liminal;

Logan hadn't moved much from where he'd paused, out in the back lawn. It was as clean and well-maintained as he remembered it being, though there were a few changes that were hard to miss. He lingered over one particular spot - empty in this timeline, but in his...

Her footsteps were light and silent behind him, but Logan sensed her before she could make it to where he stood. Automatically he put out his cigar before she could get even get a hello out to him.

Ororo smiled at the gesture, both thoughtful and familiar.

"It's late," she said, when she was close enough to speak without having to raise her voice.

Logan shrugged, turning to face her. "I'm a bit of a night owl."

'I know,' she almost says, but caught herself in time. She gave a nod instead. "You keep coming out here, in the evenings."

"Yeah?" He figured someone would notice sooner or later. Logan looked away, back to a patch of meticulously maintained grass a couple of feet away.

Another nod. "Was there something else here, in your time?"

"... There used t'be," He said, finally. "Back when we still had the school, anyway." He tucked his cigar into his jacket. "I wasn't around when they closed it down back in '12. 'Ro said- ... you said you had 'em exhumed before you had ta leave, but I never gotta chance to find out where..."

Ororo paused for a moment, not expecting that answer. She thought, perhaps, another building, another wing for the school. But just the thought of having to bury any of her friends and family made her breath still. Logan must have caught on to the subtle shock settling over her body.

"- That was years ago though. An' obviously kind of a moot point now, eh?" he chuckled, wanting to put some levity back into their conversation. It came out fairly humorless, so he just turned to look away.

Ororo reached out to rest a hand on his shoulder. To his credit, Logan didn't flinch away. He did freeze though, and tried not to think of his last memory of Ororo reaching out to him in the darkness, of her eyes shining with tears that she tried so hard to keep from falling...

"I'm sorry."

Logan shook his head. "... Don't be. Like I said, it ain't even an issue here."

"That doesn't mean you hadn't mourned them." Ororo pulled her hand away as she stepped up to stand next to him. She clasped her hands together looking at the place Logan had been staring so intently at, trying to imagine graves lining the ground...

Logan meanwhile kept his eyes on her. Why had she come out here?

"To keep you company," She said, and Logan realized he'd spoken out loud. She gave him a small smile. "Like I said, you've been coming out here in the evenings quite a bit; I thought you might need a friend. I guess I was right."

"Heh." Same old Ororo, he figured. He often wondered if she wasn't a telepath...

They fell silent again, quietly contemplating the clean patch of grass before them. Ororo tried to imagine what it looked like, how many graves, who it was that they buried here... but at the same time, she couldn't quite bring herself to pry...

"... Jean," Logan said suddenly, gesturing with a nod to one side. "An' Scott, we buried next to her. An' the Prof was over there, for a while."

Ororo blinks, incredulity overcoming her sudden surge of sadness at the thought of having to bury her best friends. "... 'For a while'?"

Logan let out a snicker. "Yeah. Long story. I'll tell ya about it some time."

She shook her head, finding herself smiling back a little.

"... But the school closed down after that; hadda hand it over to Trask 'cuz of some red tape an' bullshit." Logan's voice lost its melancholy tone and took on a slight edge. "The riots got worse, and the team split up. We lost Warren; his family took him to their personal plot upstate. And Hank..." Logan trailed off as it always did, when they talked about Hank. Ororo impulsively reached out to rest her hand on his arm, and this time he reached up to squeeze her fingers in his hand. "Old Blue's family asked for his body back. Had a closed casket funeral back in Georgia..."

Logan was silent for a long time, holding onto the memory.

"... After Hank, we didn't exactly have the luxury of funerals," he finally said, at length. "But we remembered them all."

"We?"

A nod. "You an' me."

"You and me," she echoed, drawing her hand back to herself.

Logan couldn't really look at her, so he kept his eyes on the grass before him. "... Even after we had to split up into smaller groups, you and me - we stuck together."

Ororo nodded. He'd said so before, when he'd given them the basic run down of history as he himself had known it. But the way he said it now...

"I'm glad you had each other," she said quietly. She gave him a smile when he turned to look at her. "She... you must have had something special."

He shrugged. "... We've always had something special, 'Ro. It just... it took us years to realize that it was something maybe a bit more than two people working so damn well together." He shook his head. It was the first time he'd admitted it out loud to anyone, in this time. It should have been easy to sound bitter when he spoke of her while standing next to the woman who had her face and her body and her smile and her quirks and her gentle laughter, but none of the shared memories. And yet the best he could muster was a distant sense of longing...

Ororo said nothing, turning her gaze to the distance as well. She folded her arms, and let a small smile grace her lips.

"Is that all?" she asked with a chuckle that made him look at her. "It doesn't sound all that different from what we had here, if you ask me."

"... Yeah?" He lifted an eyebrow, not sure if she was teasing or - was it too much to hope that maybe, in this time, they had...?

Ororo's smile was small, but sure. "Perhaps we had more in common than we realized."