'Sleep...
Perchance to dream of better times.'
***********************************************

The leather of the journal slipped under her fingers, sleeplessness had been her companion since the first fingers of the night had crept over the grounds. Her eyes were ringed with black and this was *no* fashion statement.

The Professor had advised her to use her journal, to write down the exeperiences, to purge them from her mind before she got to sleep. She snorted as she thought about that one, oh yeah as if sleeping was something she could even contemplate with the horror show running in her skull. But if he hadn't taken a look inside her skull in the first place maybe all this wouldn't have flared up.

So she'd been having a few 'odd' episodes with her internal passenger, he'd send her language south when she was angry but hell it wasn't *that* bad. It was preferable to the situation she was in now, even her internal Logan hid from her when she was having the dreams. As if he knew they were his fault and he didn't want her to see or feel him.

Taking the pen in hand she tried to make sense of it all, the empty page beckoning her to pour out the pain that was rattling around her skull. Gritting her teeth she forced Logan into her mind, gripping him tight as the pen went onto the page. "Come on Logan, share it, maybe we'll get some rest tonight."

'Silence, always silence, as if the lab was holding it's breath, the world stopping for a moment as the nightmare began again. Then the smell of stale sweat and fear, flooding her nose, thrashing against leather, biting into skin, ripping it open. Copper, iron, the rich stench of her own blood mixed with ammonia, as her body responded to the sight of the tank.

Resting on a slab that moved her from the horizontal to the vertical, hoisted up, and lowered into the green water. Fighting with every single piece of mind she had left not to scream as she went under the water, she'd only drown faster.

All the time the covered faces were smiling, the lines at the edges of their eyes showing their pleasure at her suffering. Opening her mouth to scream as the first injection of metal went in, flooding her burning lungs with the green water. Sedation taking effect, consciousness dropping away until there was nothing but pain. Burning, aching pain, itching, solid pain that never lessened, only ever got worse. So bad it burned through the sedative, her system trying to get air, limiting their efforts to turn her into the perfect killer.

Being lifted was the worst, taken out of the liquid chamber, lungs throwing up green liquid, desperate to breathe. The sensation of death hovering over her like a gentle caress, just out of reach but constantly there, like a masked lover. Consciousness swimming back up, throat raw and burnt by bile, system screaming at the intrusion of the metal in under her skin. Feeling it eat at her bones, each part weighted with it pulling away from her body as if it was no longer her own.

Then when she thought some remission was about to happen she'd feel herself dropping back into the green liquid. The faces coming back to continue their work on her body, every eye glinting their fevered focus at her. Yet her mind remembering their scents, the pungent odour that was all *them*. Under it all, all the scents of fear and excitement, the metal and everything else. Their scents were like liquid fire burning across her mind, her teeth bared as she fell under the liquid again. The burning taste of her own skin flooding her mouth, trying not to swallow the taint of her own body. Thrashing against the restraints as the needles came back, filling her with the liquid that filled her bones. Screaming into the green, hoping for a death that was denied by her own genetics, able to suffer again and again, over and over and each time it happened she lost more of herself.'

Marie stopped the flow, her mind was screaming at her, the pain ghosted over her bones, thousands of little pinpricks running over her skin as she hugged herself tight. Trying to keep the reality of *now* here in her mind, where she was resting on her bed, propped up writing in her journal and not in the tank again. Breath sticking in her throat as the taste of her own burnt skin made her gag.

Launching herself across the room to her toilet where dinner made a re-appearance, colouring the white of the porcelain. Yet it wasn't enough, her stomach convinced of it's state by her mind kept going, trying to rid itself of the vile green liquid that she'd never even seen. Hands gripping the sides of the toilet as if it were the only solid reality in her world, which at the moment it was. Concentrating on that, focusing on that alone, on the cool porcelain under her fingers, not on her body.

Only after a minute did the waves of sickness slow down, pulling herself back to her own body, to the pain of it and the knocking at her door. Her tears coming thick and fast as she realised exactly what she'd interrupted the night Logan had stabbed her. Why he'd reacted the way he had, why his claws had fired first before he'd woken properly. Holding her stomach tight as she sobbed on the floor of her bathroom, her secret now making the tags at her neck weigh even heavier.

As the hands moved her to the bed, a press of a needle and she was slipping away into the darkness, fear made her struggle, made her fight it. Hands flailing they dropped to the leather covered book that still lay open on her bed. Grabbing it, she clung to it as the world slipped away from her, using it as a talisman. As long as she held it she was *real* and Logan was somewhere else, deep in her mind she could feel him stirring. A darkness that hadn't been there before, a watching patience that was underneath the man. The thing that hit first and then thought about it's actions, the thing that had stabbed her when she'd woken him. The thing that had kept Logan alive throughout his torture, throughout his *modifications*, through the nightmare that had been his birth as 'Wolverine'.

Sliding away Marie screamed out inside her mind as Wolverine moved in to claim what was left of her mind.