She didn’t think she believed in God after it started. It was brief and ludicrous considering the amount of time she had to ponder it, but she thought she had stopped believing long ago, perhaps when she’d first discovered her mutation, perhaps after her eight months on the road, perhaps after she was almost killed the first time.
Life, they (who? Xavier? Jean? Scott?) say is never fair. Or particularly happy, she added whenever she heard it. Happiness was something she knew very little about. Pure joy was reserved for people back in Meridian, with their simple lives and white picket fences, disrupted only when their children became monsters. Pure joy, happiness – these were hard to come by. Mutants had the distinct disadvantage of being the dredges of society. This hardly ever led to felicity.
She had experienced what she later termed “moments”. These were brief, rare, and she grasped at them with the same ferocity of a drowning man grasping a lifesaver. She tried to pretend she wasn’t expecting all along for the moment to end. When it did, she was less disappointed than proven correct.
Lists were made and items compared and dissected and the experiments always showed she was right. This all happened in seconds; she didn’t have much time.
Exhibit A – Family. She had lost it. Completely. The moment she exited the door, carrying the duffel, sweating underneath a moth-eaten coat, trying hard not to cry, she lost them. There was mother and father and aunts and grandparents and people she never, ever got to see again. She would be a liar if she said she didn’t miss them, that she wouldn’t give anything to see them one last time. And she didn’t want to be a liar – not then.
Exhibit B – Logan. Simple man, strangely honorable and the one person she trusted with everything she had.
They had been violently happy while together and it had been one of the few times she had not been waiting for it to end, but dreaded it nonetheless. He was with her whenever he was in the mansion. He slept in her bed, ate beside her. They did things she never dreamed about and wouldn’t have expected from him. When they made love, and he thrust into her the first time she gasped and squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the impending orgasm, fearing it because it marked the end of the union. She feared it almost as much as she feared his departures – forays into Canada, searches for his past. She had to bite her tongue whenever he said good-bye to keep herself from asking why he had to know anything about his past at all. Wasn’t the future good enough?
When he didn’t come back for a year, then two, she figured someone had finally been able to take down the Wolverine. She locked herself in her room, cried for a day and shook herself off. She reminded herself that pure joy wasn’t for her and that her time of happiness had come to its logical conclusion.
Exhibit C – The End. Stupid, really. The first bullet ripped through her thigh and she was so surprised, so pained, she fell to her knees instantly. This wasn’t supposed to happen. A human wasn’t supposed to be able to kill her. Then she remembered that old axiom: life isn’t fair. Or happy, she added. What a waste, she thought, a life so unfulfilled it leaves no mark, but comes and goes like a soft breeze, leaving little in its wake but the rustling of leaves. She didn’t fight it, because it was all she had prognosticated, all that was inevitable. No, she didn't think she could believe in God and thought it was ludicrous those thoughts would fill her mind then. Sad, how little she had to put on her lists. She didn’t feel the second bullet as it entered her cranium and disconnected her brain from her body.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
I don't know what brought this on. I apologize ahead of time. Thanks (or not, depending on how you view this): Actually, I do know what brought this on. Thanks to Bjork and Dancer in the Dark, for affecting me like no other actor or morive have in a long time. This is the unhappy result. Short but terrible.