had chosen to see it as such, one of his many but well hidden weaknesses showing. Was she looking so torn because a similar scenario played within her own mind?

No. That couldn’t be the case. Something else had to have lingered below the surface and what it was Logan had no clue. Just as she was thinking to the fact that no man, nor person, could make her do something that she didn’t wish to, so to did Logan, knowing it to be truth that she was her only ruler, never having been one to have been directed or commanded.

If that wasn’t it, though, if she wasn’t doing as she was for him, then why such pain? Why was she unable to feel the joy that he was so consumed with, just by having her within reach, just by having the taste of her mouth lingering on his lips.

His remembrance was of no consequence at the moment when compared to the extremity of all that was occuring. It meant everything, but it also meant nothing. The only important part of it was the fact that with everything she still remained, not only there, but as most brilliant thing in his mind, burning bright and white and untouchable. Untouchable until he was so able to touch, fingers feeling the perfection of all that she was made of.

That, though, that they could speak of later. He would tell her the tales of his past, the two of them rediscovering what his life had been as they forged a new one together. Them, together, flashes of a future crossed before his mind’s eye, him happy and whole and complete. For once being able to love the one woman who he loved as much as he loved her, being able to show her with every fiber of his being just how important she was to him. How important she’d ever been.

A smile raked across his features at her words, the women’s names spoken with the same seeming uncertainty that her face had shown in the half-light of the moon. Was this what had so broken the stoic façade that he so often saw? Such insecurity in Ororo he’d never seen, and in truth it was something he’d never expected. She had always been everything to him, even if he’d never allowed himself to so see the truth of it all, no woman had never been more. “They’re not you.” He replied, softly, the depth of his tone matching the husky factor that hers had taken on. God how he loved her, how he loved her and how relieved he was to finally be expressing it, knowing the purity and trueness that backed it all.

And then she spoke, Logan’s heart beating under her palm, the strength of his arms wrapping around her, drawing her closer as words fell from her lips. Words that were filled with the entirety of that which he could have wanted to hear. Expressions of mutual want and need, and possible, maybe, if he could ever be so lucky in a life that often left him feeling as though he was without … love.

Never in a moment had he felt like he did in that one, his forehead moving to rest against hers, the space between them thin, but existing. Bone weary exhaustion filtered through him, the tense muscles in his body beginning to relax. He was home, he was safe, and she, she was in the cradle of his arms, saying that which he’d forever needed. In that span of time, the seconds when it all held together like a fragile and beautiful piece of Lalique, all he wanted was sleep. To carry her to bed, to wrap himself around her and drown in all that was which made her who she was, to sync the rhythm of their breathing and to sleep, sleep, sleep. Dreams would not be needed for the one he’d had but always feared, feared for never being able to truly find it, fear for loosing it if he did, it had suddenly and so shockingly seemed to come true.

As soon as her words had come, and the feeling of safe security had descended, a breath hung between them, one filled with silence, one promising that there was more to come. And there was, how there was.

Before, as he had so shown himself to her, Logan had expected such a breath, such a pause. But in the moments that had followed, as she had spoken, he had felt relief. Relief that, it seemed, what so to oh so shortly lived.

Slowly he pulled away from her, blue eyes searching for blue, the space between them once more illuminated by silver, the light cutting a path between their closeness as her words had also done. “Not the same?” He questioned warily, fear, an emotion so rarely shown upon the Wolverine’s face creeping into the edges of his features. “What do you mean, darlin’? What’s not the same?”

[Storm]

There was no redeeming herself at this point, not when she - a woman known for her poise and steely control, the one who was always in full command of herself - had been undone to the point where she had forgotten who she was. Or at least who she wanted to be, a good person. She had done the wrong already, betrayed Aiden the moment that she'd forgotten him in the face of the complicated snarl of everything that Logan evoked in her. She was already more ashamed of herself - of herself, not Logan, she felt that that was an important distinction to make - than she'd ever been before since she'd genuinely thought herself better than this.

Better than being that woman who wanted two men at once.

So she done the wrong and she could not take it back, but she could refuse to make it any worse. And as much as Logan dragged at all she was, when he was so inextricably woven into her past, into her sense of home here at the Institute, Ororo knew that it was one thing to get caught up in the passion of the moment and forget herself and completely another to continue like this when she was in full realisation of just what she was doing here. Her heart twisted when she looked at Logan, at the man she'd never really conceived wanting until now, but it also ripped itself in half when she thought about continuing to betray Aiden so. Just because she thought she'd always loved Logan in some unknowing, unwitting, unstoppable sort of way, didn't mean that she didn't love the kind, gracious, accepting man Aiden was either. And it was there in the two biggest single pieces of her heart that she'd ever given away that lay her dilemma, her misery, her unclear path.

Ororo knew this, that she didn't know on which side her heart fell the most. But this much was clear, that she had a choice to make because it wasn't fair to drag this out. She wasn't going to let Logan chase her if he could not have her, if that was the case. And she would not, could not carry on like this when she knew about it, when Logan knew about it and Aiden did not.

It was for Aiden, and for fairness, and for the memory of the good woman she was supposed to be, that Ororo pulled away from Logan then.

She did so as kindly as she could, the look on her face and the automatic cant of her slender frame towards his stockier one betraying that it was not lack of want that made her pull out of his grasp. Not when her fingers were the last, unwilling piece of her to leave the warmth of his body. There was no denying that this man, her truest friend, held more of her than she knew how to handle with and she deeply regretted the wariness that she saw birthed on his features.

But the pulling away...it was necessary. She couldn't think when he touched her, when his heat passed to her, when there was a part of her that wanted nothing more than to fling herself back into the circle of his arms and never leave it. It was that wild, frantic, passionate side of her that was his and it was that part that had led her astray. And it was that part that she could not afford to give into when he deserved more than not knowing why she could not say yes, just as Aiden merited more than stolen kisses and heartfelt reunions behind his back.

"Very little, Logan," she murmured sadly as her fingers left his bare chest and were instantly more lonely for the loss. Her eyes had a bottomless sort of hopelessness to them. 'I do not know what to do' they said. 'I do not know what I want.' And they spoke the truth of what churned and roiled within her but, for now, Ororo grasped at some tattered shreds of her usual control and gained it.

She would be stronger than the weeping woman that Logan had left behind and that Aiden had comforted. She would be better than someone who would knowingly betray her lover now that she had sense in her head again, as much as it hurt to not touch Logan right now, to not soothe away whatever pain he was in. To know that what she was about to say would hurt him. And Aiden.

The only consolation she had was that she felt it might hurt herself most of all.

"The Professor is back for one," she said quietly, kneeling before him. "And Betsy left us, more scared than I ever thought a woman like her was capable of being." But those were not the changes that he spoke of, not the ones that mattered when it came to the silver light and the broken trust and the banked fires between them, and Ororo was just stalling.

She sighed and bowed her head momentarily, face briefly hidden beneath a tangled fall of moonlight hair. In the shadows there, Ororo Munroe grieved for the innocence of their friendship for before and the brief, fleeting perfection of her body against his. Because it had been wonderful and sustaining and like a star burning at the heart of who it was in that moment and what she was about to say, what she was about to confess...it would ruin that.

"When you left..." she started to stay, the movement of her lips behind her hair as difficult to see as a ghost. "After I made you leave..."

...she couldn't do this. Not kneeling in the doorway like this, with her heart feeling as if it would break if she were to look upon him. Ororo flinched at the torture that was being the cause of hurt to two men that she cared so much for and stood up abruptly, as if putting some distance between herself and Logan would somehow increase the distance between herself and her pain as well, but that was a naive thought. Just as it was naive to think that there was an easy way out of this.

Nothing that mattered this much was ever this easy. Nothing anyone felt this deeply was easy. And that almost weary resignation was apparent on Ororo's bared face beneath the grief and obvious reluctance. But she had never been one to shy away from duty, from honour and she owed it to the men she loved to be as honest as she could in this.

"Come. Please." There was a bittersweet sort of plea in that last word and it only took a few paces to bring her to her bed. She sat down, silk swaying around her calves and she patted the place behind her. They'd sat like this so many times before, in casual conversation and laughing companionship and deep, serene certainty that their friendship was unshakeable. But now...now there was a brittle tension to the way she held herself, as if it was taking all she had just to cling to whatever control she'd lost before. That was what it took to look Logan in the eye and tell him that a part of her had given up on him ever coming back.

"I wish that it had taken less than you leaving to make me realise how much I needed you," she said and that much was honest. That much was true because she had to admit to herself that if this had come before Aiden had even showed that he thought of her as more than just a colleague, she would have probably never looked at him any differently. Logan's fleeing in the night had been a catalyst, a revelation, and she didn't doubt the strength of her feelings for the quiet, steady man now that it had happened...but would she have turned to Aiden if Logan had still been there? Would she have ever looked further than the strength of the her truest friendship? She bit her lip and fiercely, forcibly yanked her mind away from the dangers of hindsight and made herself breathe, made herself square her soldiers as much as she could and be the composed Ororo Munroe that had been on Logan's mind when he first awoke. "But you did leave and you were not there to witness what making the choice that I had to did to me." She looked at him with sadness, not blame, seated on the bed she'd slept in with Aiden, had made love in, had fallen in love in. "Whenever anything went wrong, Logan, you were the one I would turn to for comfort, but this time...and through my own fault, I will admit that...this time you were not there." As much as her heart was breaking inside of her in that moment, in spite of the pain cutting through her, Ororo made herself stay firm, stay steady, her face as calm as her eyes were anguished. "But Aiden...Cross was."

And there it was. The thing that would drive a wedge between them just when she'd found him again. And oh, she was hurting, but her worry was all for Logan, for how he would take this, for how he would take yet another betrayal from Ororo Munroe.

It was a wonder that he wanted her at all.

[Wolverine]

In a moment his question had been asked, the roughness of his voice clinging to each word, expressing as it could the emotion that which she was saying had brought. In the next the question was answered, not with her voice, but with her actions, Ororo slowly but ultimately pulling away from the circle of his arms, pulling away from the connection that they had, leaving him alone but not, leaving him to know that the change had been one as large as the space which now yawned between them.

A piece of him, the piece that was the most fragile and untainted with the rest of his life, the piece that had been so exposed to her, free of any guise or shadow, it did not shatter in that moment, he was stronger than that, even in this, but a crack began, splitting neatly, then spider-webbing outwards, fractals of pain created in the wake of her actions.

Change. It was what both made the world and broke it.

She spoke, again, but he did not hear. So ready had he been for this in the beginning, so prepared had he been for rejection. As the sound of murmured words made their way to his ear, though, that preparation no longer existed. A roar as endless as time, the crash of the ocean turning for all eternity, the rush of blood pounding harshly within his veins, it rose within his mind, blocking out his senses, leaving him to stare wide-eyed at her, jaw slack, sudden disbelief at the situation so evident upon his generally composed face.

What had he done?

Things would never be the same now.

If he had known how she had mourned, if he had known of the comfort that she had needed … then, maybe then sense could have been made of it all. He knew her as a woman stronger than most or all, one who would be brought to her knees by nothing, a woman who was so ready to stand up for the children she needed to protect and the decision that she believed in. Without that knowledge, though, without knowing what had happened, he was so left unready for that which came next.

The news of the professor’s return phased him, but only slightly, Logan far more concerned with other things. Things like the reason that his hands were now empty, and what exactly in their world had altered. Betsy, no, even the news of that was of no concern. She and he had shared a sense of wild, a sense of doing what one must. If she had left, she had done so because she wanted to, fear was not something he thought her capable of. But then, again, he often thought the same of himself.

“You didn’t…” He began, trying to explain the conclusion he had come to before, when he’d chopped and chopped wood, spending the beginning winter in his cabin, focusing his mind. She hadn’t been the reason he’d left, she hadn’t made him. It had been his own anger, his own childish stupidity. If he’d not left, though, if he’d not run he’d never have found himself again, or Carol, or so fully realized his feelings for the woman before him.

Yes. Maybe that would have been best.

Then she was gone, having stood from where they’d knelt, breaking whatever spell had slowly been unraveling between them. He wished, hoped, that the moment could go backwards, that once more his lips could meet with hers and they could wrap around each other, the rest of the world having faded into the darkness around them. Wishes and hopes, though, had never gotten Logan anywhere, and they wouldn’t do so now.

Slowly, much slower than she had, as if he was in sort of horrid dream, Logan stood. Hands pressed against the thick muscles of his thighs he rose, footing still hovering over the threshold of her rooms, him neither in, nor out, and making no move to change such a thing.

Blankly, the expression on his face moving to the safeness of revealing nothing, Logan listened to what Ororo, the woman that he loved, the Goddess that he wished to spend his years worshiping, he listened as she so calmly razed his soul. He would expect nothing less of her, the regal exposure that she so exuded, but still, it hurt, a pain past hurting, the kind that left numbness in it’s wake.

“Aiden?” He managed, looking to the bed on which she sat, finally, finally catching the lingering scent of another, of a man he knew, knew, respected and fought beside.

This other man had comforted her, been in her rooms, been with her, all while Logan had been gone.

Shaking his head Logan’s choice was made. Lips moved to speak but no sound came, Logan instead turning and walking through the door which he’d never fully come.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He was so very stupid.

Two steps down he stopped. He was stupid. Stupid if he would leave like this, if he would do as he’d always done and walk away from something, from someone, from her just because it wasn’t as easy as he wanted it to be.

This time he would not run, he would not hide. He would face the pain like the man he was supposed to be, in everything.

Returning steps were taken slowly, one and then another and then he was within her rooms, feet on floor he knew, worn wood cool and smooth beneath his bare soles. “Do you love him?” He asked, gruffly, moving to stand before her. It wasn’t the question he needed an answer to, though. It didn’t matter. She could love him if she wished.

Once more Logan found himself upon his knees, that piece of him bared, his jugular vulnerable. Large hands found the softness of silk covered thighs, Logan looking up into the face of her, a face surrounded by a whisper of light. “Do you love me?” This was the question that mattered, and the only one.

[Storm]

It was one thing to try and prepare herself for knowingly hurting her friend, as unwilling as she was to do so for all that it needed to be done, but quite another to see the actuality. Before all of this had happened, before that meeting in the chill of Jean's medical bay, Ororo had been arrogant enough to believe that she knew Logan best of anyone, that she was best equipped to predict how he would respond to something, anything. In her head, she'd been bombarded by future possibilities, the looks of anger or disappointment or hurt that her words, her confession might evoke in her friend, a man who appeared stoic but could never, ever have been mistaken for heartless. Like herself, Logan seemed to feel deeper than most would expect of him and he was gloriously unpredictable in the turns that he took. So she tried to brace herself by holding a picture of the wrong she was about to do him, as if doing so would shield herself slightly from the pain of doing this to him...

It didn't help.

Nothing could have prepared Ororo for what she saw then because Logan...he didn't look wounded or jealous or angry. Instead, he just looked blank. Emotionless. And even as Ororo held her breath, her calm a fragile thing and growing more jagged yet as bits and pieces of her facade fell in on itself, her worry for him and his heart starting to shine through the cracks, she wondered distantly whether she was being vain to assume that this news would hurt him. But, no, Logan was nothing but an honest man - too honest at times, yes, but he was not a deceptive person and if he said that he came back for her, she believed him. So the blankness...was it because he found it impossible to conceive her with being with anyone else? Because he and everyone else knew that her heart lay with her work and no one person could be important with the cause she'd found in being a maternal figure for all the people who dwelled here?

That would have been somewhat hurtful (though she doubted there was room in her for any more aches of the heart) were it not for the bittersweet notion that Ororo had that, maybe, it was simply that Logan could not imagine her being anything but his. But she was distressed and not as discerning as she usually was and she didn't know what was going on behind his shuttered eyes. That in itself made her tenser, cracked at her resolve further and her hands knotted fruitlessly in her lap as he stood there. She'd hoped that he would come to her, that she would have been able to reveal this sitting at his side like a friend rather than on her knees before him like a woman who wanted him, that that way she would have been better able to resist temptation...

Instead, he was across the room from her when he said Aiden's name, when he looked at her bed then and showed her that he finally understood what she was trying to say. And Ororo did not flinch when she became less to him (or so she assumed) but it was a close thing. Because how was he going to react, what was he going to say, what was he going to do?

Then Ororo Munroe was made to witness how, once again, who she was and the choices she made drove Logan Howlett away from her.

"Logan--" she started to stay, but her voice cracked then, her resolve with it then. And she'd tried to be calm about this, tried to protect him by putting distance between them, by being the one in control. But faced with the joy and pain of having him so newly-returned to her and then being made to watch his back...no, no, she could not. She simply couldn't. And she most certainly could not cling onto the tattered cloak of her resolve as he was walking away from her again. It was happening all over again she realised as she wrapped her arms around her own stomach where a deep and visceral pain had sprung up within her, he was leaving again and how was she supposed to do this again?

Logan walked away, just like before...

...except, except, this time? He came back.

When she heard his returning footsteps, Ororo's face jerked up from where it had been bent over her own knees and her eyes were wide and startled and wrecked in her face. He had come back and that realisation sparked the smallest flare of hope somewhere within her.

Whatever else she had ruined her, the lines they had crossed and the words they could not unsay, the ones that had changed everything...maybe there was hope yet. Maybe there was something that could be done to fix this. Maybe it was just as simple as Logan not being quite willing to leave again and Ororo would take what she got.

He stood before her now, stocky and shorn and achingly familiar all the same as he asked her a question there was no escaping, that was easy to answer as well. "Yes," she said quietly, looking nowhere but at him. And she would not apologise for Aiden, could not find it in her to regret the sweetness that had grown between them, the trust, the way that friends and colleagues had become something more. She didn't bother trying to explain the way in which she loved the man they called Saint - easily, languidly, with a gentle sort of grace and serenity that fitted so well with who she was to the Institute because all that mattered was that she did love him. Even with Logan before her, nothing changed that, nothing affected the colour and form of the threads that tied her to Aiden Cross.

She would not apologise for loving him because to do so would dishonour the man.

...but she would also not lie to herself and Logan's next question, it made her eyes flicker with a thousand feelings. There was longing there and grief and sorrow and joy, companionship and laughter and wildness and want. But most of all there was a love, both newer and older than what she felt for Aiden and, really, the two feelings could not be compared, just as the two men themselves could not.

Logan knelt before her, touched her and Ororo looked down at him, eyes suddenly very weary and old. "Yes," she said, just as simply, just as honestly. Slim brown fingertips rose upwards to brush against his lips, light as a breeze, and even amidst the grief at the heart of all of this, there was a wondering sort of softness in her face at the revelation that was Logan Howlett knelt like this before her. "Of course. How could I not?"

She touched him, felt his warmth, wanted him...and knew that she could not have him. Not like this. And that softness turned more sorrowful than sweet then as she sighed and pulled her traitorous fingers away from the mouth she had been kissing mere minutes ago. "And I am aware that that is fair on neither of you, and I wish..." She sighed, softly and wearily and felt the press of guilt upon her narrow shoulders. "...I wish I loved one of you less, but I do not."

That was one fact. Another was that she had realised her love for Aiden first. Yet another was that he was sleeping while this was going on and her lover deserved more than that.

Her full lips twisted, bitter and ashamed then. "I have to go and find him," she said softly even as her thighs shifted beneath the solid warmth of his touch. "I have to tell him because I--this wasn't fair on him." She didn't need to tell Logan that Aiden was a good man because she had a feeling that he had known that better than her before he'd gone. "...I can't be that woman, Logan, the one who strings both of you along. I won't be her."

Because it wasn't fair and Ororo had said that a lot already, but it was true. What about this horrible, heartbreaking situation was fair on any of them?

[Wolverine]

He didn’t know why he came back. He didn’t know, except that he did.

There were always reasons to return, one more than another, another more than the last. He’d woken and returned to her, for her, to finally have her as his own. But having wasn’t the right word to be used, not with her. No one, no one person or man or being could have Ororo Munroe. She was a woman unto herself, and one who, if you were lucky, allowed you into her life.

She’d let Logan in. Before, so long before, and as the days passed so to did the way that their mutual trust and friendship twined them together. He came back for that, and for more, wanting to still be her truest companion and most reliable confidant. He came back to be her lover, to express himself in way that he’d never been able, to show her what he not wanted, not needed, but just the way it was supposed to be. Like the rising of the sun or the pull of the tides, like something he’d needed for more than a century, something he’d never had. Man, and woman, bound together in love, in lust, in the eternal bonds of ether and air that so tied them.

That was what he had returned for. That was what he had thought he’d found.

The loss of it, the mention of Aiden’s name, the knowledge that he could never so stand up to someone as good as Aiden Cross, that he could never be for her what Aiden would … that was why he’d left.

Not willing to give up on her, on them, if there was a single thread of anything which lay between them, that was why he climbed her steps once more, the two rises steeper than any ascent he’d ever made.

She loved Cross, she loved him, and though it hurt Logan to know that she was in love with another, he could not fault her. If there was any man worth her love, any man who could so be deserving of her heart, more so than Logan, it would be him. The pain was present because he was late, because he knew, knew, that had he not left such things would not have happened, and their universe would not have so altered. But with his leaving came other things, and they were too far in for regret now.

Logan had too many regrets as it was. He would not add to it another.

It was not Cross alone she loved, and as she spoke the words to Logan, explaining, he was so thrown back to another time. Rose, the girl that he had so shared his youth with, Josiah, a man he respected and looked up to. Then Logan had been left in the middle of it all. Then he had given up, stood down, sacrificed his happiness for that of others.

But he hadn’t loved Rose anywhere to the way that he loved Ororo. Love her just for her as she was, for nothing more, and nothing less, wanting nothing than to be with her, near her, to share the experiences of their lives together and to build more. And Rose, he’d loved her enough to love her through the decades, pulling his feelings for her through time, depositing them upon others. No, what he felt for ‘Ro was something special, and unique and it was because of that difference that the pain he felt was so strong and raw.

It was also why he would not walk away.

Her touch was gone, her fingers having traced the line of his mouth, but still he felt her, still he felt that which lingered. He would not loose this, he would not loose her, and he would not bend. A single nod, short and curt and he stood, hands moving to find hers, fingers twining together as he rose. Gently, but surely she was pulled with him, the strength of his arms aiding her, giving itself to her. In truth he wished to pull her further, too him, wrapping his arms around her and taking her to bed, he wanted that, he wanted more, he wanted less. None of it, though, could be had. Not while Cross, not while his friend and brother was so left unknowing. Logan cared for him, in a way. Not enough to give, not enough to relent and surrender Enough, though, to prevent himself from allowing his mouth to claim hers once more.

Thumbs, sure and strong, stroked the insides of her palms, palms that were soon allowed to fall free and away, Logan having released her and taking first one step back, and then another. “You could never be that woman, darlin’.” His reply wasn’t placating, it was just honest. Part of him wished that she could be, so that they could have had their night, their moment, so that he could have so held onto bliss for a few hours more. Most of him was grateful that she wasn’t. A sliver was surprised she had acted as she had at all.

Looming dark and forboding behind them, the outline of her open door remained, Logan half turned toward it, preparing to leave. “Let me know, ‘Ro.” The halfness of her name was back, the safety which so remained there. He wasn’t giving up, but his walls were building. He would not be caught so unawares again. “M'not goin’ anywhere. I’ll be here. But you gotta decided one way or another, and you gotta tell me when you do.”

With no more words, and no more affection he was gone, leaving in a way that was better than all the times before it. She knew he loved her, and he knew that she loved him back. That was enough, for the moment, at least, until she decided who it was that she loved more.