**

The tears hadn’t come yet. She wasn’t sure they ever would. Why was it that she couldn’t cry like the rest of her team? Perhaps it was a side effect of her mutation? Perhaps she wasn’t human enough anymore to feel grief? A sad, old voice in the recesses of her mind quietly suggested perhaps she was in denial. She ignored that voice.

She picked up the phone and dialed the all too familiar number. The phone rang and rang before the answering machine picked up with her voice floating over the line.

You’re reached the answering machine. Logan’s not available to take your call at the moment. Leave your name, number, and a brief, and I do mean brief, message and I’ll try my best to have make sure he returns your call.

She heard her own giggle before the message clicked off and the tape clicked on to record. Logan had been making faces the entire time she had been recording that message. It had taken a dozen plus tries, but she got the message recorded.

She carefully pressed the off button and then deliberately hit the redial button. She had been calling ever since she was told. He couldn’t be dead. He was Logan, the invisible Wolverine. He had touched her and survived. He just wouldn’t answer the phone, and the knot in her stomach got bigger with every unanswered call.

The answering machine clicked on again and still the tears didn’t come to her eyes. He wasn’t there and he wasn’t coming back.

There had been an attack on an apartment building that housed a few known mutant families. The building was a few blocks away from Logan’s, and he was the first of the X-Men to make it to the scene. The fire had spread quickly through the building. In the middle of the day most people had been at work, but one child wasn’t accounted for. A little girl on the second floor had been left alone during the day while her momma was at work, and no one had seen her.

Logan had gone in – alone – to find the girl. Neither had come out of the building before the fire fully engulfed it. The Professor had searched, via Cerebro, but to no avail. Logan was well and truly gone.

Leave your name, number, and a brief, and I do mean brief, message and I’ll try my best to have make sure he returns your call.

The beep of the message recording startled her. She took a ragged deep breath and whispered, “You’re dead and I’m sorry.”

**