Scott doesn't love Logan. He doesn't even like him most days – the days where it's the two of them and about a hundred students, the days where Logan's lips just won't stop moving and everything that comes out of his mouth – words, laughs, smoke – just gives Scott an itch under his skin that makes him feel raw and irritable and about one more smirk away from setting something on fire.

This thing between them – the claws at Scott's throat, his nails sharp on Logan's back – it's not about love or liking or romance; it's about power and dominance and just letting go. It's about long days where all Scott can smell is sharp musk and wood-chips, days where Logan stalks through the halls and backs him against walls.

It's about anger and frustration and 'I hate you so fucking much'.

Because Jean's dead and that means something – it can't not. Jean's dead and the spot where she fit so perfectly between them, kept them apart, is void. There's nothing to stop them rubbing and chaffing, and when that gets too much, from trying to make it go away the only way they know how; with scrabbling fingers in the dark, bruises that heal in an instant and bruises that take weeks.

Scott loved her; he loved Jean. He loved her like it was the only thing in the world that mattered; he loved her like it could change things, like it would make a difference.

These days there's not even the scent of her soap on the sheets.

Logan loved her too, Scott thinks (he thinks and tries not to let it make him angry, tries not to let it turn the taste in his mouth bitter because it doesn't even matter anymore) but Logan loved her the way a man was probably meant to love a woman; he loved her for her smile and her smarts and all those little Jean things.

(Scott doesn't even know what that means for him; because he just loved Jean and that was all there was to it.)

Now that Jean's gone everything feels a little bit broken because Scott's got nobody left to love and Logan's lost what might just be another in a long chain of women that he couldn't save.

So they take it out on each other; the long nights with only the whir of the fan and the white of the ceiling, nights where everything is lonely and they just need to feel something; skin beneath fingers, flesh against bone.

Scott doesn't even know what he's doing most of the time, only that it's good and Logan's an ass and he never wants this to end because he can't breath – can't think – like this. It's just harsh breaths and curses and the feeling that nothing even matters anymore – not Jean, not Scott, not Logan.

Sometimes it hurts – not the press of Logan's fingers to his skin, teeth to throat, the sharp pain as Logan rolls inside him – but it's a good kind of hurt, like Scott's proving something, like he's laughing in the face of all those memories (ofjean) and it's a release, something a bit angry and red and complete euphoric like Scott's walking on hot coals with water in sight.

The more they do this, the more Scott lets them – because he tried saying no once just to see what would happen and watched Logan back away like wildfire in rewind – the easier it becomes for Scott to realize that nothing matters and that's almost euphoric on its own.

(Sometimes when he sees the Professor just looking at him with blank, unreadable eyes, he thinks there might be something wrong with him after all but then there's Logan and darkness and Jean's face curling in wisps of fire as inks drips like candlewax on burning film and Scott decides, that too, doesn't matter.)

Scott and Logan talk, but never about anything that really matters (is there such a thing anymore? Scott doesn't think so.) They talk about how much Scott hates even looking at Logan and they talk about how Scott's very presence makes Logan want to claw out his own eyes. They talk about lessons and missions and Victory VS Defeat. They talk about long nights in strange Canadian bars and long nights blind and locked out of sight.

After a while they even talk about Jean and Scott isn't even surprised when it doesn't hurt anymore.

They talk about her eyes and her hair and they both agree she was probably the most selfless person either of them had ever met. The talk about the three of them and how she had chosen Scott but not really chosen anyone at all. They talk about what would've-could've-might've happened if there had never been a jet and an ocean duking it out that day.

Then, one day, they don't. They stop talking about things like how much they hate each other and what Quebec smells like in winter and what it feels like to not be able to see for fear of killing someone you love.

(And maybe Scott begins to realize they'd been talking about things that mattered all along.)

Fingers too tight in the dark and bites that scab and bleed in the morning turn into something softer, if only a little, and frantic tussling that always felt a bit too much like a slow-suicide becomes something a little less rushed, a little more easy. The grinding urge to break something that had since given way to complete apathy gives way again into something a little more human, a little more like how Scott had felt when he was fourteen and had woken up after his first surgery; sluggish and like everything that had been so completely dulled and gone was coming back in faint splotches of light here and there.

If anyone (Logan) notices anything different, they do Scott the favour of not mentioning it and for that Scott is grateful.

Scott even begins eating again, sleeping whole nights through. He starts remembering to bathe and shave and even buys himself a comb one afternoon when he's on recon in Hong Kong and just looks up and sees one in a store window.

He rescues the photos he'd been steadily burning one by one and buys an album to keep them in.

(And if somehow a photo of him and Logan, completely at each other's throats in the middle of training finds its way beside a picture of him and Jean on a picnic, Scott figures it's probably just par for the course.)

However, it's the first night Scott wakes up in Logan's bed – not passed out in the training room from being just a tad too rough or collapsed in the bath because he'd slunk out of Logan's room and back to his own while his legs were still weak and he hadn't slept in going on thirty-six hours – that Scott really realizes something.

Two weeks later Scott asks Logan, completely casual, if wants to go for drinks after his last class.

It's silent for a full beat but when Logan says yes, he says it like it means something.

Scott knows it does.

And Scott realizes there might be something to feel beyond nothing after all.