Pace, pace, pace.

Peek through the little door… no, not yet.

Pace, pace, pace.

Take a swig of beer. This pacing thing is getting old.

Old. Now that’s a laugh.

Ding!

As the timer chimed, Logan dropped the empty bottle on the countertop, opened the oven door, tested it by sliding a claw into the center of the cake. When the claw came out clean, he smiled and slid the cake onto a cooling rack. Chocolate. It smelled good, he thought proprietarily, pleased with his effort.

All right, sure, it came from a mix. His contribution to the culinary masterpiece had been one egg, a cup of water and a little bit of vigorous beating, but there was a chocolate cake sitting on the counter where before there had been a box full of brown powder. And he dared anyone to try and stick candles into that.

The cake did smell good. And it looked good, round and smooth, with a high, proud dome of a top. Not a miserable, lopsided sinkhole (like a few of his earlier attempts) that would need to be cut flat, then patched and cemented with frosting. It was worth wearing oven mitts for. It was almost worth wearing an apron for. This day was special.

Now, for the finishing touches. The box insisted that the cake needed to sit and cool before frosting could be applied, and while Logan did not normally care to be told what to do, especially by a lousy piece of cardboard, he was reluctantly forced to admit that the box had known what it was talking about up to this point, so he wandered away, drank another beer, smoked a cigar, made sure the candles were still where he had left them, paced.

Birthdays only came once a year, after all.

They had to be done right.

It was important. It just was.

An hour later, he came back into the kitchen, eyeing the cake far more nervously then he ever had any oncoming armies, and he spread chocolate icing evenly over every inch of cake, then decorated with rainbow sprinkles.

Satisfied at last, he reached for a tube of blue gel, and carefully, painstakingly, wrote ‘Happy Birthday, Marie.’

If anyone ever accused him of doing this kind of pansy stuff he’d deny it.

A ring of candles around the edge of the cake and it was done. He put the cake on the table, lit the candles, and stared at them for a while. He didn’t sing. He just watched as they burned, a curl of colored wax dripping slowly from each to splash onto the smooth chocolate. Finally, he blew them out, and cut himself a large piece, which he ate in silence.

The Mutant Registration Act had been in full force for something on the order of twenty years, now. Children were now routinely scanned at birth, and, if the X-gene was found, the child was given a registry tattoo. On the left cheek, where it was impossible to cover or conceal. Logan had heard vague rumors that one of the latest fads involved faking such tats, perhaps indicating a groundswell of acceptance among kids if not their parents, but he didn’t pay much attention to such things.

He’d stopped caring, for the most part, the day the school was firebombed, which would have been about seventeen years ago. If any of the little ones had gotten out, the X-Men had never been able to find out what had happened to them.

Not that there had been too many kids left in the school. Admissions had plummeted, and just about everyone old enough to drive had abandoned full-time education in favor of working with the X-Men and just plain staying alive.

Chuck hadn’t been too happy about that, but there was a war on, and if he hadn’t kept them close, kept them as safe as he could, most of them would have ended up drafted into the US Army anyhow.

Marie had been in his team section. He’d insisted on that.

They were a good team, too. Marie, and LeBeau, a Cajun they’d picked up right before the shit really hit the fan, and Bobby Drake, and Kurt, and Logan himself. They’d fought a good fight.

And they’d lost.

It had been inevitable.

It was a war of attrition, really. They kept winning battles, if by winning you meant ‘most of us got away.’ It was the ‘most’ that was the problem. Even with five crackerjack fighters on a team, say you lose one person every other firefight, after ten battles you’ve lost even if you won the first nine. And when you’re fighting pretty much the combined armed forces of the whole damned civilized world, heavy losses are hard to avoid.

Kurt first, then Kitty over in Scott’s section, and Chuck, and and and. . .

Rogue hadn’t made it back from a particularly nasty little ambush about fifteen years ago. It was the week before what would have been her twenty-seventh birthday.

One by one they fell. Scott, and Bobby, and Hank, and LeBeau, and and and. . .

Logan, of course, got back up again every time he should have been finished, but once there was nobody left to protect he’d quietly vanished, lost himself in the deepest part of Canada. The war had been over for years. Over for everyone but the X-Men, for everyone except a handful of ragged idealists who just plain didn’t know when to quit. They were fighting to try and force the norms to accept that they were human too, and Logan, deep in his heart, had known from the start that it was hopeless. He had fought to protect his teammates. That had been hopeless, too, of course.

He cut another slice of cake. It was delicious. Marie had loved chocolate. He chewed. She would have been in her forties by now. She would probably still have been beautiful. Maybe the silver streak would have been wider by now.

His hair was still the same thick, blue-black tangle it had always been, and his face was still unlined. Some days he thought he was immortal. Some days he hoped not.

He opened a beer to wash the last crumbs of cake down his throat. He’d been having birthday parties for Marie, and by extension for all of them, ever since he’d declined the honor of single-handedly continuing the Professor’s crusade, more than ten years now, closer to thirteen or fourteen. Something like that. A long time, in any case. It was the only link he had.

Well. One more year gone. He stood up, ignored the dirty plates and pans and bowls, and walked out of the house. He picked up a hatchet and began splitting firewood. It was going to be cold tonight, and the wood-burning stove that was the only heat source his cabin had needed a lot of fuel to keep going.

“Happy birthday, Marie,” he said aloud.