What is now known as �Sweet Girl� started out as �Violet and Blue�. I wanted to write something that delved deep into Logan�s psyche when he left at the end of X-Men and then the damn thing mutated on me and became his return in X-Men 2. So instead of an angsty hundred words on leaving, we get an angsty hundred words on returning, and Logan finds out firsthand that home is never quite how we remember it. Picture this: Logan�s been away for 2+ years. He�s given Marie time to grow up. He�s thought about her every time he�s seen something beautiful � that�s happened a lot up in Alaska, I�m betting � and now he comes back through the door he left and finds that she�s the first one who�s come to greet him. He can smell the difference in her; she has gained some control and he�s had time to process how her body takes energy. So he gives her his memories, all the wonderful clean moments he has gathered in the past months, some sweet, some funny, some gentle, all of them tinged with the memory of her and how she was always on his mind. �Better than any fucking postcard� was one of the original lines I discarded. Enter Robert �Bobby� Drake, a.k.a. �Iceman�: cool, calm, levelheaded, a Scott Summers-wannabe in Logan�s estimation and everything that Logan himself is not. The little macho display of power on Bobby�s part makes Logan believe that Marie could care less about his recollections of the Alaskan wilderness. Not only is he too late to claim Marie as his own, now she�s got winter whenever she wants it. The situation can only be summed up in that one blunt Anglo-Saxon expletive. �Sweet Girl� was a demo Nicks made before she went out on the road with Fleetwood Mac. She wasn�t about to go on tour without that song. I liked the images of a woman roaming all over the world, and I thought that I could work Marie into Logan�s consciousness. She was always with him, and to see her with Bobby in a relationship that�s been going on long enough for Bobby to try and seek his approval hurts Logan more than he�d like to admit.

Copyrighted � 2003 Silver Thistle Publishing.