It Was An Accident
by
Soappuppy



Disclaimers: They're not mine, they never will be (dammit), they belong to Marvel and Fox but they live in my head, too, and sometimes they just have to get out and play in the dark.




Rogue entered Logan's bedroom as silently as she could. The room was dark but strangely welcoming, filled with the scent of him, an unusual smell, weird and wild. The sounds, for the moment, had stopped, but the figure on the bed was wreathed in sweat and fear.

A hand, timorous, extended. "Logan?"

A pause, and she was beginning to think he had dropped back into deeper sleep when the nightmare took him again and he moaned. The darkness hid his eyes, but his hands were clenched in the sheets. She fancied she could hear metal slithering in his forearms as his claws fought to extend, battled the paralysis of sleep to engage his imagined enemy.

She could not stand to watch him suffer. He had risked his life for hers.

The Wolverine looked savage and brutal in daylight, in consciousness, confidence turning his every move into a challenge backed by steel and muscle. In sleep, in this terrified nightmare, he looked -- still feral, but cowed and beaten, no threat. He hadn't talked much about his background -- then again, neither had she -- but she hoped she never found out what caused the screams.

Her fingers brushed the bed, the sheets, but she would not touch him. Better he dream, even fitfully, than awaken to that very real terror.

He fought the dream, muscles straining, but chained in his mind he could not move. The vicious growls Rogue had heard earlier muted to whimpers, Logan writhing in cold fright. Though his face was tense and his teeth bared, his expression was one of despair as his hands flexed in stark futility.

"Logan . . . ."

More breathing, panting as though starved for air. The sheet rocked over him. Rogue tentatively tugged the bedclothes, her hand wanting to reach for him, moving for him as though of its own accord. Like a doomed animal in a trap he lay in his dream and shivered, and she longed to release him. But she would not touch him. No matter how much she wanted to.

She said his name again. "Wake up."

Logan gasped, stiffened, and then his eyes snapped open and she saw them glimmering gold, thick and dull in the dark, still in the shroud of sleep, and in that moment he drove screaming forward, arms locked, claws extended to the depth of their reach.

Something pulled in him as he came awake, feeling the weight on his claws as they sank into the vision before him. Needles and black ice rained down around him in a hail of shrieking madness and he felt the weight on his claws and someone was saying something -- something very important.

He shook his head and coughed frigid water.

He blinked.

Rogue was standing before him -- a figure was standing before him -- a young girl -- a man in a cap and a black rubber gown. Someone was in the room with him, and they were saying something, they were hurting him, and it was very important that --

Rogue was in the room with him, standing by his bed, his claws buried in her chest. In the light from the doorway he saw bloody black points extending from her back. Her weight was on his claws, she was in the room with him, and she was speaking -- no, she was whispering, panting, a confused exhalation of fear. Her eyes were fixed on his own.

He shook, and his claws retracted with a sick, slippery noise. He glanced to right, to left -- no-one. He had just killed her, and now he was alone with her, and he felt a desperate need to bolt, like a stricken animal, and she was still standing up.

"Help me!"

Unsupported, Rogue swayed, her eyes locked on his, her expression startled, confused, somehow quite calm. Her hand still sought the sheets, something, anything, moving randomly. Logan stared helplessly, his mind frozen in dream and panic. What had he done?

"Somebody help!"

Who was speaking?

She stared at him, and he stared at her, and the light came on in a searing flash and Cyclops -- Scott was there, wearing sunglasses, sunglasses at three in the morning, and then Storm pushed past him and they stopped, transfixed, and Rogue's hand moved of its own accord and feathered a lover's touch across Logan's cheek.

There was a pause. Logan's face turned pale.

Streaks of pain flamed from her fingertips and slid through him on acid trails of poison.

Logan would have screamed had he had the voice, but the touch stole that from him, cannibalized him, consumed him, ripped and shredded him as it sucked the air from his lungs and all thought from his mind. A dim red blur replaced his vision. Central the anonymous patch of Rogue, glowing -- growing? -- in a comet of sparks. His body wasted, stretched, whined with tension. He felt something -- something terrible -- stream out of him and into her, and felt burning pain as wounds opened raw beneath his skin.

Rogue would have screamed had she had the voice, but the touch stole that from her, thrilled her, shocked her, danced rhythms in her head and made her brain sing. The sucking whirlwind focused, swirled and bled and she felt no fear. She could dimly see Logan, pinned by her fingertips, through a distant sighing haze. He was moving, his mouth working, but she heard no sound as something -- something wonderful -- streamed out of him and into her, and slowly she felt the stabbing, burning fire in her chest smooth and ease as the wounds in her back and chest stitched, closed and vanished, all in the blink of an eye.

As before, she felt the mind of the person she touched enter her . . . but this time it was stronger, like being invaded by an army. She momentarily saw herself through his eyes -- was she wearing rouge? What a strange expression she had on -- and felt her touch on his cheek as a source of burning light. Logan's consciousness still had in its forefront the remnants of the dream; fog swirled like a live thing in her head and before Rogue's wide eyes passed an inchoate parade of nightmare visions -- a man garbed in black rubber, a tank of bubbles, a syringe resting in a glass of champagne.

She blinked and shivered, feeling the unsteady weight of an adamantium skeleton, the sick sliding of metal in her forearms. Scents in the room became almost physically tangible. She fought the urge to extend her claws and leap away, breathed deeply, managed to submerge the foreign memories in smoky reassurances that they weren't hers.

Her hand fell.

Logan fell.

Reality returned in a torrent of motion as Scott, Jean, and Ororo finally clicked into motion. Rogue blinked as Logan collapsed on the bed, his eyes open but unseeing, a noiseless scream gurgling in his throat.

The Wolverine stirred inside her, shrieking, and she turned, paused, gazed into Jean's disbelieving eyes.

"It was an accident. . . ."



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