She was in trouble. Big trouble. People were scurrying around, minding their own business. Nobody paid attention to a lost little girl.
At the end of the week her mother had been making an inventory of her clothes, and she had decided she would need completely new wardrobe since she was going to be a big girl and move away to boarding school. They had gone to the mall. She had been overjoyed for a chance to get out of the house she had been confined for days. Too excited to notice that her mother had gone her way while she had been staring at a pretty doll in the window of a toy store. And now, half an hour later she was completely lost.
“Excuse me… Sir?… Excuse me, ma’am?” She tried desperately to gain attention. Anybody would do. Some people even looked at her, but passed her by as soon as they noticed the ugly blue tattoo adorning her left cheek.
“Excuse me, could you help… me?” It was hopeless. Everybody was too busy or too disgusted of mutants to even stop and listen what was the matter with her. Panic started to settle to the pit of her stomach. If she ever managed to found her mother, she would most likely get grounded for the rest of her life. And that didn’t sound a bad option right now. At least if she was grounded she couldn’t wander off and get lost.
“Hi, kid. You lost?” Voice sounded familiar, little rough and scratchy. Low. More like a murmur than any other voice she had heard before. Jeans. Huge belt buckle. Brown leather jacket. Finally her eyes settled to the face of the man she had seen in the park.
“Mom and dad said that I shouldn’t talk with strangers,” she blurted out the first thing that came to her mind. This man, even if he had helped her earlier, definitely fell in to the category of ‘scary-strangers-you-shouldn’t-talk-with’.
“You can call me Logan. And now I’m not a stranger anymore. You got lost from your mother?” Man asked, kneeling so that his face was in level with hers.
She had spent past half an hour trying to get attention from strangers passing by. Now she felt strangely reluctant to trust the man kneeling in front of her. There was something in him that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something just beneath the surface, creeping behind hazel pools of his eyes. Wild and feral.
“Come on, kid. I haven’t got the whole day. You’re here with your mother, right?” Man asked.
“Yes.” She had to force the word out of her mouth. Man flashed her a brief smile.
“Hop on to my shoulders. I’ll give you a ride to the info desk. They can call your mother through speakers.”
She hesitated for a moment. If she did as he asked, nothing would stop him to walk out of here with her and take her to… to… Away. It happened. Every day. There were bad people who liked to hurt other people. She knew about them. She wasn’t stupid. But she was lost, and this Logan-guy was the only one even remotely interested to help her out.
She walked around him and climbed to his shoulders, swinging her legs down to his chest, and grabbed a firm hold from his forehead. He held his hands in the pockets of his jacket, and apparently expected her to take care of herself up there on her own. He stood up slowly, and suddenly everybody and everything around her looked so small. She giggled a bit, and clutched his head tighter when he started walking towards the escalators. She could feel him flinch a bit when she accidentally kicked him when she moved to a better position.
“Careful, kid… Don’t want you to fall down,” he huffed with a tight voice.
She never saw the trail of tiny droplets of blood he left at his wake to the marble floor.
When they got to the info desk, people there were more than willing to find her mother. Anything to get a mutant child off from their hands. She had a feeling that the angry grimace Logan had flashed when he had heard them calling her a mutant had something to do with the swiftness of finding her mother from a store that sold schoolbags, notebooks and pens. She hadn’t even noticed that she was missing.
During that summer Logan seemed to appear almost magically whenever she got in to trouble. He was there when other kids bullied her, towering over her and telling them to get lost. He was there when she fell from a tree and hurt her ankle, carrying her to home and disappearing before her parents saw him. He was there when she got lost from her parents at K-mart.
“Are you an angel?” She had asked him once when they sat in the park.
“Hardly.”
“Then how do you know every time I’m in trouble?”
“It’s magic, kid…” Logan had said with a serious tone, but when she had looked at him, he had been smiling, mischievous glint in his eyes.
“I just know. I just know. But it’s getting late. You should head back home.”
“Why aren’t you afraid of me like everybody else?” She had asked when he had been carrying her back home after she had sprained her ankle.
“Why should I be? You’re just a kid.”
“I’m a mutant. People… They don’t like me. Mom and dad are sending me to a school away from here.”
“They’re doing it for your own good, kid. They want you to be safe and happy.”
Safe and happy was the last thing on her mind that night. She was supposed to get on to a plane at next morning. To a flight to New York. But right now it looked like it was already too late. Mom and dad were in the kitchen, talking nervously with hushed tones. There were people outside, their neighbors and friends. They weren’t acting overly friendly that night. Many of them had torches and baseball bats with them. Some of them even had guns. They had obviously gotten enough. They were going to get rid of her once and for all.
“The line is dead… What are we going to do?” She heard her mother asking.
“I’m sure somebody has called to the police already…”
“Look outside! There’s nobody left to call to police, they’re all standing at our front porch!”
“Calm down. I’ll go and have a word with them.” Dad. Always the sensible one.
First shot rang out when her father opened the door. He stumbled backwards and fell flat on his back to the floor, bright red flower spreading rapidly to the front of his pajamas. She couldn’t comprehend what was happening. She heard her mother screaming, something breaking in the kitchen, and then suddenly somebody brushed past her, closing the door to the porch before people standing there decided to come in. Her mother screamed again, glass was breaking in the kitchen. Windows above the sink. Wide enough for a grown man to crawl through. Somebody had broken them.
“We’re leaving, kid. Do you have your bags packed already?” Logan. Logan was there. Holding her hand and pulling her away. Away from her father. Away from the kitchen and her mother that had stopped screaming abruptly.
“Mom! Dad!”
“I can’t help them, kid! I came to get you! We have to get you out of here!”
He dragged her to upstairs to her room.
“Your bags? Where are they?” He scanned the room, stomping around, crushing delicate toys scattered around under the heels of his boots. He wasn’t her friend anymore. He wasn’t the goofy Logan she had gotten used to. He was her angel, and all she could think about when he climbed to the windowsill, holding her against his chest with one hand, and her bags with the other, was that she was going to die and he didn’t even know her name.
“Don’t worry, kid. I’ll take care of you.”
“You promise? Cross your heart and hope to die?”
“Cross my heart and hope not to die…” Logan murmured, and then they were airborne.
For a brief moment she felt like flying again. All too soon gravity grasped them to its clutches and they were falling. Ground was approaching. She screamed. Logan’s hold around her tightened. She closed her eyes. They landed with a jarring thud. Logan stumbled a bit, but he stayed on his feet.
“My bike is few blocks away. I’ll take you to the airport.”
Rest of the journey was a blur to her. She was tired and shocked; it was hard to think anything, hard to notice things. It got even harder when she realized that Logan was going to leave her in to custody of an airport guard who would escort her to the plane.
“I don’t want you to go!”
“I can’t come in there, kid.”
“Why! I want you to come with me!”
“I can’t. I can’t Marie. I’m sorry.” Marie.
“How did you know my name?” She asked suddenly flustered. Not once during their impromptu meetings had she considered telling him her name. He had called her kid, and somehow it had felt appropriate.
“It’s magic…” Again he smiled, but this time it was a sad smile.
“Go with this nice man, Marie. He will take care that you get in to the right plane. And there’s somebody waiting in New York.”
“But… I don’t want to go alone…” Her chin started to tremble.
“Hey… Don’t worry kid. Everything will be all right. I promise,” Logan murmured, pulling her against his chest.
“And I have somebody here who’s going to keep you company…” He pulled a tattered teddy bear from the pocket of his jacket. Her favorite teddy. The one she had gotten from her parents a year ago when a carnival had stopped in to town. Her dad had won it from skeet shooting.
“Are you going to come and see me again?” She asked. Logan cleared his throat.
“You won’t need me anymore, kid. You’ll get new friends from where you’re going. They’re good people.”
“But I like you. You’re my friend.” Logan hugged her tighter.
“And I like you, kid. Go. Live a little.”
It took almost sixteen years. Sixteen years of studying and practicing under the watchful eyes of professor Xavier, from which two of them were spent working as his private secretary before she saw her friend again.
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