Chapter 16: Gone
“Marie? Babe, we’re goin’ to Monaco!”
Logan put the bike into park and bounded up the sunny steps of the veranda, eager to show Marie the plane tickets he’d bought. Logan knew she would love Monaco. The entrancing blue sea, the people, the culture, it was all so much different from what she’d ever experienced, and that she would fall in love with it was inevitable.
Finally, Logan could retire; maybe he and Marie could even buy that houseboat that Logan had been thinking about. They could spend their days sailing the crystal blue waters, their evenings would be spent eating fresh seafood and drinking champagne. The more he thought about it, Logan couldn’t wait to get as far away from Mexico as possible so that he could start giving Marie the life she deserved.
He couldn’t wait to see the look in her eyes and the smile on her lips. Nothing seemed wrong at first. The sun was shining brilliantly; the weather was balmy but not too humid…it was the perfect day to start a new life.
At least, that was until Logan entered the villa and realized how eerily quiet it was.
“Marie?” he called out. When there was no answer, Logan quietly closed the door behind him, his senses on the alert for any sign of her. “Darlin’?”
Logan slowly crossed the room toward the bathroom, opened the door and looked in.
She wasn’t there either. Logan felt his blood speed up in his veins as he as he turned around again and surveyed the room. Everything was in its proper place, just the way they had been when Logan left that morning. Except for one thing…all of her stuff was gone.
Logan’s heart gave a lurch as he turned around in the room, looking for something, anything that belonged to her. Storming over to the dresser, he began ripping open the drawers. Every single dress, every undergarment, the swimsuit, her hairbrush. Gone, gone gone.
Logan bolted back into the washroom, tearing open the door of the medicine cabinet and pulling the contents out, letting them spill over the tiled floor. Even her toothbrush was gone. Logan’s heart began to thump loudly in his chest as he exited the bathroom. Taking another look around the room, he caught sight of a single piece of notepaper sitting on top of the kitchenette counter.
He felt his heart crush in his chest before he even read the simple words that were written on it in black ink:
I can’t do this. I’m sorry. Goodbye.
~*~*~
Blackness. Nothing but blackness.
That was what Marie saw when she opened her eyes who knew how many hours later. Suddenly, the memory of what happened the last time she was conscious came rushing back to her and she sat up in a flash, feeling the smarting scrape of a rocky floor beneath her thighs.
Where am I?
The next thing she registered was that her wrists and ankles were bound together with…rope? Marie’s heart began to race in panic as she tried to maneuver herself onto her knees. She blinked her eyes repeatedly, desperately willing them to adjust to the dark as her bound hands came up to feel around for a door, a vent, anything.
“Come on…Come on…” she whispered, her fingers scraping against the rough wall. Was she in a cave? The darkness was so all enveloping that Marie almost couldn’t tell when her eyes were open and when they were closed.
Marie inched along the side of the wall as quickly as her bound legs would allow her, frantically searching from an escape, but to no avail. Marie sank back down onto the ground, her body exhausted and mind still hazy from the tranquilizer she had been given. She raised her knees toward her chest, curling into a corner of the wall and shaking with rage and anxiety. Feeling the rough surface beneath her bare feet, Marie deduced that she was in some sort of underground chamber.
Moments later, Marie heard the shifting of chains on the ceiling above her, and her suspicions were proved correct when the ceiling – which she now began to realize was a door – began to shift, scraping open loudly with a sound that reverberated throughout the dark room.
Marie’s pupils screamed at the sudden invasion as bright orange rays of sun pierced the blackness. Early evening. Marie could tell by the color of the sunrays and the long cactus shadows cast on the ground of wherever she was being held. Once her eyes had adjusted to the sudden light, Marie’s head darted around, searching the room, trying to find any clue as to where she was and how long she’d been there.
It was definitely a bunker of some sort; Marie’s eyes darted around to take in the barely roughed-in walls, looking around for any kind of tool that she could use to escape. The room was completely bare, however, save for a rickety wooden ladder that descended from the door in the ceiling sown to the ground opposite to where she sat.
God, it was so small, so dark…almost like a tomb.
Slowly, and with that awful scraping sound that made Marie’s teeth itch, the door above the ladder slid back until a broad strip of sunlight shone into the room. Marie shrank farther back into her corner, concealing herself in the darkness as her captor began to descend the ladder.
Marie recognized Hector’s tattooed arm as he stepped down from the ladder and came into full view. That blue dragon tattooed on his bicep, the one that Marie had seen before and admired …now, as she looked at it, her stomach was beginning to turn.
“Sleep well, dollface?” he asked, approaching then stooping down in front of her with an evil smile on his lips. Marie felt his blue eyes burn into her skin as they roamed over her. Marie shifted a bit, trying to adjust her white sundress, which had ridden up on her thigh in her desperate attempts to escape.
“Hey,” he sneered, taking hold of her face in his gloved hand and squeezing her cheeks roughly together. Marie felt his fingers digging roughly into her face as he leaned in closer. “I asked you a question.”
Marie glared at Hector for a few moments, daggers shooting from her eyes, before spitting in his face. He didn’t do anything at first. Then his face turned dark as he wiped the saliva from his cheek. In the next moment, the back of Hector’s hand was making contact with her face.
Marie’s ears immediately began ringing, her face growing hot with stinging needles of pain. When the spots dancing before her eyes began to fade, she looked up at Hector, who had now risen to his feet before her.
“So…what, have you been working for Magneto this whole time?” she finally hissed at him, trying to distract his attention from her wrists, which she was determinedly trying to get free. “Were you just waiting to get me alone?” Marie’s voice began to rise in volume, seething with anger.
Hector stooped down to her level again, pulling a knife from one of his boots as he casually rested his elbows on his knees. “Better watch that mouth of yours, `darlin’,” he jeered, placing extra emphasis on the word `darlin’ in an obvious mockery of Logan’s term of endearment.
“What are you gonna do? Kill me?” she spat back as the blade of Hector’s knife gleamed in the sunlight. “I know you won’t,” she continued when Hector didn’t answer. “The son of a bitch wants me alive.”
Hector chuckled briefly at that comment before extending his arm and pointing the knife at Marie’s cleavage. Marie shivered as the tip of the knife pricked lightly into the skin of her chest and dragged slowly upward, stopping just beneath her chin. Marie suddenly felt sick at the icy, hollow glaze of Hector’s stare.
“Well then I guess that leaves me with a whole bunch of other options, doesn’t it?” he whispered.
~*~*~
Logan watched the sun slowly disappear below the Mexican Gulf as he sat on the veranda of the villa, not nearly as drunk as he wanted to be. Swaying to and fro in the rocking chair, Logan folded and unfolded Marie’s note absently in his hands.
The paper was almost falling apart now, as Logan had creased it so many times. The more liquor he drank, the more he folded and unfolded the paper, each time silently willing it to read something else…anything else. Yet each time, the note said the same thing. No more, no less.
Even the sound of the chair’s risers as they creaked on the wooden planks beneath him were sad…crying. Logan raised a near-empty bottle of bourbon to his lips and took a swig of the searing liquid before leaning forward onto his knees.
He’d remained in that spot for most of the day, waiting for her to come back, hoping against hope to see her trotting back up to the villa, kicking the sand up under her feet, saying how she was just at the bar…or how she just went for a quick swim.
She didn’t come back.
Logan’s foot kicked over an empty Tequila bottle as he stood dizzily from where he sat and ran a hand through his hair before digging the heels of his palms into his bloodshot eyes. Leaning back against the railing, he removed a cigar from his shirt pocket and lit it.
That she’d told him she’d stay meant nothing now, especially given what had taken place the night before. Marie had seen firsthand how short Logan’s fuse was, gotten a taste of what their life on the run would be like.
His dreams of retirement were now bittersweet, at best. There was no meaning left in it, anymore, not without Marie. He’d given up on his past, and now his future had given up on him. His heart had been ripped out not once, but twice, in as many weeks.
His rage taking over for a moment, Logan picked up one of the empty bottles at his feet and angrily tossed it out onto the beach, hearing the crashing sound that it made as it hit a rock in the distance.
The note still turning over and over in his hand, Logan absently began to amble along the length of the veranda. He unfolded the note again, took another look at it. The words on it were so curt, so blunt. Logan almost couldn’t believe she wrote it.
It was only when he looked up from the note that he realized she hadn’t.
He knew this, because sitting on the ground behind the villa, just where he’d left it when he bought it for her, was Marie’s Vespa. Logan felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, and his drunken haze immediately disappeared when the sickening truth of the situation struck him.
Logan burst into the villa, adrenaline shooting through his veins like liquid fire as he kicked off his shoes and grabbed his combat boots from under the bed. Once they were on and laced, Logan raced back out of the villa and bolted down the veranda steps toward the bike. He hadn’t the foggiest idea where to start looking, but he was going to find her. And once he did, there was going to be a whole shitload of hell to pay…he only hoped he could find her in time.
That last thought had barely finished forming in Logan’s head when he suddenly had another sickening realization…
…Hector.
His head spinning, Logan leapt off the bike and raced across the beach to Hector’s villa.
~*~*~
“He’s gonna screw you over, Hector…just like he screwed Logan. You know that, don’t you?”
Marie shifted on the hard ground where she sat, trying to keep her voice calm as she attempted to reason with him. This was a more than difficult task. Marie wanted to scream, to kick, to bite, to rip his face right off. He had no idea what Magneto was going to do to her.
As Hector stood over her, Marie discreetly studied his clothing, looking for any opportunity to make skin to skin contact. He was fully clothed though, and even if he hadn’t been, Marie’s hands and legs were so tightly bound together that she could barely maneuver herself into sitting position let alone attempt to take Hector down.
Night had fallen and the bunker was dim, lit only by a small oil lantern hanging beside the entrance. Marie watched as Hector’s face flickered before her in the glow, his once jovial expression now cold and uncaring, a mere shell of who Marie believed him to be.
Hector didn’t answer her question, merely watched her with a taunting glare as the knife dangled between his fingers.
“Logan trusted you,” Marie said, changing tactics in an attempt to appeal to the good in him. Desperation was setting in now and had come out in the shaky tone of her voice.
“Wanna guess how much that’s worth to me?” he scoffed.
“Don’t do this,” Marie pleaded, her eyes beginning to glisten with tears as she realized that he really wasn’t going to let her go. She was trying to raise herself to her knees, the rough ground scraping her skin as Hector silently stood and made his way to the rickety ladder pulling the lantern down from where it hung.
Marie sobbed in panic, realizing that she was about to be left alone again in that unbearable blackness. Suddenly the rage returned, shaking her with it’s intensity as she made one last bid for her life.
“Logan’s going to find me…” she rasped, becoming more and more enraged by the second at the smugness on his face.
“…and when he does, he’s gonna to tear you limb from limb.”
Marie’s eyes were narrowed in incredulity as Hector began to laugh. It was a Iittle laugh at first, but no less sinister, and soon Hectors shoulders began shaking as he chuckled quietly.
“What’s so funny, fuckface?” she hissed.
Hector’s laughter faded after a few moments and Marie felt a shiver run down her spine as his blue eyes stared icily back at her..
“Hector’s already dead,” he said eerily, and then Marie gasped in surprise as Hector’s blue eyes suddenly flashed yellow.
In the next moment, that blue dragon tattoo on his arm was stretching, growing, the scales radiating outward in large blotches until they covered his entire body…
…her entire body.
Marie shrank back against the wall and watched in wide-eyed terror as the strange woman made her way up the rickety ladder and out of the bunker. Her heart thumped wildly in her chest at the sound of chains being once again lifted from the ground above her, and then the door was slowly being dragged shut again.
“They’re on their way,” the blue-skinned woman could be heard saying to an unseen person outside.
Then the leaden door scraped slowly back into place, and the night stars above her disappeared, and once again Marie was plunged into darkness.
~*~*~
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000