He can’t see her today. He picked out her scent, recognized the rhythm of her heartbeat and the breath in her lungs, and knew the touch of her hands as she cradled his head in her lap, but he can’t see the familiar shock of white at her forehead that remains in remembrance of the once-long streaks that framed her face so beautifully.
Yesterday he couldn’t hear her when she spoke soothingly to him. The day before he couldn’t curl his fingers around her hand to comfort her as she wept. He wonders when the day will come when he won’t be able to speak to tell her that he’s okay. He knows that it’s possible that day might be tomorrow.
She sniffles now, and he smells the sharp salt-scent of tears, hears them in her breathing and the soft whimper of her voice that she tries to hide.
“I’m fine,” he tells her, though his voice is slightly breathless with pain and exhaustion. “I’m always fine.”
“I know,” she answers bravely past a stubborn tremor. “I just hate it. I know that it’ll only take a day or two before your eyes grow back in -- it didn’t take that long for your ears and fingers -- but God, Logan, I hate them. I hate that they do this to you, that every day they take a part of you. They kill me every time they do it.”
Her choice of words sends a shudder through him at the very real possibility that, one day, that will be their experiment. To see how much his mutation can heal her from. He knows it brought her back from the dead once, but how far is too far? Will there ever be a time he won’t be able to save her?
“You know it’s not true, don’t you?” she whispers, and he makes an expression that says he doesn’t know what she’s referring to. “Their little motto. That’s not you at all.”
“It’s not you either, darlin’,” he feels the need to tell her. The official name of the place where they are being held is the Central States Registration Center, Knoxville Division, Branch 0629, but everyone calls it Corpore Vili -- “worthless bodies.” It’s a testing center, in the most antiseptic and polite terms. In plain language, it is a torture lab where overgrown children pull the legs off the “insects” that dwell in the cages. The so-called doctors in charge of Logan and Rogue have a thing for hearing Logan scream and for seeing helpless rage in his eyes when they dare lay a hand on Marie.
So far they've never harmed her, but there is enough tampering to make him jealous and furious. Her hair, for example. They’d cut her hair in processing. They said it was to help keep lice under control, but Logan knows it was because they were stripping her of what the white stripes in her hair meant to both of them. Those little discolored streaks were physical proof that he had been there to take care of her once and that the promise still stood. To him they mean that he is capable of saving her; to her, that he is willing.
And now, even though he can’t see her, he knows that she is peaceful. That the initial distress from seeing him blinded and shorn like Samson, defeated momentarily by his enemies, has worn off. Now she is beginning to come back into herself, to settle down and deal with what is happening rather than simply allowing the sheer brutal unfairness of it to beat her over the brain until she’s numb or incapacitated, or until she breaks down and makes a deal with the girl in the next cell over for some white powder or a couple of syringes.
The temptation of being slightly fuzzy is one she lives with every day, but so far Logan has managed to counteract the silent yet persuasive propaganda that her body is worthless and that it doesn’t matter what happens to her now. So far she hasn’t taken any of the questionable pills that somehow find their way to the prisoners. So far she hasn’t popped a needle deep into her veins to erase the sight of Logan lying in her lap, eyeless and tense.
But she knows that if it ever goes too far, if he ever dies and doesn’t wake up again, she won’t have enough faith for herself and her body will become worthless in her own eyes. She knows they’ll get a two-for-one deal if they ever let him slip away.
He knows this too, and that is why he fights so hard to hold on and to come back every time they plunge him too deeply into the darkness. She doesn’t know that he’s died four times on the cold metal lab table in the past five weeks. She doesn’t know that, once, he died in the cell while she slept curled up in his arms. She doesn’t need to know. The only thing she needs from him right now is his belief in her, and she gives it back with such force that it bears him up under the worst of the pain.
He doesn’t know if they’ll ever get out of there, he doesn’t know what will happen in the next five minutes much less in the next five days, but one thing he does know is that, when his eyes grow back, he will take every moment to see more of her than he ever has before. By treating his body as if it is worthless, they’ve shown him how much he really values it. He vows to himself and to her that if they ever get out of this place, he’s going to start trying to take care of it. They may tell him his body is one of the worthless ones, but it’s the only one he’s got. It’s all he has left to give her and he’ll hold onto it as long as he can.
*The End*
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Author's Chapter Notes:
tinhutlady decided to be eeeeee-veel and toss out a challenge that I couldn’t resist. This is my response to it. The title comes from the Latin phrase "Fiat experimentum in corpore vili," meaning, "Let experiment be made on a worthless body."