<hr/><div class="floatleft">(http://i.imgur.com/JWIWv1D.jpg?1)</div><strong>Name:</strong>James 'Logan' Howlett<br/><strong>Location:</strong>The Blackbird, monitored airspace around Westchester County<br/><strong>Date/Time:</strong>September 7th, 2017, early evening<br/><strong>Tagging:</strong>Salem Summers | Cyclops<br/><strong>Content:</strong>Smooth sailing  in the stratosphere; Minor turbulence in the cockpit. Logan wants to get to know his student.<br/><hr/><br/>The kid was a natural in the cockpit. As soon as he'd surrendered controls to her, she checked her instruments as she'd always been instructed, not forgetting a single one. Salem even made a comment on their low altitude; He'd purposely brought them to the lower range of typical altitude for their class of jet aircraft, curious to see if she'd take note if it.<strong>"Heh."</strong>The sound was somewhere between a grunt and a chuckle, but it was a sound of approval that Logan had given her so many times since they'd been working together. A beat later, the girl made a similar noise, noting the roughness around one of their wings; Logan could feel it in his bones, and like him, Salem didn't need to rely on an instrument to take notice and begin to adjust the wings. When she took manual control of those adjustments, Logan shifted uneasily in his seat, but kept his mouth shut. The kid knew what she was doing, and he should have remembered that Scott had been capable of something similar. It was like she could feel the plane around her as if it were her own body, every curve of the jet akin to her own, and guiding it correctly through the air was as natural as walking in a straight line.<br/><br/>Once they had finally eased into a steady course, the cockpit fell silent. With clear weather ahead, Salem had no more dutiful observations of the plane. She could have abandoned the pilot's seat for a bathroom break and come back before any manual input was required to keep them in the air. Logan relaxed visibly in his seat and clicked his seatbelt off; He lifted his feet an inch off the ground, preparing to kick back and rest his boots on the dash, but he remembered something that made him plant back on the floor. Scott had hated it; The unruly X-Man had a habit of getting mud on the console, and he'd rather have died on a hill arguing than to correct himself and apologize. Logan didn't like people telling him what to do... Or at least, he hadn't. It had been a long time ago. He kept himself from soiling the dashboard just to make her happy. And while he found any similarities between Scott and Salem curious and interesting, a part of him didn't want to know how extensive it was. That small bit of Logan worried that she'd grow up to resent him because it was just their nature to be at each other's throats.<br/><br/>After a few minutes, in which Logan allowed himself to ease up a bit around her, he could tell that she had some questions on her mind. He could sense it in her body language and the way she stole occasional glances at him, the movement<em>almost </em>imperceptible through the obstruction of her ruby-quartz glasses. Then again, Salem had an odd way of telegraphing her social body language, as if to make up for her constant poker face. When she finally broke open the conversation and asked him about his past, he rolled his head to the side to stare at her, making a face at her. It wasn't that he was reluctant to speak with her; Logan still struggled with that question himself, and hadn't talked to anyone about it for more than a second or two.<br/><br/><strong>"Well... There are some things I regret not doin' over there."</strong>His world was still a blasted hell-hole dominated by villains, and he still worried about those he had left behind, chiefly the Hulk infant and Dani Cage.<strong>"But for the most part, that place is hell. Not sayin' this is heaven, but it's... Nice enough."</strong>It made him feel a little guilty to grin, but 'nice enough' was a big departure from where he had been. There was still hope in Salem's world, still a chance for people to have a normal life. Maybe not for Logan, but he could make sure that Salem and the rest of Xavier's school could see a better future than the one he'd seen.<br/><br/><strong>"Say. Somethin' I've been wonderin' since I came here... Why's Alex with Magneto? It's not like the Havok that I knew. He usually had some sense, and wasn't really interested in bein' a fighter."</strong>Logan had been wanting to talk to her on a more personal level for some time. Throughout their training and lessons together, they had been an ideal model of a professional teacher-student relationship. Conversation came easy when he was giving her a lesson, or she was assailing him with questions. But he wanted to know more about her, and changing gears from work to play wasn't as easy for him nowadays as it used to be. Not nearly as mechanical or fluid as flipping a switch on the pilot's console. She was as easy to read as an accelerometer gauge, but he didn't know what to do with what she was telling him.