Logan pulled his dust stained paisley bandana down from his face as the fuel cell light on his hovering chopper flickered dangerously close to low. Glancing up the black-top road that wound through the martian frontier, he vaguely made out the blinking signs of a small town, prefab metal housing units stacked fortress style with thin-slit windows to protect against outlaws or bandit attacks on the red planet’s barren plains. Rolling through the security checkpoint via the flashy white security clearance hologram that signaled to waiting guards, he pulled in to the first food joint on the side of the road, jerking his data chip and fuel cell out of the chopper and pulling his napsack from the storage bags on the back. Slinging them all over his shoulder, he stalked through the hissing forcefield door.

“Welcome to Vic’s!” a chipper voice called, ringing from the back room of the dive located a little ways off the highway underneath the massive Mars Dome Gamma, the third million square mile living structure the United Space Exploratory Alliance had constructed around twenty years or so back.

Logan had traipsed out to Mars some fifteen years back to continue his quest to find her. Unluckily for his classic motorcycle, fuel cells had long since replaced fossil fuels. Reluctantly, he put the beautiful black chopper into climate controlled storage on Earth, and sadly purchased a beat up hydraulic Demon-stylized motorcycle-esque machine at Dome Alpha. The only reason he’d stopped today, at Vic’s, was because the damn thing’s fuel cell needed recharging.

Logan frowned, feeling older than ever. I mean, how’re you supposed to feel if you’d been born in the early 19th century and currently sat in a bar-diner combo with retro sixties Earth decor, in the year A.D. 2175, pondering the fate of a classic motorcycle that ran on now obsolete and non-existent gasoline? I mean, he remembered eight track tapes and VCRs, not to mention DVD players! Shaking his head, he dropped his weathered, ancient ruck-sack on the martian bedrock countertop, coughing as red dust leapt up in clouds. It was impossible to travel anywhere on Mars without getting this crap in your craw, hence the dirty bandana slung around his neck.

Reaching into the pack, he pulled out a blue crystalline 21st century flash drive look-a-like which stored a small portion of his accumulated wealth. Despite the Wolverine’s penchant for living life simplistically, inheriting Charles Xavier’s accumulated property and investments in faster-than-light travel as the last living original Alpha Team X-Man had made him quite wealthy. And once you’ve lived a little over three hundred years, these things also tend to accumulate interest.

A blue-space-jumpsuit clad waitress came from the kitchen to hand him a holographic menu. He tugged on his beard thoughtfully as he contemplated his food selection. Ah, hell? Why not.

“Beer, whatever’s on draft - burger and fries, all the way, add some cheese if you’ve got it.” he said. The menu snapped closed as the waitress took it from him with a smile. She had blazing red hair, she wasn’t natural though, if his faded memories of Jean Grey gave him any indication. In other words, the Wolverine was pretty sure that the carpet did not match the drapes.

Snickering to himself, he reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of glasses frames. Placing them over his eyes, he punched a glowing blue button on the side and datastream shot out from both temple pieces, uniting to form a blue screen that displayed the galaxy’s hottest news.

“Nova Corps Severely Decimated,” was the first headline to catch his eye. Automatically, iris recognition opened the newscast, and he cursed at the damage and casualty totals. He had heavily invested in the Nova Corps latest outpost station during the last fiscal year.

“Fucking skrulls,” he growled. A faction of the shapeshifting aliens had broken away from the larger whole, causing absolutely no end of trouble for the remaining humans and Mutants that had spread across the galaxy following the third world war.

Not human versus human.

Human versus mutant.

The war that had claimed the life of the only soul in the universe that the Wolverine had ever, really, truly given a serious damn about.

His Marie.

Shaking his head to clear away the ghosts, his nose told him when his food and beer arrived, and still busy reading his headlines, he slathered the whole pile with dehydrated ketchup and began to scarf it down, guzzling his beer. He only had six hours of daylight left before night fell, and night on Mars could be a long fucking time, consequently, he needed to get hopping on this fuel cell repair, or he could be stuck in this run down dump for a week.

The waitress brought him a glass of water and leaned against the counter, her only other customer, a trader from one of the andromeda galaxies dropping a cred chip on the table as he got up to leave.

“So, where you from stranger?” she said, smiling genuinely, “I’m Bess.”

Logan smiled back, unintentionally, taken aback by her genuine interest. Glancing down, he noted the slim onyx wedding band around her ring finger. This chick didn’t want to get laid, but she was looking for gossip.

“Name’s Logan, Earth,” he replied back, noncommittally. She didn’t need to know exactly where. Let her guess, it was a big damn planet after all.

“I’ve never been,” Bess said, with a sigh of disappointment, “I was born in Dome Alpha and game to Gamma with my husband to start this place.” She gestured to the quaint decor, “I decorated it myself, got the idea from one of those rerun sitcoms from the 2000s, think it was That Seventies Show or something like that.”

“Your husband the cook?” Logan said, lifting another fry to his mouth. The screen of his newsprompter was now politely opaque.

“Yup, he’s from Earth. One day we’ll visit,” she beamed, confidently, “First we gotta get this bun out of the oven though.” Her joke, one that Logan hadn’t heard in at least thirty years made him crack a small smile.

“Congratulations, when’re you due?” he said, giving the standard reply for anyone who was willing to patronize a beaming, expectant mother. Who knew, she might throw in some free apple pie or something.

“A couple more months, one of the girls from Dome Beta is going to be my midwife, she’ll be traveling over a few weeks before the birth, just in case.” Bess replied.

“Hey, Bess?” a gruff voice called from the kitchen, “Any more customers before siesta lock up?”

“Nope, we’re cool Vicky!” Bess replied, then turned to Logan to explain, “Sorry to rush you, but Dome Gamma gets pretty hot when the solar shields come on during the afternoon to recharge the generators, so our businesses close in the afternoons.”

Cursing his luck, Logan handed her his cred chip and finished his meal, now desperate to find the nearest repair shop. Tipping Bess heftily, he left the dive with a to-go piece of pie and the directions to a third-floor walk-up fixit shop called, simply, ‘Skylady’s.’ He could feel the heat soaking into his black bomber jacket, the weight of his pack making him sweat as he trucked the three blocks towards the escaladder that lifted him from street level to the top floor.

Clangs and bangs emanated from within the fabric covered outer door. The sound of a hydraulic-machine-saw whirling and exacerbated cursing made him smirk.

“Son of a mutant-Skrull-loving-whore-bag!” a vaguely familiar voice snarled. The ubiquitous repairperson’s tool, a silver wrench, went flying by him to slam into the forcefield wall that acted as a railing for the skinny walkway. Taking the somewhat silent interlude as his chance, Logan knocked.

“Come mother fucking in!” the voice yelled again, muffled. Inhaling deeply, Logan confirmed that whoever this “Skylady” was, she smelled damn good beneath the layers of grease and machine spooge.

Pushing the fabric away, Logan was taken aback at the amount of junk that littered the workshop from floor to ceiling. What most certainly was the carburetor from a ’67 Skylark sat atop an R2-D2 made from legos. Screws, wrenches, screwdrivers, and digital hydraulic tools littered worn metal containers. Drill bits from an ancient Black and Decker kit were spread out across a massive holographic sketching table, next to which a rusted skill-saw impaled a piece of corroded metal.

“I’m in here!” the voice called again, and Logan stepped through, over, and around the pile of crap through another cloth covered doorway.

This room was completely different than its predecessor.

A black, 1967 Chevy Impala two-door sedan sat on worn tires, hood propped open with a prybar as a lithe body peered around underneath the hood, giving Logan a beautiful glimpse of a taught tush clad in denim shorty-shorts and a white tank top.

Holee shit. Hot bodied girl (what, he hadn’t seen her face yet!) working on a car that he hadn’t seen the likes of in a hundred years and somehow or another had been imported to Mars.

Fucking luckiest day of his life.

“Eck, em,” Logan cough-growled, and the hot-mama mechanic turned around, wiping a streak of grease across a pale, freckled cheek. Waves of brunette hair were pulled up into a messy rooster-tail bun, and heavy schematic holo-goggles covered most of the kid’s face.

“What can I do you for?” she asked, and he grunted, passing her the fuel cell for inspection.

“This thing’s shot, what’re you driving, a 2150 hydro-cycle? Sheesh, that thing’s a death trap, it’s got no speed limiter,” she groused, reaching up to pull her goggles from her cheeks, revealing soft chocolate brown eyes, a delicate nose, and a mouth that Logan was intimately familiar with.

“Marie?” he gasped, hoarsely, pack falling from his hands on to the floor with a dull thud.

Logan’s heart skipped, stuttered, and stopped beating. He stepped forward without even realizing it, cornering the mechanic against the door of the Impala.

“Excuse me?” she eeped, hands pressed tightly against his chest as he leaned in to her neck to inhale her scent.

Beneath the smell of grease and body-odor, was the distinctive, never forgotten scent of Marie. His Marie.

“Oh God, it’s you,” he practically sobbed into her, hands pawing at her clothes, feeling, touching, just for the sake of knowing that after two hundred years of searching, he had found her, the one that Destiny had predicted would come.

“Dude, you’re seriously freaking me out,” she yelped, pushing her hands against his and pulling them away from her, “Stop touching me!”

But Logan was too far gone in sincere delirium to stop now. His lips crashed into hers, her tiny fists punching and kicking him as he groaned like a dying man in the desert, finally presented with a cool spring of water.

He pulled back dazed, staring in shock once more at the girl before him, who opeend her mouth, inhaled a massive gulp of air, and screamed, “VICTOR!” at the top of her lungs.

The last thing Logan saw were Marie’s bewildered eyes as clawed hands lifted him bodily away from her, and slammed him through the roof of the beautiful, classic Impala.

Far Far Away

“MY CAR, VICTOR!  MY FUCKING CAR!”
 
Logan groaned, eyelids fluttering open, four people, two Maries and two Victors, stared down at him.  The Marie’s were raging loud enough to wake the dead.
 
“Whuzzgoingon?” Logan rasped, “Why the hell do you each have id… indentical twins?”
 
“That’s just GREAT, just GREAT, Vicky!” the two Marie’s shouted at exactly the same time, “You just mind-body-fucked a drifter through the roof of my CAR!”
 
“Calm down, sheesh,” the Victor’s rumbled, “He’ll heal soon enough.”
 
“BUT MY CAR WON’T, VICKY!”
 
“Two Maries are twice as loud as one Marie,” Logan snorted, rubbing his temples wearily, then rubbed his head against the leather back seat, mumbling, “Upholstery is comfortable.”
 
“I HOPE YOU SUFFOCATE IN IT!” Marie-times-two shrieked, incensed.  Several metal objects rained down on Logan’s exposed face as she stormed off, throwing anything she could reach in his general area.  Most unfortunately, the ubiquitous wrench slammed into his groin.  Gasping in agony, Logan rolled into a fetal position, two tears slipping out of the corners of his eyes, carving paths of clean skin through accumulated layers of red Martian dust.
 
“Smooth move, puppy,” Victor growled.  The feral, hair shorn short and rather comely looking for the first time Logan could recall, and his twin, reached into the jagged hole and lifted him out by his jacket.  Logan wasn’t sure exactly which end was up.  Victor swung him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, then settled him sloppily onto a folding metal chair where the Wolverine curled into a fetal position protecting his throbbing manhood.
 
The massive feral squatted back onto his heels to contemplate the piteous heap that was hunkered down in front of him. “I climb up here expecting Jimbo to be harassing Marie, and I find you of all people, I mean, I thought we lived in a freaking galaxy.  What the fuck are you doing on Mars?”

“Hurting,” Logan gasped out, one powerfully strong hand clutching the edge of the chair for support.

“Healing factor will take care of it,” Victor huffed, nonchalantly.

“Takes twice as long for your balls, you know that,” Logan growled.

“Put on your big girl panties, will ya puppy?” snapped Victor, “You sound like a little bitch.”

“Fuck you, Victor” Logan spat.

Victor chuckled, stood up, and walked over to a cold fusion box that hummed with blue light. It let out a large bang as he opened the door, two battered bottles of beer sat in the side of the door.

Turning around, he handed one bottle to Logan, then twisted the cap off of his beer using his teeth. Spitting the corrugated metal to the side, Victor took a swig, then said, “What’s it been, Wolverine, twenty years since I last saw your sorry ass? Why aren’t you dead yet?”

“Same reason you’re not dead, I suppose,” Logan managed to wheeze. The pain emanating from his crotch had died down to a dull roar. Victor actually had one head now instead of two.

“Why are you on Mars, then?” Victor asked once more, his long fingernails scratching his short hair leisurely as he relaxed down onto the cold cement tile floor.

“Looking for her, obviously,” Logan snorted, gesturing towards the forcefield bars blocking the arched doorway that led into the pod-garage’s living quarters where Marie had disappeared, “Destiny said she’d be back around sometime, can’t live without her, you know.”

“Seems to me you’ve been doing mighty fine for the past century,” Victor mused, quietly.

“If you like living in hell, yeah, sure,” Logan ground out, as calmly as possible. He’d forgotten how much Victor grated on his nerves, “Why are you on Mars?”

“I dunno, got an itch, Earth’s not what it used to be,” Victor’s claws scratched gratingly against the roughed concrete, “Met Bess.”

Logan cocked his head at Victor - damn, his head was still swimming, the feral had split back into two - one eyebrow raising in an interested fashion, “You love her?”

Victor blushed.

Logan spat out his beer in surprise.

“No fucking way,” Logan hooted, jubilant, “Sabretooth! Whipped!”

“Look at the droid calling the mech silver,” Victor huffed, finishing his beer, “Call me crazy, but I think Marie whipped your ass back in 1999.”

“Yeah, but I’m not a sociopath,” Logan snarked. Victor reached out a clawed hand to the seated man, Logan took it.

Victor jerked him forward with lightning speed, then let go. Logan crashed into a table full of tools head first, metal falling around him in an earsplitting roar.

“WHAT WAS THAT?!” Marie’s voice shrieked, faintly from inside the house.

“Have fun, puppy,” Victor said with a grin. He didn’t offer to pull Logan from underneath the metal tool bureau, “I’ve watched out for her these last two decades, now it’s your turn.”

“You’re just going to leave me here with her?” Logan quipped. A trickle of blood slid from his forehead to his mouth, “You’re fucking mean.”

“Eh, she’s not my problem anymore,” Victor said with a grin. The floor vibrated. Marie was coming towards them, and she wasn’t walking calmly.

Oh no, she was stomping.

Turning and walking towards the entrance, Victor paused, “Oh, and puppy? Her powers aren’t the same...be careful.” He waved two fingers at Logan, then casually disappeared around the corner. Logan could hear him clanking down the escaladder.

The hum of the forcefield door that led to the living chambers sliding open made him feebly stir. He didn’t want to be unable to defend himself this time. That wrench was heavy.

Crawling out from underneath the rubble, Logan clambered back towards the chair, seating himself sloppily. Sure enough, when his vision had cleared enough, Marie was standing directly in front of him.

With the wrench.

“Mister,” she hissed, “You have some explaining to do.”

“God, you’re more beautiful than I remember,” Logan blurted out. Damn, he had absolutely no couth.

“Don’t you try to sweet talk me, Chester,” Marie growled. The wrench poked him forcefully in the chest.

“Chester?” Logan asked. He reached around the edge of the chair for his beer, found it, then brought it up to his lips.

“The Molester, of course!” she yelped, “You come in here with your shitter of a power cell asking for a tune up for the piece of junk demon cycle parked across the street, and then you feel me up?! That constitutes you as a Chester, thank you very much!”

“I’m just, jeez, let me,” Logan stammered.

“Let you what?” Marie yelled. She had a streak of grease from her chin to forehead. Logan couldn’t help thinking it was amazingly cute, “You’ve already fucked up my car! You know how long it took me to find and import that thing? Now it’s totaled!”

“Totaled?” Logan turned and glanced at the car. Sure the frame had gotten bent and the cloth top was beyond repair, but the bones of the car were still in good shape, “I can fix that in no time.”

“Oh please, where are you going to get the parts? Despite the fact that this looks like some sort of junk grotto, nothing in here is really older than 2100.”

“I am,” he growled.

“Oh please, and when were you born then? You don’t look a day over thirty,” Marie huffed, but her eyes were gentle, hot. Logan missed that look.

God he wanted her.

“1880, give or take,” Logan said, wincing at the shock in her eyes.

“That’s impossible,” Marie said, “You’d have to be a mutant, at the least.”

“Well, there you go,” Logan reached around his neck and snapped off the dog tags that hung there, then passed them to her, “Codename, Wolverine.” He couldn’t help but notice her bare fingertips touching his own without care.

She wasn’t the same Marie.

But she was still Marie, he was certain of it. Destiny had said she would come again.

“I’m a mutant, too,” Marie murmured softly, fingertips tracing the metal with familiarity, “I’m a sensory-technopath.”

That explained the mechanics shop. Any sensory propelled techno-path generally had an insatiable need to work around technology. No wonder she had imported the car, possibly buying it on the black market, she was naturally obsessed with tinkering.

“Let me help you fix your car - I promise I can get you the parts that I need,” Logan offered.

“Where from? Not a techno-heap on Mars that could get me pieces to this baby without a blood-price,” Marie snorted.

“Darlin’, I’ve got plenty of money,” he replied, running his hand through his messy and dusty hair.

“Mars currency ain’t worth shit these days,” Marie warned, “You’re not gonna pull the wool over my eyes, Mister Wolverine.”

“Call me Logan, and trust me, it’s Earth creds. I can get what you need.”

“And how does someone like you,” she looked him up and down, scrutinizing his look, “Driving a beat-to-shit cycle with barely enough fuel to get from Beta to Gamma, looking like he doesn’t have two nickels to rub together, have enough creds to buy me pieces to a car worth it’s weight in gold?”

“I’m the best at what I do,” Logan shrugged, “But what I do isn’t very nice.”

“You sound like Victor,” Marie replied. She yanked a rubber band off a nearby table and pulled her hair into a messy bun. It had fallen into a tangle around her shoulders earlier.

“You don’t say, Marie, you don’t say,” Logan laughed.

“Alright, I’ll let you fix the car, but you’re paying for it.” The wrench poked Logan forcefully in the chest once more, “Got it?”

“Crystal fucking clear,” Logan replied, dead serious.

“Before we get started using up your supposed massive amount of creds, I want you to answer a question,” she said, wrench still poking into his firm chest. His balls twinged in faux pain at the sensation.

“I’ll answer,” he replied.

“How do you know who I am? Why did you go after me like that earlier?”

Logan didn’t answer, just reached into the inside, hidden pocket of his jacket. Inside, a gently folded, worn flap of paper sat, warmed by being next to his body. Gingerly, he peeled the folded paper back, then handed it to Marie.

“What is this?” she asked, touching it with reverence.

“It’s a photograph, before holographic technology, this is how we saved visual memory.”

Marie frowned, her eyebrows furrowing as she looked closer at the photograph, “When was this taken?” she asked, her voice edgy.

“2012,” Logan replied, “We’d just gotten back from vacation.”

Her finger traced the face of the brunette standing next to the man in front of her, who was beaming with male pride, they had wedding rings on. She looked at the stubborn chin, the soft eyes, the freckles.

The only difference was the two white streaks falling into the woman’s face.

“Wolverine,” she asked, gently sinking down towards the floor, “Why am I in your picture?”