The Phoenix Compound
December 10


"No apologies. Apologies are cliched." I say. "We both have enough of them to last all night without really getting anywhere."

"What do you have in mind?"

"I want to remember it all. Not just the bad things, the good things too. We'll trade them off. One bad memory, and then one good memory. Until we know everything we want to know."

"Fine. Which one do you want to start with?"

"You pick."

A gesture of trust, of apology, exchanged with a shift of eyes, a twist of voice. I offer, he accepts.

"The best day was when I came back from Vancouver last fall, found you playing your violin by the lake."

He's looking at my hands, his eyes twisting through my fingers like he wants to hold them. He does not try, though we both wish he would. We wish but we are too scared to ask. He continues, slowly, unfolding the memory in pieces as a man brings a treasure from a box.

"You wore this little orange sweater; you smelled like oranges too, but maybe I was just imagining that part. It's hard, now, to remember what I really saw and what I imagined. Did you really laugh, did you really tease me and smile? Maybe the details are going, but I get the important things right. I still remember that we said we loved each other. I don't think we ever said it again, but that was enough. I still remember it. The best day."

Why didn't we say it again? Was it because we never felt the need or were we just too scared? After all, they were coming for us, cameras and guns and barbed wire cages. He could die, I could die, everyone could die. For the first time we knew that. Youth reserves the right to be invincible, it goes around dodging bullets, jumping off cliffs, running through traffic, but sooner or later the charms wear off. We became aware, gradually, that invincibility only applied to one of us. And that one wasn't me. He never lived with that very well.

So is that why we never said it again? Because we realized in those days that if we said it, that would mean we had something that could be taken away? Something they could use to hurt us?

I want to ask him these things, but that is not in the rules of the game. The rules are a memory for a memory. Light for light, darkness for darkness. An eye for an eye, but not for vengeance. To enable the other one to see something they could not before.

"The best day was the day we burned candles in the church. Jean's wedding." A muted grin. "You held up admirably even though faced with the loss of your dream girl and the confines of a tuxedo... although I did catch you trying to worm your way out of the tie when they were reciting their vows. But it wasn't the wedding I remember. I remember the painting, St. Francis in prayer, looking human, like a brother I could have, like a father. And you took off my gloves."

I can't help glancing at my hands, at the thick woolen gloves hiding my skin from the cold and from other, less tangible things.

"You weren't afraid. You should have been. But you weren't, not in the way you should have been. It was the first time I had my gloves off since Magneto. The first time you kissed me. I don't know which one of those makes the best day. Both of them, I guess."

He almost smiles. His mouth moves, shakes at the corners of the lips, creases along the sides, then freezes before the expression can complete itself. He has remembered what is coming next.

"Worst days?"

"Yes." I swallow, twice. "Worst days."

"Every day was the worst." His eyes don't follow mine, this time; he stares at his knuckles, rubbing the skin over the blades as if he feels the metal underneath. "But one stands out. The only one that I almost didn't make it through."

He stands to his feet, paces. Hands rubbing harder against his knuckles. Faster. Eyes darting from corner to corner as if he expects the walls to attack him at any given moment. "The day I got back to the farmhouse."

He coughs, clears his throat. I swallow the cotton dryness in my throat, swallow whole the fear.

"It was too late. You know that. You had killed one of them-- I was so proud of you for that-- and the other two didn't last long. I should have made it longer, made them pay for what they did, but I didn't think. I was pretty close to crazy right then. I found everything...the scarf, the mattress, the cloak...everything but you. It was like you had disappeared from existence, that there was nothing left of you but the things I was looking at. I remember thinking that this was going to be the last memory I have of you, the last piece of you I was going to get to touch. And that it was my fault." The pacing stops, abruptly. "That was the worst."

Conflicting spasms in my gut: nausea (slimy and cold like a dead jellyfish floating in my stomach) and the intense desire to walk up behind him and lock my arms around his waist. To give him another good memory.

In the end, the opposites neutralize each other. I do not throw up, but neither do I embrace him. Instead I pull the blanket up over my legs, over my hands, and I prepare to give him the truth. A pretense of courage, synthetic to the extreme. But then, the worst pretense of all is the pretense of not having any. The trick is, I have learned, to choose the truest imitations. The most honest deceptions. Example: I will tell him my worst memory but I will not tell him all of it. He only thinks that he really wants to know.

"Two days before the worst day, I killed a man. That could have been the worst, or the things before could have been the worst. But they weren't as bad as the third day."

I take pride in the fact that I can look at him when I say it. I have no qualms; this is the honest part of the lie. He perches on the edge of the bed, listening intently. The way a doctor listens to a pulse, the way a woman listens to make sure her child is still breathing. He regulates his breath and his pulse by mine, by the words I offer him one at a time, like heartbeats. Slow and steady.

"It was the day I made it to a gas station, some filthy truck stop that flaunted its dirt because it was the only place around for a hundred and twenty miles. Or at least that's what the old man told me, when we pulled into the parking lot. He was a truck driver, I didn't want to trust him but I didn't have a choice. It was either get into the truck or bleed and freeze in the snow on the side of the road. At least in the truck I could bleed next to a heater."

He winces. It is not meant to be something I notice, it is not a jerk or a twitch, but the skin around his eyes tightens just so and I know how much this is hurting him. I know because it's hurting me the same way. This is why I have to lie about the rest of it, because he deserves better. He deserves not to hurt.

"I guess was a bit crazy too, then. Maybe more than a bit. I don't remember getting in the truck, or even getting out, it's just that all of sudden I realized that I was standing under a shower and the water was ice cold and that whenever it ran off my body, it turned red."

My hands are shaking, he does not see this. The blanket keeps the secret.

"I didn't throw up. I'd already done that, too many times, and there was nothing left. But I wished there was. I wanted to push something out of my body so I would feel empty inside and clean again. The water didn't work. I stood under the shower until I couldn't feel my arms and legs, until the bruises hardened and turned purple, but it didn't work."

I can't see him anymore; momentary panic ensues, followed by realization that my eyes are closed. Squeezed tightly shut, like Scott's the day his visor broke. Voluntary blindness, meant to keep back destructive forces such as tears and fear. These things can kill as certainly as red lasers. But I am afraid that these efforts are betrayed be the shaking. It is not just my hands anymore. It is not a secret. I do not open my eyes, this is the lie (not by the addition of words, only the omission.) and I don't want to see him when I say it.

"And then I left, with the old man. He didn't ask and I didn't tell. The heater in the truck broke five miles down the road, and my hair froze because it had been wet, and my fingers turned blue, and three days later I was coughing blood. But that wasn't the worst. The shower was the worst. The inability to be clean."

There, I said it. He knows but does not know, he has the facts but not the last, cruel detail. I have not told him that in between the shower and the broken heater, I saw him in the parking lot and walked away.

Only there is one thing I have not counted on. He does not accept the story; he is not satisfied to hear the ugliness, but suspects the truth and acts on it too swiftly. I need time for a denial, time for a plausible excuse. No such allowances are made. His voice, too calm, too thin.

"The third day."

"Yes."

Choke the word out, Marie. He's onto you and you know it.

"I was at a gas station that day. The cashier said he had never heard of you."

I open my eyes. I want to see it coming. Whatever it will be, anger, rage, hate. It won't take him long to fit the final pieces together. "Why would he lie?"

"I paid him...in case the others followed me..."

"Why didn't you leave a message for me?"

"I didn't think. Shock, I told you."

I say, too quickly. That sounded like a planned response. He'll pick up on that, ask me one final question and I won't be able to lie to him again. I don't have it in me.

"The man who gave me a ride said that he saw an old trucker pull out of the parking lot after I went inside. Said he had a passenger, but I told him it couldn't have been you. Because I called your name and if it was you, then you would have answered."

His eyes, black like the metal of a gun, lock into place against mine. "You would have answered, wouldn't you, Marie? You didn't because you weren't there. You weren't."

He waits for the reassurance, begs for it. "Tell me."

I don't tell him; I can't say it out loud. I can't form the words, not at first. I can only shake my head. Sometimes that is all it takes. Sometimes it is too much. "I can't."

A whisper, drowning in itself, in the rain that is again falling on my face even though we are inside and I know perfectly well that there are no clouds in sight. "I can't."

There is no explosion, rather the aftermath of an explosion. broken buildings and shattered windows and ruins. It is all in his face. "Why?"

Not a word, a growl. Hoarse, charred. Another aftermath. He's unseen again, but this time it's because the top of the world is running down into the bottom of the world and it's all smeared together. The rain again, the rain that is not rain. I turn my face from him, turn it to the wall because there is no place else to hide in this barren little room.

I make my confession to the cement, not to him. At this point it's easier to talk to stone. I've broken the rules of the game; I have lied, but I'm about to do something worse than that.

I'm telling him everything.

"Afraid."

Individual words are all I can manage now; I'm working up to groups and possibly sentences. Give me a moment.

"Of me?"

I can't answer him as fast as he would like. My teeth are banging against one another, it's hard to talk around the edges. "Of what you'd see when you looked at me."

"I'd have seen you. What else is there to see?"

His voice is moving closer, why? It should be drawing back from me, heading for the door. I should be listening to silence, but he's talking and not at all in the way I was prepared for. Screaming I can handle. Profanities, accusations, righteous indignation. All this I am ready to accept. But not this. Not the sadness and the disbelief, the empathy.

A touch on my shoulder; I am undone. He does not know it yet, but I am. I am unraveling, spinning out and out and out, but it's only now beginning to show in my voice. Threads of words fraying, snapping, curling into knots and snarls.

"Blood. Bruises. Filth. That's all there was left to me, all there is now. I was afraid you would see that, see their mark on me, you would find out that I was no better than any other whore on the street. Not your woman, anymore, but their slut."

"No, Marie. No." His fingers dig into my shoulder bones, his arm slides around me to stop the shaking, only he can't. He can't stop this, it's too late. "Nothing of you belongs to them."

"It would have been better if I had died that night. At least then you would have thought of me as innocent."

His hands slide down my arms to cover my fingers. "Baby, you were never anything but that to me. Nothing can change it. No one can take it away."

God, I want to believe him. I want to believe him but I know he's just trying to do the right thing. He's just trying to get me to stop trembling, trying to stop the rain from falling from my eyes before I flood us both. I love him for it, but it's not enough to make me accept what he's saying as true. It can't be true. I know what I am, and it's not what he's saying.

This is not what I tell him.

"Of course you will tell me this." I touch his wrists, slide my fingers over his knuckles. I turn my face to his, until we are close enough to feel the other's breath across the cheekbones.

"That's how it is with you. You'll say anything you have to. You'll do anything."

A brush of fingertips across his face. "If I were to put my life in your hands, you'd drop it." I tell him. "You know that, don't you? You'd drop it because you'd try to hold on too tight."

"Would I?"

A minimal whisper, barely enough to push the words into my ears. There is something dangerous in his eyes but I do not realize this until it is too late. "Let's find out."

This is the explosion that did not come before: he pulls my mouth to his, his bare hands on either side of my face, the spasm takes us both, blindness. Blind with my eyes, but seeing straight through his. The things I see are burning, everything exploding at the same moment-- faces, images, memories-- like fireworks out of control, like Hiroshima from ground zero. Only there is no sound. His mind burns silently, as in a photograph. Yellow, orange, red, white. No one screams, or maybe they do because I think I hear the sound on the very edges of consciousness. I think it is my voice, but it vanishes beneath a second voice, his voice.

(I said I would do whatever it took.
What's happening to you? What's wrong?
Don't you know?
I'm afraid.
So am I, baby. So am I.
Stop it. Save something for yourself. You don't heal anymore.
Do you believe me now?
Yes, but stop. Enough.)

Dual oblivion. He is unconscious because he is empty and I am unconscious because I am full and bursting at the seams. This time I do not see fire behind my eyes.

I see snow.



Burning Snow: Marie and Logan

You do not remember the past as clearly as you once did; it is impossible when his colors dominate the memory. His vision of the universe, his revelation-- adamantium silver sky, burnished, glowing to melting point and this is what you call snow. It is not the color of snow, the expected angelic white. It is sienna, washed out tan glowing faintly golden at the edges. Faded, neutral, bland. The dead soldier's blood is the color of teak, thick and dark. It stagnates in pools on the ground, melting the snow; it covers his claws, turning to steam with the heat.

He does nothing to wipe away the stain. He sniffs the body, the air, the ground, growling absent-mindedly. If there is one, he mutters, there is ten. A trap. Someone has betrayed you and now you all will be hunted down and they will burn numbers into your shoulders or necks or wrists.

You tremble; you could never stand burnt flesh. He gave you this weakness when he first poured his mind around yours, and this is how you know he is afraid as well. Even if he does not shake, there are other signs. He keeps his body in front of you, a human shield, tight and close as if something will try to crawl through the space of inches. He doesn't allow the claws to retract. He tells you it will be fine, he says it too many times.

(Are there more?
Yeah, baby, but you don't have to worry. They won't find us. It'll be fine.
How can you say that? How can you know?
Just trust me. And keep your head down, behind me. )

You don't want to stay behind, you want to stand beside him. To meet whatever else is coming at the same moment he does, even if it is fire. Even if it means you will burn.

The brothers argue with him, static phrases of fear and panic. Sometimes he answers them, and sometimes he tells them to shut up. You don't listen to specifics. You lean your head against his backbone and listen to the distant echo of his heartbeat.

It is now you remember that this is Christmas morning.

Perhaps this is his gift to you, the heartbeat. A reminder of constancy, of security, of the forward motion of time and life. In a number of these beats, this will all be over one way or another. You envision two scenarios: escape and capture. Good and bad.

You do not realize that they will be turn out to be the same, different only in form and technicality.

(Marie, we have a plan.)

His voice opens your eyes, you are no longer resting on his back but held before him, his hands framing your face. His woolen gloves scratch your skin: a mark of desperate times; he always buys the softest materials he can afford. At first it was leather, then cotton, then polyester, and now wool, with patches over the knuckles and a hole in one wrist.

(We can't outrun them or outfight them. So what's the plan?)

His hesitation takes too long because the oldest brother interrupts the silence.

(Just tell her, Wolverine.)

Your hands tighten on his jacket.

(Tell me what?
Our only chance is if one of us goes to draw their attention and lead them away. The others will wait here for two hours then head back to the farmhouse. It'll be safe to use the main road....they'll expect you to be hiding in the forest...
It doesn't have to be you.
Marie--
I know you're going to say it. You're going to tell me it has to be you, but it doesn't. Let one of them go get themselves killed. You stay with me. You gave me your word.
It has to be me. I'm the only one who can survive it.
Then let me go with you.
No. Absolutely not.
I'm not afraid. As long as we're together it doesn't matter...it doesn't...
It matters to me. You go with them and wait for me at the house. I'll be back by dawn.
I don't think so. I don't think you're coming back.
Of course am I. Don't you trust me?
I do, but you don't understand. You can't leave me with them.
I'll only be gone long enough to do the job. Promise me you'll go back and wait for me.
I can't.
Promise. I've never asked you to do anything for me, but I need this. I need your word and I need it now because we're losing time. I have to find them before they find this place. You have to promise me so I can know you'll be safe.
I do.
Say it out loud.
I promise. But I won't be safe. You know that.)

He will not believe it. He needs a reason, and this is the only one he can find.

You look at him through your eyes and see the weariness at the temples, the sadness and resignation in the corners of the eyes and mouth. You don't know what it means, then; only an instinctive fear and the urge to pull him closer before he slips away. The picture flips; inverts until you are looking at him through his eyes. He views himself in the same color as the background of snow. Unremarkable. Invisible. But you are white, burning like the sky, like metal under heat. You know you are all he sees.


(Baby, I have to go. Logan--)

He kisses you, too hard, too fast, but you understand there is no time. Like the wool gloves on your face, it is a desperation. You watch him run from you, you watch it through your mind and his and this is the first time you don't hate him for it. This time you know he is going to die, as you are, only he dies harder. Death can be many things, not all of them final. He will drag his out, without mercy because he wants you both to survive. You more than him.

This is unfair; he doesn't consider the fact that you feel the same way, reversed. You'd rather see him survive any day. You'd rather be the one taking the pain because he's had more of it than you. You want to even the score. He doesn't realize that, or he does and that's why he moves so fast. He doesn't let you change your mind.

In a better world, you would measure your relationship in flowers, in chocolate kisses, in I Love Yous. You would fight over which one got to make dinner for the other.

In this world, you fight over which one of you gets to die. You measure love in colors: sienna, white, red. Not rose red or Valentine's red, but in the color of blood. This is also unfair, but you have made a promise and there is nothing you can do. You can't even say I love you, or goodbye. That constitutes public admission that you will never see each other again.

You watch him disappear into the burning snow until his figure is melted down, disfigured, swallowed up. It does not swallow you, it buries you. You will become as sand, as snow. Written on, rewritten, then smoothed over. Only he will not be the author. It will be a stranger's penmanship, bold and ugly and profane.

But this has not happened, not at this moment. For now both of you decide, inside your minds, at the same second, that this is the worst it can get. When you are in love you earn the right to be naive; it is your only defense.

This is the last day either of you experience such a luxury.
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