* * * * *

Possession wasn't something debatable. It just was.

She was in his truck, staring at his knuckles.

She was on a train, curled against him in utter devastation.

She was standing at the door, asking him not to go.

She was seventeen and playing soccer outside--eighteen and celebrating graduation--nineteen and warily attempting her first dance--twenty and putting on her first uniform.

She was laughing over her first beer with him and showing him her favorite place to think in the woods. She was curled up over schoolbooks in the library and she was panting in exhaustion when he taught her to fight. Once she fell asleep in his lap watching some incredibly long chick-flick that he didn't even know the name of, but he remembered looking down at her while she slept and smiling over the entire concept of someone feeling secure enough to use him as a rather dangerous pillow.

Logan didn't have a past and over time, as his life filled with these memories, he began to wonder about it less and less. Or maybe he just had too much to do now--he was off that whole live to survive kick, and his days were suddenly full of activity and people and God help him, he was starting to care. He had a little girl to watch grow up and protect and teach and wait for, to become a woman he could have.

He had his own room, which could have been a little disturbing to someone who'd never managed to stay in one place long enough to imprint even the lightest traces of his personality into a given area. When he went in it, it had signs of occupancy--and he found out things he didn't know about himself, like he hated to leave his room a mess and that he knew how to do hospital corners. And that he had a nasty habit of wanting every shirt hung evenly and exactly an inch apart on the closet rail. Human things that vaguely surprised him, because it had been so long since he'd thought of himself as human.

Shit, anyone saw that--didn't bear thinking of. So after he put his room in order, he went out and acted like a bastard, so no one would guess that he'd gotten mildly annoyed by the dustbunnies under his bed, and when he growled over a beer, he was also contemplating where they stored the vaccuum. He was a meticulous bastard. Fuck. He was becoming as much a pansy as Scott.

And while he mulled dustbunnies and efficient ways of kicking Scott's ass, he also began to mull the fit of a certain uniform on the kid everyone considered his adopted daughter--though if he'd been asked, he could have told them that no, when he looked at Marie, he didn't think filial thoughts and never had. Illegal thoughts, yes. Immoral thoughts, definitely. Indecent thoughts--oh yeah. Thoughts that included food items that doubled as body covering--say whipped cream and chocolate syrup--all for it.

But filial? Fuck that.

Problem was, getting all those improper, indecent, immoral, de facto illegal thoughts (with food) into her head. Which turned out to be far more difficult than he'd expected, but he figured he had time. He was Logan--shit, he had the better part of an eternity. He could wait her out.

Well, he thought he could, anyway. And she turned twenty-one and everything changed.

* * * * *

It started with a tiny step, of course, because few people really jump to the dark side without some preparation on what they're gonna be dealing with. Started with the first time he watched her leave, wrapped up in her cloak and hugging the walls as if she didn't want to be seen, as if she didn't know he had her schedule memorized and knew exactly where she'd be any given second of any given day. He followed her to the door, because he was a predator and she was his, and he wanted to know what she was doing.

She took the car and left and he smoked a cigar in the shadows of the mansion and waited for her to come home, and when she got out of the car, she had tears stained into her face and walked like someone had fucked her hard. She stumbled, grabbing for the wall, and it was a tiny step, that for the first time, he didn't respond to Marie in pain.

Her cloak covered the disarray of her clothes, and she smelled of sex and cheap motel rooms and a long hot night with the curtains closed. Of sweat and lust and fear and guilt, and just below it all, she smelled of someone familiar, someone he couldn't place, though he knew it, *knew* that scent.

She smelled like she didn't know she was owned, and that just pissed him off.

She went inside and he followed her in, and being in love with her hurt for the first time, because his competition wasn't just her age or her mind, but a living, breathing male that he had a need to find and kill. Slowly. With the same cool, meticulous attention to detail that his sheets received, with the skill he'd developed over twenty years. Make them hurt, make them pay for fucking *days* and shit, he'd enjoy every second.

Civilization sucked. No question.

But that was just one tiny step, from love to possessive anger, and Logan had been playing human for long enough that he went back up to his room and put a hole in the wall before spending a sleepless night in the gym.

He was human. Humans, as a rule, didn't kill their rivals in highly satisfying, violent ways in cheap motel rooms that smelled of sex and lust and Marie.

So he watched her during the day, watched her interaction with the males of the mansion, checking a dozen scents against an imprinted memory. And in the practice ring, if his students wondered why he started teaching them how to kill, not disarm, they didn't question it.

Three nights later, he listened to her hitching breath as she walked by his room, waited until she was on the stairs to follow her out. Watched her get in the car with narrowed eyes and a cigar, a bottle of whiskey beside him, and he made a promise that he meant to keep. He'd give her time to screw around, but he'd win, because he was more patient, more determined, and he had one thing going for him that no human could ever compete with--he had no scruples.

Three months equaled ninety-two days equaled twenty-four encounters at twice a week. It was a large number and every time he didn't follow her into the city, he was a little more angry and a little more betrayed and there was another tiny step when he stopped thinking of the day he'd make love to Marie and thought of fucking her against the wall outside when she came home, smelling of sex and cheap motel rooms and someone else slicking her skin--and who the fuck *was* that she smelled of anyway? Drag her upstairs and throw her in a hot shower, make her wash until he couldn't smell anything on her but her, put her on his bed and show her that possession wasn't a choice she had, that she was owned, that she'd been owned since the moment he saw her, and no one else would ever touch her again.

Fuck her until she forgot anyone else had ever touched her, ever looked at her, ever slid inside her body, mark her so *no one* would ever make the mistake of thinking she was anything but his.

And it was a tiny step from possession to hatred, and the animal, the part he'd so successfully and so completely repressed for so long that even he forgot it was there, it got a little louder, a little more insistent, a little more violent, and it became almost a point of pride every night when he watched her walk by him, that he didn't grab her and tell her how wrong she was, that she thought she could be free.

Then came the night that changed him, when he stood outside waiting for her to come home and realized that if he was standing here when she got home, he wouldn't let her walk by. And he was just human enough still to walk back up and wreck his room, sit down on his bed and hate. He knew how to hate. He'd had years to practice it.

He fell asleep after too many sleepless nights and this time his nightmares weren't in labs, but watching Marie writhe under the body of a man he didn't know, a man he wanted to kill, a man whose scent he knew--a man that shifted blue and he woke up smelling that still, a man--no, a *woman* who was blue. A woman that he hated, a woman that was *here* and he threw open the door with claws extended and met Marie's wide, startled eyes, stained with tears beneath blackening bruises.

He knew that scent.

The smell of sex and cheap motel rooms, of sweat and lust and fear--of blood and pain and guilt, and over it all, the smell of that blue bitch coating her like a sheathe, like ownership. Soaked into the ragged clothes that covered her skin, into the bruises that covered her face, into the soul that stared out at him from behind haunted eyes.

She ran and he didn't stop her, didn't even think, but turned back inside and knew that hatred had changed, and the animal, the part he'd repressed, sat up and for the first time he listened to what it told him, about love and possession and anger and hatred and revenge.

He listened to what it told him all night, and when he went downstairs the next morning, he started to do what it told him had to be done.

* * * * *

She smelled of fear and pain and anger and betrayal and tears when she taped the note onto his door, fingers shaking so she had to try three times before it'd stay in place. He waited on the other side, listening to her footsteps as they hurried down the hall. He opened the door, read the two lines, crumpled it up in his pocket. Followed her to Xavier's office, pulled the second note off the desk and burned both of them in the fireplace downstairs when she was gone.

One.

The computers were easier still--four years of civilization, and he knew what to look for because she hadn't been trying to hide it, she'd wanted to be caught. Crashed the harddrive with a few keys.

Two.

Scribbled a quick letter to Xavier and threw it on the desk before finding the keys to the bike in the fifth drawer he slit open with a single adamantium sweep of his hand.

Three.

And drove into the city looking for a cheap motel that smelled of sex, of lust and fear, of pain and guilt, and of Marie and a blue bitch.

* * * * *

She was alone, stood up when he came in, startled, then her eyes narrowed as she reached for the phone.

"Be Marie," he whispered softly. And she paused, raising her head in interest. Considering the options, and he knew how she thought, had seen it written on Marie's face for a week. Smelled it on her, cheap fantasy was her specialty and she didn't understand him at all, didn't understand that possession was something that wasn't arguable or dismissable, wasn't something you could ignore and move on from. It just was.

She shifted into dark eyes and dark hair streaked with white and silky soft skin and he pulled on his gloves before he touched her.

Fucked her against the wall with long brown hair wrapped in one fist and looking into eyes that were Marie's eyes and weren't--and it was a close thing when he felt her shiver and whisper his name the way he knew Marie would have the first time he made love to her. Smelling of cheap motels and sex and lust, of a blue bitch and this time of him too. They both slid to the floor, sweat slicking their skin and he slid three claws into her stomach, pinning her into cheap plaster and peeling paint, holding her perfectly still while she became Mystique again, gasping for breath.

Because she didn't understand at all.

"You ever been fucked by someone who wanted you?" he asked her and moved one centimeter and felt her groan, her blood tracing the lines of his knuckles, pressed against blue skin. She whimpered and he reached for the phone, dropping it beside her. "Make the call."

Four.

Possession wasn't something debatable. It just was.

The End