Correspondence
by
Dala



DISCLAIMER: No characters in this story belong to me. I'm just playing in my little corner of the Marvel sandbox.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: My muse has been very kind, and I have been writing up a storm: right now I'm working on the sequel to Dreams and an entirely new fic. Those will be up soon.




The first letter came about two months after he left.

I never got any mail, not even those addressed-to-occupant adds. So when Jean handed me the envelope, plain and without a return address, I was surprised. I had never seen his handwriting, so the bold strokes of my name and the mansion's address didn't strike a memory. And I couldn't think of anyone from my past knowing where I was, or caring.

But when I opened it, I knew exactly who it was from.


Marie,
Hey kid, how's it going?


Closing my eyes, I could almost hear Logan's voice saying the words. The rest of the letter went on to talk about his ride north, a waitress he'd flirted with at a truck stop, what the weather was like.

The second letter, sent just a week later, contained a description of what the sunrise over a snow-filled Canadian valley looked like, and his reminiscing about our first meeting. I smiled when I read that he had decided not to stop in and visit our old friend the bartender.

They came haphazardly: three months would go by without a word, and then four letters would arrive in one week. Every time I stopped by to get the mail, I got curious looks, but no one asked who my penpal was. I hid the letters in a box under a loose board in my closet, and never mentioned them to Jubilee or Kitty--his words were for me, and me alone. I read each one several times, the door locked, his dogtags clutched in my hand.

He never marked down an address that I could write to, but at first I figured that maybe he just didn't have a set place to stay yet. If he ever gave me an address, I decided that it would be rude to not have letters to send back. So I wrote to him. I wrote long, detailed letters about my school day and my friends, movies I'd seen, books I'd read, tests I had passed or failed. I wrote to Logan not just when I received one of his letters, but more or less every day, adding onto letters that were short and starting new ones when they were lengthy. I kept it up more faithfully than anyone who's ever written in a diary.

His letters never mentioned what he'd gone back up north to seek. It was strange, but perhaps he hadn't found anything, or perhaps he just wasn't ready to talk about it yet.

Even to me? I was left wondering about this one day, a year after the first letter had come. There were some deeply personal feelings and thoughts in those letters; surely he would have told me about his past! And if he had learned nothing, then why didn't he come home.

The next letter I wrote was four pages, both sides, and it was very angry. I ranted on about how the team needed him and everyone missed him and he was being selfish and stupid, but eventually my hand shook as I started to cry. Why won't you come back to me? I wrote, tears falling onto the paper and making the ink run. Don't you understand how much we need you? How much I need you?

And then with steady fingers I wrote the words, the ones I had only whispered in my darker dreams.


I'm in love with you. I want you with me. Please come home.


You would probably say that I was a little strange in the head to write to a man as if he were going to read my letters. And in my head, I knew that since I couldn't send them to Logan, it was senseless to keep this up. But my heart believed otherwise, and I continued with my letters, pouring out my feelings fully now, writing down how much I missed him, dreams I'd had about him, what I imagined we would go do if he showed up at my door right now.

I wrote him a letter filled with excitement on the day I graduated and began to really train as an X-Man.

I wrote him a very long letter after the incident with Ms. Marvel. Part of it was wonder in my newfound powers, part was fear of yet another personality inside my skin, and part was guilt over taking a life.

I wrote a mostly happy letter about Jean and Scott's wedding; mostly happy because it was such a wonderful and beautiful day, but partly sad because I knew his feelings about her.

I documented all of our missions, our new teammates . . . I even tentatively described my attraction to Remy. But if you were here, I wrote wistfully, the Cajun wouldn't have a chance.

I wrote about life, death, love, pain, sadness, happiness . . . my letters to Logan became my outlet, my source of strength in which I could tell him things I couldn't even mention to anyone else.

All this was well and good, but the last letter I'd received from him said simply, I'm coming home. It was four and a half years after he'd left, and he was finally returning.

Ecstatic, but apprehensive, I felt it was my duty to tell the Professor, but he already knew. A room was ready, in fact, and so I did the hardest thing in all the time I'd known him. I wrote a final letter, saying that I still loved him but if he didn't feel the same, I could live with it. I signed it Marie, as I always did. Then I took that letter and the others, which had accumulated into a remarkably large bundle, and I put them on his bed, along with the tags.

Then I holed up in my room, only leaving to grab something to eat. When I left on the second day of my self-imposed quarantine, I came back to find a single envelope on my pillow containing something heavier than paper.

I opened it and took out a very short letter.


I read them all, and I only have two things to say. These are yours, and so I am. Come over here now because I've been a fool and taken too damn long to come home to you.
--Logan


I pulled the dogtags out of the envelope, finding a new one on the chain. It said Rogue on one side and 'my Marie' on the other.

Smiling, I put them around my neck and went to him. Letters were great and all, but now that I had the real Logan back, I didn't think we'd be writing anything for awhile.



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