I didn’t expect to find anything like that; the frightening sight of a human shape lying on the paved ground of a dark street with absolutely no sign of life coming from it. I really thought he was dead but I was irresistibly attracted, wanting to see this with my own eyes, for something deep inside me suddenly held all the pain in the world and my whole body started to shake uncontrollably. What was I so much afraid of?
I took the most careful steps towards the shape not afraid of the scene displayed before my eyes, but by the thought that maybe there was nothing I could do to save this person: the shape appeared to be a man, dressed in a shattered work shirt and used pants and boots with a large bleeding hole in his chest. His eyes were merely opened staring tiredly at something unknown, arms spread limply along his sides and I could swear on my life that he was still breathing.
So I ran the last steps that kept me away from him and I delicately took a hold on his throat on the left side trying to find a pulse; and it was there, weak and irregular but definitely there. I reached for a piece of clean cloth in my purse and pressed it to the damaged chest and it was immediately soaking with dark blood. I took another piece, added it over the first one and with a larger, started to quickly bandage the whole of it. It took me all I had to draw him to my close by apartment really thanking Heavens for not having to climb stairs to come in.
His eyes were closed now; too tired to keep them opened to face his unfortunate fate. So I hurried to my bedroom and laid him as gently as I could on the padded covers. I instinctively grabbed his wrist in search of his pulse and I almost stumbled and cried on the floor when there was none to be found. I reassembled my strength and courage rushing to my small cabinet to take a stethoscope, not even able to think of anything else but making sure he was still there, with me.
His heart beats were just mere whispers and his breath shallower than a new born child’s, but I tried, I had to, there was no other possibility than this one. Storming out the late afternoon sun bathed room, fear and hope gnawing at my young inexperienced doctor’s heart, I raid my cabinet in quest of all of the necessities for a decisive operation. In less than a minute I had a full wooden box of alcohol bottles, syringes, cloth, needles, aprons, scalpels and guidance books and bottles of all kinds of contents ready to bring back that man from the dead if I had to. Hastily putting on a white surgeon apron, soaking my hands in a bath of alcohol for disinfection, I started do display my most needed material making sure I didn’t forget anything. The books were spread on a nearby desk, curtains shut and lamps lighting the bedroom brightly.
My heart was now shred to pieces as I was watching more carefully the damages delicately cutting off the now red bandages and last remains of a shirt from the man’s chest. With water I started to superficially wash the deep wound taking in the ravages made to this once certainly most beautiful chest. A Perfect three inches bullet hole-I could swear it was - was digging through the flesh to a still unknown depth. With a little chance the wound wouldn’t be as profound as it actually seemed with the bullet still inside, certainly near the heart according to the situation, but not close enough not to eventually heal. I hoped and I prayed to a God I had never been exactly sure I believed in. But that time, I found the faith of a true believer as my hands started to take holder pinches in and out and around the opened wound, moving as quickly as I could without causing more damages.
Fortunately the bullet was still there not far from the two last solar left ribs, right under the heart. After what seemed like an eternity, I was sewing the skin shut back again considering the fact that the man was still miraculously alive. The bedroom floor was covered with blood soaking cloth in metal and ceramic basins, the lights still brightly lighting the place. That was when I allowed my eyes to take a closer look at the man lying in my bed.
I knew his body was tall and strong for I experienced its weight upon my shoulders and its length when I tried to make his size match the bed mattress and realized he was a little too tall to fit perfectly. Large delicate hands with long fingers that made me think he wasn’t an ordinary worker but certainly a man of intellectual occupations. His broad forehead was a mark of intelligence and deep thinking whereas long dark lashes extended from delicate eyelids. Brows I could only imagine furrowing while concentrating or thinking, cheeks taut and smoothly shaved, thin lips that I hoped I could see curl up in a genuine smile very soon. For sure that was the most handsome features I had ever seen and suddenly, I was strangely moved to tears when I thought about the way his body had been almost deadly damaged. Or was it something else, something that made my heart tighten dangerously when I saw him lying on the ground?
What happened to him? Who did this to him and why? I discovered I was taking an unusual interest in that whole situation. I was not the kind to bring a heavily wounded stranger home trying to make him rise from the dead in my bedroom. I was not the kind to be so moved by a wound no matter how it presented itself.
I never cried over someone’s lost blood as washing and boiling bandage cloths; never. And that was what I was doing, hands still covered with blood, blood on my apron and deeply dying the cloths, I was crying and washing and crying even harder at the irreplaceable loss. I couldn’t calm down; I didn’t know at that time the exact causes of so much emotion, but I was sure I‘d discover everything I wanted to know the moment the man in my bedroom opened his eyes.
Three days of waiting, wounds washing, constants matching and sleepless over watching. He was still there, fighting for life, struggling with fate. The wound was healing incredibly fast, though. Just a few more days and the whole thing would only be a far away memory.
It was snowing outside the bedroom window. My bedroom. It became the only place I could be because *he* was there and I had to be there if he woke up; and if he ever did I had to be there for him. And he did, by late morning; he opened the most beautiful hazel eyes I had ever seen. A perfect shade of green, golden and brown mirrors stared at me from under lashes even longer and thicker than I actually thought. I stepped up from the desk chair I was sitting on making my way to the bed’s side extending one shaky hand over his large one, barely able to speak a word, overwhelmed by waves of relief and another million of unspeakable emotions. I squeezed it gently trying my best to hold back the tears and forming a smile by curving my shaking lips. He smiled back a weak smile at me squeezing my hand gently too and sank into sleep a while more.
He woke up the next morning an indescribable expression on his face. Was it fear? Was it pain?
My voice steadier than the day before greeted him softly enough not to scare him. I could swear he was studying me, watching me closely with now slightly wary eyes. Like I did about twelve hours earlier, I stepped closer to the bed but this time I gently reached his left wrist to check his pulse while leaning down to take in his now firm steady heart beats with my stethoscope. It took some time for him to form a sentence, I could see him struggle with the words as his brows predictably furrowed. Unsurprisingly, he asked me where he was. His voice was just a murmur but the deeper tone of it wasn’t a hard guess. His soft look lowered to the covers he was tucked in and one hand reached for the bandage across his chest. He asked what happened to him and I honestly responded that I didn’t know, telling him how and where and when I found him. He suddenly looked lost as his brows furrowed again, asking to apparently someone else in the room who he was. Then his eyes shot up darting into mine as if to find an answer to his torments and I faintly shook my head as to say that I was sorry, I didn’t know. Fluttering eyes went watery and the reddish shade around the hazel accentuated the green in them. He tried to rise from the bed, but failed and I had to bring support not to let him fall on the carpeted floor. I could sense panic rushing through his now tensed body and I tried my best to sooth him with words but I hardly managed and I had to push him to the bed with my hands on his shoulder wondering either I should give him something to calm him down. I didn’t know when it happened but I felt myself reaching out for his face with one shaky hand speaking words I can’t remember even now, and he finally gave in lying back on the mattress.
“Are you hurt Sir?”
He slowly shook his head yes and I gave him the medication I had prepared for that case. He drank it painfully making the greatest efforts to swallow the clay-colored liquid. I had so many questions to ask him but not knowing whether it was appropriate or not to start a conversation right now. So I just asked him if he wished to eat and he whispered that yes, he did wish. I helped him sit down leaning his back on the bed head. He suspiciously looked at the cutlery and bowl of warm bouillon that I brought him on a legged tray. He hesitated for some odd reason that I thought I understood, but when I saw him raising alternatively his right and left hand in attempts to pick up the silver spoon I was rather perplex myself. Then he chose to eat with his left hand, making sure the flavored liquid only directed into his mouth and not anywhere else.
Surprised by his attitude I went to my office after his meal and started some researches. The way he looked at things with always almost frightened eyes alarmed me a little. It was like he didn’t even recognize the simplest things or the most essential words and their order in sentences. As I ran throughout the pages of numerous books I fell upon a theory that said that persons who underwent a violent and traumatic experience tended to develop some kind of amnesia, in different stages and degrees of manifestation with language and move coordination disabilities, or some others with loss of immediate memory and other much more complex cases of mental alienation. So I decided to deepen my researches by preparing a series of tests that essentially consisted in simple questions and simple physical tests.
He was sleeping by that time and I allowed myself to use a most deserved night’s sleep as well. I woke up the next morning and surprisingly found him standing up against the far other window of the room, looking at the snow falling on the street and little yard across from it. He didn’t even turn around when he told me he couldn’t remember anything, not even his own name. He couldn’t tell why he’d been shot or what he was doing in that street not far from my house, nor could he explain how he was able to do that. And then he brought up his hands before his face and started to make one of my old handkerchiefs fleet appear and disappear. He did the very same thing with coin and a ball that he had in his trousers pocket. I was rather surprised myself at the sight of it but then something became clear. I started to explain one of the few theories I had read as I saw anxiety growing stronger on his soft features and asked him if he’d agree to do the tests I had prepared so that we could know a little further about what was really wrong about his memories. He quickly shook his head as a yes and we started right away.
I still had a few of my grand-fathers belongings in the house I lived in and that once belonged to him. I gave the man a clean shirt and a new pair of trousers that strangely enough, fitted him. I don’t remember my grand-father being that tall, or just maybe, the man wasn’t as tall as I actually saw him. As he was getting dressed, I prepared him a new room, not really knowing why I did it because the man didn’t seem to need convalescence. I did anyway; my old room, the one I had before I finished my studies and before my only remaining relative died of lung disease. I lived all alone there, with two remnant white streaks in my hair due to utter grief and self desperation after my grand-father’s death; and I wasn’t even in my twenty second year of age. I was a doctor, the Colorado Spring’s doctor.
I was what the others at university called a ‘genius’. I didn’t like the word because it made me appear as some kind of strange creature; and whereas most of physicians obtained their certification after almost ten years and sometimes more, I gained it only after four years. It had been extremely hard to exist among older men that always regarded me as an inferior or as some kind of monster. I know I am not the only woman physician in the country, but I sometimes don’t know anything else to do but cry over my own choices and my naïve attitude. I wish I could be more than what I am, or maybe I just would like to be who I truly am. It was my grand-father’s disease that made me decide I would be a physician later on, just like he was, and I’d be able to save him. He didn’t even wait I had my diploma; he died three months before, while I was in Boston making my proofs to a famous hospital. When I came back, it was too late. Since then I have two permanent reminders of my selfish choice and its consequences. My place was at my grand-father’s side, that’s what those two white streaks keep on telling me.
I told the man that his new room was ready if he wished to stay until I had a clearer vision of his health with the results of the tests. He simply and quietly stated that he had all the time in the world. I led him upstairs in what was about to become our meeting place for the next two months. It appeared that he had some difficulties to climb up the stairs due to a bad leg. Had he been injured? We found him a stick anyway and it seemed that it was a part of him in some strange way, which might indicate that he certainly have had to use one before he was shot.
Two months during which he had to relearn or learn everything, even the simplest of things, because he didn’t have any memory of anything. He couldn’t read or eat or bathe properly nor button up his own shirt or tie knots to his shoes. I taught him most of those things as patiently as I could, with unexpected results. He learned very fast. The tests revealed that his blood possessed slight differences compared to anybody else’s. It didn’t seem to alter his normal vital functions so I let it at what it was for me, a simple particularity.
One night I hazarded one question, to see if it appealed anything to him. I asked him for his name. He stared at his hands gathered on his lap for endless minutes, making efforts to try to remember something, anything, and then giving up; he said that he didn’t know. I hazarded further more proposing that he could then choose his own name, a name I could call him until he remembered his own. He nodded briefly, looking at the dark skies beyond the frost window.
“One should deserve a name.” He said with a distant voice.
“You deserve one. You are a person, you deserve a name. And by the way, how am I supposed to call you? It’s become hard to find ways to avoid that path. Won’t you relieve me?” I said, trying to stay a little casual despite the grief that was now violently biting at my heart.
“Then choose one for me. I don’t know that many names, as you can suppose.” his bitterness now palpable in his voice and in his words. I was in sheer agony.
“If I may…I’d like to… What do you think of…Logan.” My eyes were nailed at my feet, feeling a torrent of discomfort washing over me.
“Logan? Logan.”
“It might sound silly but, I do love that name, and I’d be honored if you… And I think it suits you very well.”
“Logan. It’s a nice name, and simple. What is yours then?”
“My name is…Marie DeWitt.”
“Marie…” He whispered my name like to engrave it somewhere inside his mind, or in his heart, just like I hoped he would.
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000
Story Notes:
Total AU with a L/M romance inspired by the movie "The Prestige". I love this period of history ans loved the characters of the movie and I thought that it could be a great context for some logan and Marie loving.
PS:I own nothing but my sick imagination...
PS:I own nothing but my sick imagination...
Author's Chapter Notes:
I didn’t expect to find anything like that; the frightening sight of a human shape lying on the paved ground of a dark street with absolutely no sign of life coming from it.