Logan had gone and paid for the room for a week. Then he had returned and locked himself in to bathroom. She could hear the shower running.
“Sorry. Had to wash the blood off…” He muttered when he emerged from the bathroom, dressed only to a towel he had wrapped around his waist.
“Blood?” She asked.
“Theirs. Mostly theirs,” Logan said and sat down heavily on the bed.
“What did you do? Did you kill them?” Marie asked, strangely repulsed and excited at the same time.
“They’re alive. Scott won’t walk for a while. Ororo needs some creative surgery. Hank… I don’t even know what he’ll need. Fuck…”
“But… Isn’t that a good thing?” Marie asked.
“No! It’s not a good thing! It’s not who I am! It’s not what I do!” Logan shouted, waking up Kate who started to cry.
She wanted to stop him, but she was unable to move, startled by his outburst, and she could only watch when Logan walked to the baby and picked her up to his arms, starting to rock back and forth. Same hands that housed nine inches of cold death cradled Kate like she was made out of glass, gently and carefully.
“It’s not me…” Logan whispered, nuzzling the baby’s cheek with his nose, eyes closed.
Rest of the day she listened when Logan told her the whole ugly story behind him, Wolverine and claws. It was a long story. He took long pauses, taking care of Kate, getting food to them, and generally avoiding the whole issue, revealing everything piece by piece almost reluctantly. How he had volunteered to some top-secret military program. How the deal had been a bust from the beginning. How he had escaped half mad, his memory filled with holes size of the Switzerland. How Xavier had taken him in, helped him to put back together what had been left of his fractured mind and asked him in return to join the X-Men. At the time it had seen the thing to do. Best possibility to settle his score with the world, especially when the reward Xavier had been offering was more than lucrative. Professor and team would help Logan to find the men behind program “Wolverine”.
“It was… I guess I could say it was fun while it lasted. I was… Wolverine was the thing they wanted. The thing they needed, because rest of the team was already in spotlights, and Xavier couldn’t afford to soil their reputation. X-Men. Invincible. Non-lethal, effective group of heroes fighting the crime. Wolverine… He was handy when things got ugly. While Scott & Co. held up the image of good guys saving the day, I could sneak behind their backs and do what needed to be done.”
“What happened?” Marie asked.
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I just woke up one morning. Ordinary morning. Birds chirping outside. Sun was shining. Bees were buzzing. Flowers flowering. I was so goddamned tired that I couldn’t get up from the bed. Had been on a mission in the evening before, and after that I had made a tour through every shithole in N.Y. That still admitted me in and served me booze. I just lay there and started thinking that I didn’t want to do it anymore. Slept for a while, got up, packed my bags and told Xavier that I was leaving. Left, spend three months learning how to live like a normal man, then applied to police academy. And here I am now.”
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000