I Can't Tell You

By Alestar

DISCLAIMER: Marvel had their chance, and they blew it. The poem is "Postcard" by Margaret Atwood.

SUMMARY: Short little celebration of our Wolverine, which, I think, is wholly overdue.

WARNING: SWP. I make no apologies for sentimentality and pontification.

NOTES: This actually found its birth in a hetfic. Go figure. The rest was inspired by Sophie, mi jovencita hermosa.

FEEDBACK: Please. Yes, I need to ween; but not today. Alestar213@aol.com


I Can't Tell You
By Alestar

I can't tell you how long I've watched you. I've seen you fight, I've seen you relax; I've seen you rage, I've seen you cry. I've memorized the deep blue of your eyes, your startlingly elegant gait, the heady scent of your cigars.

All this time, and you've never known a thing. You don't even know I exist. Where's that animal intuition you're supposed to have? You blind, beautiful man.

I am one of many, you know. There are oceans of men and women that see you on the horizon, stalking towards them, and everything they thought they knew about the world changes as they watch you approach. By the time you reach them you are the center of their universe, silhouetting the sun. And, of course, you continue walking, right past them, leaving them gasping in the mud, wondering what's happened to them and why things can never be the same.

It's enough to drive one to murder. Several, in fact.

It didn't take long for you to become my obsession. You frightened me, see, and not much does that. The first time I saw you, that I can remember, the first glimpse of your sulky, compact body, I saw the whole of you. You moved with a Darwinian economy of motion, and your storm-colored eyes took in everything around you with only the slightest turn of your head. Everything around you except me, that is. And then you took a breath, hardly noticeable, only a slight lifting of your chest, and I was reminded of a poem I'd heard long ago . . .

://"I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only.

I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary."//

And that is what I am. Completely unnoticed, the one whose misunderstood grimace is not a glare of hatred but a clench of wistful remorse. And necessary? Yes, I think so.

Since then, my fixation has muted and grown. I've had the time to get used to it, and the sense to go a little bit insane from it. Instead of the rage I was once plunged into at the thought of you, I now simply lower myself into a . . masochistic sardonia.

And it is masochism. You know that, don't you? It's important that you know that.

Although, with your observation skills, you most likely don't. You don't even know I exist. Maybe you saw me, in that first unguarded moment, saw the light dawning in my eyes; and you wondered for a split-second if I recognized in you the perfection of motion and of sentiment and of destiny that you are aware on some level of possessing. But then I realized the rest, the unattainability of you, the impossibility of it all, and I became for you what you see now. The anger that is really passion. The hatred that is remorse.

I remember realizing, when I saw you that first time, that you would be the death of me. You reflect a person's mortality in your eyes, did you know that? Not because you're the harbinger of death you accuse yourself of being; but because they know that whatever they are, whatever they've lived, has led up to that moment of chance meeting, and the rest is all inconsequential thereafter. You think you're Midas, that you poison everything you touch. The truth is that the gods strike down in mercy all those who can't have you.

Almost all. I recovered from the lightning bolt. Damned healing factor.

I dealt with the survival as best I could, though that's not saying much. Tell me, though, in truth. There is more between us, more that is real, than there ever could've been if I had been allowed you. Granted, when I tell you I love you, you hear something completely different, but at least I am allowed to say *something* to you. And it is enough, for now, so I play the game. I can't tell you.

Come on, Logan.

"C'mon, runt."

Let's be what we can. Let me love you as my enemy.

"Let me eat yer heart out."


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