The fog was like a living thing.
When Logan shouldered open the heavily reinforced, and cleverly concealed trap door that barred entrance to the steps leading down into the lower levels, the fog at first skittered backwards, swirling away from the rush of air, startled. But slowly, with curiosity, it crept back into to place, investigating the new hole in the ground, sending small tendrils in and over and around the edges like probing fingers. It breathed over Logan as he stood there, tense, waiting, claws extended, and seemed to inhale him back in again, taking in the smell of him even as he was smelling it. And then, apparently comfortable with this new development, the fog resettled, a placid and unperturbed blanket of gray.
He couldn't see a goddamned thing. It was the type of fog that liked to play tricks on you, that whorled just enough to lend a sense of depth that was all wrong, that coaxed the eyes into a false sense of security, shrank the world down and lured the mind into a dangerous sense of peace. It dampened sound and smell, so that things were only mournful echoes, muddled scents. It prickled on the skin, turned it clammy, and then crawled deep down into the bones to chill them, make them ache the ache of a sea giant at the end of his days, tangled in seaweed and starfish and the uncaring waters of the deep. It was a swamp fog, a barrow fog, a graveyard fog.
Logan knew this, and was wary. For long moments, he stood motionless, ready to spring at the slightest threat, one foot on the top step while the other rested on terra firma. When he finally turned his body enough to be able to look back at Scott, who stood a few steps below him, hand poised at his visor, a haze had already succeeded in drifting between the two of them, so that it looked, weirdly, like they were peering at each other from different worlds that were separated for a short time only by a thin, penumbral veil.
With a jerking inclination of his head, Logan signaled the all clear and stalked deeper into the fog without bothering to make sure that the others were following. He was certain that they were, after years of this. It had only taken the lot of them -him, Scott, Ororo, Remy, Kitty, and, of course, Marie- a mere five minutes to ready themselves for this little cautionary venture. Once upon a time, it had been practically a weekly exercise, when there were still people wandering around often enough to make it all feel like this life was just a temporary thing. But They had been methodical in ensuring that such an occurrence happened with less and less frequency. The last time they had done this had been months ago. Still, the X-Men had not lost their edge, and they filed out with their senses sharpened, bodies ready for combat.
As a rule, they made no sound until all of them were twenty steps away from the entrance to Home; they did not want to inadvertently give away the secret entrance to the unfriendly by announcing themselves too near it. Usually, without the cover of fog, they could have spied on whoever it was lurking around first, to make an assessment of their threat level, and then proceeded from there. The fog, however, made that all but impossible, so they had moved without question or comment, silent ghosts in a ghost world.
When Remy, bringing up the rear, had reached the rest of them at that new location, Scott called out, "Hello?!"
Strangely, his voice was both dampened by and echoed in the fog. They all waited for a long and silent moment, ears straining to listen for a reply. None came.
"Is there anybody there?!" Scott tried again.
They waited in vain.
This, however, proved nothing, although it served to tighten their already tightly wound nerves. The people might not have replied because they were too frightened, because they were incapable of doing for some reason, perhaps medical, or simply because they were out there, waiting to spring a trap.
Logan's claws itched. He knew, on a conscious level, that he had no feeling in them; they were just cold, ruthless, sharpened slabs of adamantium, mere tools to be employed in attack and defense, like any knife or gun.
They itched, all the same.
"Don't like it," he said quietly, sniffing again at the air.
"Agreed," said Scott, and the silence found them again for another moment as they all still waited. Then he said, "Okay, move in pairs. Storm and Gambit, Shadowcat and Wolverine, me and Rogue. Fan out and go slow. They're here somewhere."
Logan didn't really like the pairs. He understood them, which was why he didn't protest them. Storm was cautious, and Gambit liked to take risks, which meant they balanced each other out. He and the Shadowcat could move the quietest, which meant they could slink around together like nobody's business. Cyclops could keep his eye on Rogue, and drag anybody off of her without gutting them as a first instinct if it was necessary. No, he understood the teams just fine. He sure as hell didn't have to like it, though.
"Let's go," he said gruffly to the Shadowcat, and then melted into the fog, without waiting for her.
As she hurried off after him, Scott just sighed and waited for Marie before moving in another direction.
*****
Postcards. County Fairs. Psychics peddling their wares out of strip malls. Strip clubs. Dance clubs. Country clubs. Sears. Macy*s. Nordstrom. The Gap. Best Buy. Bed, Bath and Beyond. The little flower-shaped pats of butter at fancy restaurants. The city lights on a clear night. The growl of a powerful engine on the open road.
Scott Summers -a.k.a. Slim, Scooter, Boy Scout, Cyclops- had learned to live without shaving.
Some people might have thought of it as something of a trivial, inconsequential thing, shaving. It was not a necessity for living. One could continue on just as happily with a covered chin as without. After all, many men changed their facial hair on a weekly or monthly basis, this Thursday appearing with sideburns, and then the next Thursday without, and then the next one after that with a fledgling goatee. Change had been encouraged in the American market where styles, fads, and fashions had gone in and out faster than you could utter hulahoop or macarena. Change was fresh, sparkling, desired. Change was good.
Except to Scott. Everybody on the planet had their own set of signatures and quirks that defined them, and the sixty-two people dwelling in the underground levels of Xavier's were no different. Remy had his trenchcoat and his deck of cards. Marie had her gloves and that streak of white hair. A man named Harris always carried a pocket knife and a smile made lopsided by a mild stroke. And, even more so than his ruby quartz glasses, Scott had had his clean-cut image, with near-perfect hair and a chin that made the butts of babies everywhere jealous.
He loathed the itchiness that a beard brought on. He hated how he looked in the mirror, the conjuration of some hobo, some mountain man that he tried so hard not to be. Though he had never been in the military himself, the genes of his barely remembered father had managed to infiltrate him to the very core, so that he winced whenever he remembered that he could never hope to pass an inspection with such a hairy chin. Whenever he thought about it, he made himself miserable.
Razors, however, were hard to come by, and Scott had never gotten into the whole shaving-with-a-knife bit that Logan sometimes employed. He had tried a straight razor for a little while, and then gave up when they ran out of shaving cream. He would rather suffer with a beard than with the enflamed, reddened skin that threatened to drive him mad caused by dry shaving. When they did come across razors, they were delegated out to the women, and, well, that made everybody happy. So Scott suffered quietly, making his little sacrifice without complaint, but with the occasional scratching.
And Marie could hear him scratching idly in the fog then while they made their way from wherever to wherever, progressing slowly for the occasional debris in the grass that still lingered on from the total annihilation of the mansion. She tried to picture where they were in her head, both realistically and in the past: here the few bits of foundation remaining for a wall, and another close by, placing them in a hallway, there the rotting remains of a cabinet from what had been the kitchen, apparently deemed unsalvageable and left to molder back into the earth. At one point, they moved out of whispery grass and onto a barren space of blacktop: the remains of the basketball court. Those hidden doors for the hangar had long since been sealed shut forever, the Blackbird destroyed even before the mansion. They had converted that large space into living quarters instead of trying to resurrect the jet, which was a thing Marie knew Scott missed just as much as his clean-shaven chin.
She had just been thinking about that, in fact, about how sad it was that he had given up so much of himself in the past couple of years, and how she would have to take special note to find him some razors the next time she was out scavenging -a sort of thank you gift for Logan's cigars- when Marie looked up to find him gone.
Well, hell.
"Cyke?" she asked quietly of the fog, but it supplied no ready answer.
Her scalp prickled just a little bit, and a spider danced on the back of her neck, tangling itself up on its own thread. She shook the feeling off, however, sure that he was close by, and that it was only the damnable fog. He was probably wondering where the hell she had wandered off to right about then, himself.
"C'mon now, sug, no playin' games-" she had started to sass, when something clapped over her mouth, and she felt another something cold and hard prod into her back.
*****
The fog seemed to quietly enjoy torturing Logan as it was, dulling his senses to such a degree that, though they were not neutralized in any way, they only served to confuse him in subtle ways. What he perceived as far away turned out to be much closer, and what he thought was nearby wound up being quite a distance away. It was almost like he had stepped into one of those M.C. Escher drawings Hank was always trying to get him interested in, the one with all of the stairs going every which way, and if it weren't for the ground beneath his feet, he wouldn't have been able to tell which way was up, which was down, and which led to an unfavorable end.
And it did not help that the Shadowcat kept sneezing.
Oh, he knew she tried her best to quell it, said 'watermelon' under her breath in the attempts to stop it, clamped a hand over her mouth and nose and sneezed without letting the sneezes out, which had to hurt, had to irritate her sinuses something fierce. But she was still sneezing. He knew why, too; the fog was man-made, and had a tendency to smell a little like dust and tickle the nose. But... she was still sneezing.
It made things potentially just a little more dangerous. Not that he minded the whole dangerous part. Logan hadn't sat down with his old pal dangerous to shoot the shit for a good long while, and he missed their talks. Still, though, he wasn't playing at the lone wolf bit today, so he had other people to think about.
You know, like Marie.
His mind had just been straying off into thoughts that didn't involve fog, didn't involve tromping around, trying to look for people, and certainly didn't involve a sneezing Shadowcat, when there was a shout, muffled in the sea of gray. He whirled around, trying to pinpoint the sound, having difficulty, letting out a slight grumble of frustration because of that, and then the fog lit up in red like they were standing inside of a giant neon sign.
"Guess they ain't friendly," was his gruff comment to Kitty, even as he charged off in the direction he thought Cyclops' blast might have come from.
*****
The something that had clapped over her mouth had been a hand. Marie's startled sound of surprise had largely been subdued by it, and then she had felt the insistent prod of what she was sure was a gun barrel at her back, which caused her to go still, instead of trying to struggle with whoever the hell it was that thought it was a bright idea to try to jump her.
Yessir, real bright, this one.
She didn't have to struggle, of course. The hand was bare, lacking any sort of protection against her skin, and so she stood there, attempting to quiver and be all meek and placid-like so the guy wouldn't get all wound up and do something dumb like actually shoot her. Her mutation did all of the work for her. That always curious sensation of the draining started to creep into her, like shifting liquid from one container to another, spreading like a peculiar warmth outwards from his hand. Just as strange memories, utterly foreign, unwelcome, began to batter her mind and his grip started to loosen with a choking sound, Marie drove an elbow backwards into his gut and then twisted to the side, in case he still had enough sense to pull the trigger.
She might as well have kicked him in the testicles with a spike-toed boot, however; looking blanched, doubled over from the elbow blow and still making strangled, windless sounds, he eventually keeled over in the throes of mild seizure. Gingerly, Marie stepped over to him to nudge the gun out of his spasming hand with a foot. She then tried to make sense of her slightly jumbled up head.
...his name was Brian, but everyone called him Bulldog...
He was a singularly ugly man, with a visage comparable to the gargoyles found on ancient gothic cathedrals, carved with the intent to frighten off evil spirits. His expression looked tortured then, facial muscles experiencing a series of rapid tics and twitches that only made him all the more unaesthetic, bordering on grotesque. The fog did not help him, either, but rather painted him in an eerie lighting that conjured up images of half-orcs and hobgoblins from fantasy role play games.
What memories Marie had gleaned from him felt rather mundane, like most people, little snippets remembered for who knew what reasons.
...fishing with dad on the lake, when it rained, and we had to bail out the boat before it sank, and the old man is just cussing up a storm greater than the one overhead, having chugged one too many beers before lunch already...
He stopped seizing. Groaned.
...Lauren Brewbaker in the fifth grade, doing a cartwheel in gym class, accidentally showing off to everybody that she was wearing a training bra...
Rolled over to get to his hands and knees.
...detention in 10th grade for flushing cherry bombs down the toilet in the teacher's lounge. They had blown up just as Mr. Schmidtz, a stuffy math teacher with a stick up his ass, had sat down to take a shit. You could hear the whump all the way up on the second floor...
Marie placed a foot squarely on his back and brought it downwards, to keep him put and let him know that he wasn't going anywhere any time soon. She was pretty sure that Scott would want to ask the guy some questions, like why he had pulled a gun on her, wherever the visored X-Man had wandered off to.
...Luke saying, "Bulldog, you get the woman, we'll take on the guy"...
Even as she got a hold of that disturbing memory and understood it, she heard the shout come from not too far away, and then saw everything around her light up in red, the fog amplifying the color, taking it on like a hue-changing octopus, blinking bright and then dull again. Cyclops.
Marie had started to head in the direction that she thought the shout had come from, when she was tripped up, stumbled, and fell, barely catching herself before she landed face-first in the dirt. Bulldog had Igrabbed her ankle before she was able to slip away. She kicked at him, kicked harder, trying to shake him loose. True to his name, he didn't let go, but instead tried to hang on while getting back to his knees so he could pin her.
"Let go, ya idiot! Bad dog!" she hollered at him.
He didn't seem so inclined to comply with her request. In fact, he suddenly surged forwards, letting go of her ankle in an attempt to grapple with her, hold her arms down and keep her trapped by his own weight. Nonplussed, she hauled off and hit him in the face with one fist first, and then tried to go for a kidney shot with the other just after that. He was sort of snarling then, obviously frustrated by her, a meaty hand delivering a slap to her in retaliation for those blows that was hard enough to cause her teeth to clack together and her eyes to water.
It was strange, fighting with the same person that you had just peeked on, had just caught a glimpse of their mind, their heart, their soul. Strange, to be fighting with a person that you couldn't quite yet sort yourself completely out from, differentiate between what belonged to you, and what belonged to them. Marie knew that he liked pastrami, hated salmon, liked off-roading and working on cars and fishing and hunting deer, illegally, never could remember birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and while she struggled with him, she struggled equally with trying to remember if she liked and hated all of those things, had trouble remembering dates herself or not. The mind can only handle so much at a time, sort so many items into neat little piles, or else it gets jammed up and breaks the system down.
But the one thing that she easily split off, that was useful to her, that she knew right away was not one of her memories, was that Bulldog had an ulcer. A bad one. And that whatever Tums he could scrounge up from time to time only did so much for him. A churning, gnawing, fiery blight of pain in his gut, deep-rooted like kudzu and just as tenacious and insistent about its existence.
When he wrenched himself upwards again, trying to get a grip on her arms, Rogue kneed him as hard as she could in the stomach, willing the entire weight of her frame into the blow.
Bulldog did not make a sound. Instead, his face immediately reddened, like a boiled lobster, and his mouth pulled open to birth a cry that never was, framed by a horrific expression only imaginable by monsters of another time.
Before he could recover, Marie shoved him off of her, just a sack of cement, and scrambled to her feet again, her body tensed just on the off-chance that the man still had bite.
She had, however, effectively pulled his teeth with that blow. He lay there, curled around and clutching at his gut, wretching. He was pathetic that way, reduced to such a sorry state of being. For reasons she could not quite define, Marie pitied him right then. Perhaps it was because he served as a reminder of just how fragile they all were, how easily they all could be taken down by the most simplistic of blows. Perhaps not. She couldn't tell. Nor could she bring herself to do anything more to him, as deserving as he might have been. Quietly, she kept an eye on him, straining her ears to listen to her surroundings. It was quiet and still for long moments, save for Bulldog's sounds of dry-heaving.
When she heard running footsteps, she tensed, readied herself for an attack. She couldn't quite tell where they were coming from, dampened as they were by the fog, so she turned slowly around, 360 degrees, damning the gray, damning her eyes, damning everything and anything and then damning herself for feeling so vulnerable.
She nearly clocked Logan a good one, when he suddenly materialized behind her and she whirled around to face him, surprised. She wound up hugging him instead.
"What the hell is that?" he asked with a nod to the man on the ground, after a fierce if fleeting embrace.
"He goes by Bulldog, Ah guess," Marie answered, just as the Shadowcat appeared beside them. "Scott's missing."
And the Wolverine smirked a bit at that and said, "Figures."
*****
The fog hindered their search. At some point, there was gunfire somewhere in the distance, and Logan grew more and more agitated by the fact that the sea of gray stubbornly refused to lift. After half an hour, they met back up with Storm and Gambit, who professed to have stumbled across no one. At Logan's adamant demand, the weather witch put her powers to use, and drew in the winds to blow out the once beneficial, but now wholly malignant man-made fog. It departed in trailing wisps of promise to return another day.
Somewhere along the way, Bulldog had regained enough of himself to attempt an escape. Logan split him from groin to sternum when the man foolishly tried to battle his way to freedom. At least it freed him of the ulcer.
It took them nearly an hour of searching before they found him. It was the sound that drew them in, a slow and subtle creaking, like a shutter in an old, abandoned house catching on a breeze and forcing a rusty hinge into use, or an ancient ship brushing against an ageless dock.
Or a rope, rubbing against the branch of a tree as the weight of what it held slowly swung back and forth like a hobbled pendulum.
They had strung Scott up by his feet, and stripped him bare of everything but his boxers. Clothes were valuable, after all. A wound in his shoulder had once been bleeding freely, drizzling weird, haruspex patterns on the ground beneath him. Now the wound merely wept, either having lost most of its supply, or else clotted enough to halt the flow, and every so often a spat sounded as a fat droplet fell from his fingers.
At some point, from what they could discern, one of the bandits had attempted to take Scott's visor. It lay on the ground, bathed in the blood, red coating the red. A dead man was some feet away, halfway embedded in the earth that was dented itself by the sheer power of one of Cyclops' optic blasts in the raw.
Carrion eaters had already descended on the scene. Two fat American ravens had been squabbling with a trio of turkey buzzards to pick at the man lodged into the ground when the X-Men appeared. The buzzards had hopped some distance away. The ravens watched with keen interest from a nearby tree.
"Is he...?" Kitty had started to ask, unable to finish even the thought.
"No," Logan replied simply. As he stalked to the tree, the claws emerged with that distinctive snikt. "Gambit, hold him up so he doesn't drop while I cut him down."
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Well, it looks like I will not be able to update as often as I would like. I'm very sorry to any of you that might be reading, but I promise that I'll be cranking these out as fast as I can. Working 13 hour shifts every day sucks.