The Girl: Chapter Twenty
Logan was taking his time, a long time.
First he turned the T.V. on, crouching by the set and clicking through the channels--all eighty of them, manually, though the remote lay on the couch's arm. He straightened, started for the girl and then turned back, lowered the volume to avoid a headache--and then raised it again, because it was too close to mute for her ears. Then Logan had to fetch another beer from the kitchen; he didn't want to get up during the game. Returned, apologized, asked if she wanted anything. Shook his head, said she might change her mind, went and came back with a bag of Fritos and a Dr. Pepper. He pushed the coffee table back so that he'd be able to put his feet up, then pulled it back so he wouldn't need to reach so far for his beer.
Only after this abnormally fussy ritual was complete did Logan sit--slowly, lowering himself by reluctant degrees as if trying to think of other things to do, not the careless sprawl that had previously been his custom. A beat later, and he put his arm gingerly around around her.
And like it had for the past four months, something inside the girl lurched, lifted like the sensation one experiences in a car suddenly going downhill. Tightened and shivered, not unpleasantly. A little know somewhere within her, some organ that had previously done it's work in silence, suddenly made itself known. It happened again when he moved, or she, when his shoulder or leg brushed against her own.
The girl pressed her knees together and tried to keep still. When she didn't, when she squirmed too much, it seemed to wake in Logan an abrupt need to use the bathroom. He'd return distracted, sit a little more stiffly beside her--annoyed, perhaps, that she'd made him miss the game.
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She secured the next slide to the microscope's stage, adjusted the lenses.
"You each have three minutes to examine your specimen, and copy what you see to a sheet of paper," Mr. Summers said, loudly. "Jubilee, the Fine Focus is on the other side. Don't touch that. When I call time, proceed to the next microscope. Those of you at the back will move to the front, until--"
"We could go see a movie afterwards. I've got 'The Notebook' and 'Two Weeks Notice'," she heard Kitty tell Bobby eagerly from a table away. "Which do you prefer?"
The girl glanced up from the eyepiece, caught his eye almost accidentally. Bobby looked away, quickly.
His crutches were propped against the nearest wall. When asked, Logan would say simply and indifferently that he'd been teaching the boy to fight like a man.
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"I don't know," Mrs Grey was saying to Storm. "I just don't know. Since that fiasco at the conference, no one wants to be seen showing support. And now I can't even schedule a meeting; they're all so busy organizing that Summit--honey, find yourself a bag or don't get so many next time."
"Okay," the girl agreed noncommittally, flushing as she restacked the fallen books.
Storm touched her shoulder, one. "You're too young for back problems," she told her. Her serene voice was a balm to an ache you hadn't been aware of.
The women walked around her, walked on. The girl hefted the tomes into her arms and did the same.
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One sheet was twined around her leg, the others a disordered mountain atop her. The room was quiet, and with her face buried against the pillow she felt her breath leave and return in hot gusts. She was sweaty, half awake and halfway back in a sleep she wasn't yet alert enough to want to leave. The next morning she would blush through her confusion, forcibly forget what images had chased themselves through her mind. But now she bit her lip, clenched her thighs together and rocked against the touches of a subconscious Logan.
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"Finally, right? I should have told him fuck off. I mean, he's been so busy kissing up to Summers--cleaning the practice room and the cars all week, and now he expects me to drop everything when he suddenly wants to hang? Like, Oh--Em--Gee."
One would expect Jubilee to be the sort of teen to hiss at alarm clocks and fight any awakening before noon, not perky and planning shopping trips at eight A.M. on a Sunday. The girl tugged the covers over her head, tried to ignore the light shining through the weave of the cloth.
"I thought housekeeping cleaned the practice rooms," Kitty said.
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The pain, the need--two terms to describe the same thing--was no longer a quality he could view objectively. It was not a sensation but a physical presence draped over his being, made him weight every action, every movement against what he what he wanted to and the consequences of what he might. The pain no longer restricted itself to night hours, to privacy, but attached itself to Logan more devotedly than a shadow.
Yesterday, after his training class (which One-Eye had taken to supervising in an effort to minimize the number of students sent to the hospital wing, or at least their time spent there), Scott had approached him. In a tone more brotherly and confidential that Logan would have thought him capable of, he suggested, "Look, buddy, why don't you go blow off some steam? Stretch your legs--get laid, for chrissakes."
Logan had stared at the younger man for a long time. He put down the towel used to wipe his chest and neck of sweat, and learned two things: yes, his fist could indeed move faster than Scott's hand to his visor, and that Jean possessed a shockingly vast vocabulary of obscenities.
Books in the crook of her arm and the purple bracelet Ororo had given her, pushing her hair from her face. A flash of pale wrist that brought saliva and a growl against his teeth. She was only halfway down the hall. He could reach her in a few steps, a few seconds. Logan looked at the hem of her shirt and imagined it balled up in his fist, the tearing sounds her jean would make.
The girl spotted him, smiled reflexively. Logan felt his body turn, felt his legs propelling him down an opposite corner as fast as they could...but not before he caught the bewildered hurt on her face, or felt the answering pang inside him--an animal who cannot comprehend it's punishment.
He wished she hadn't seen him, that he'd chosen a different hall immediately. But lately, keeping track of the girl's exact position in the school was difficult--managing to led to the opposite of avoidance, a predator attempting to stop in the middle of the hunt. But her scent was everywhere, on everything. Potent in places she rarely frequented and in those the rational part of him knew she'd never been. On Logan's clothes and attached to other students--his nostrils would flare in a crowded hallway, his head would twist sharply in search of the person who might have faintly touched her.
These days time spent with the girl had to be planned and prepared for far in advance, with a strict routine and a unforgiving leash on his baser instincts before undertaking. Meals, and T.V., like it had been when he first met her. He no longer waited for her outside her classes--doing so left Logan's hands and his mind too free, rarely surprised her with lunch outside the mansion, in any area with fewer witnesses than the cafeteria.
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Xavier spoke in a low voice, as if the crippling weight of shame was too much for his voice to lift, or he was afraid of being overheard--the latter of which was confusing, as they were alone, and the former Logan knew the old man too well to believe.
He described the escalated number of threats, veiled and not, toward humans, the wistful tone those threats used to have but didn't anymore. The months that had passed since Xavier had seen his old friend and, most importantly, the time that had passed since he had fallen off his telepathic radar. The Professor did not refer to Lensherr by name, or any of those informal terms earned from years friendship, but by his code name, reserved for missions and for distancing himself from any personal association.
Xavier, without a breath's worth of humility, said Logan's own gifts of tracking might find more success than his. He told him it was crucial, used phrases like,'I fear' and 'time is of the essence' and 'unfathomable consequences of underestimating this'. He said he knew how Logan was disinclined to accept mission proposals these days, but that this--
There was something the old man wasn't telling him, but that had always been an integral part of their interactions. But there was also something else, a half-ghost of a scent that, despite the ever-eloquent scripted manner of his words, spoke of real desperation.
Logan considered Lensherr; a dozen choice swearwords sprang to his mind. He thought of the girl, of air that wouldn't taste like her, and couldn't decide if this was a pro or a con.
He told Xavier yes. He'd start looking around tomorrow.
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This time the girl was awake. And Jubilee came in alone.
She closed the door roughly--loudly, but not the bang it might have been were the school not constructed so adeptly. The girl expected her to flip on the light, squinted her eyes in preparation, heard the sound of a hand sliding, scratching along the wall's plaster. But her roommate must have given up--as if the switch changed it's position according to it's own whims. Crackles and thumps as she crossed the room, a whiff of something that held an ugly familiarity. She wondered who would dare supply Jubilee with alcohol.
A crack as a heavily-beaded purse was slammed on the bedside table, then the mattress as the weight was flung onto it. The girl blinked at he dim ceiling, rolled over and shut her eyes. She thought, hoped, that would be the end of it. It was the time of night when sleep almost has a corporeal, concrete shape--in reach, and the dreamer has only to open his hands to clasp it again.
But then a giggle, a snot. Little bursts of laughter interspersed with long silences that grew shorter. They rose in pitch as their owner's vocal control slipped, or as she thought there was a chance the girl couldn't hear her.
"You must--", Jubilee started to say, before giggling overtook the words. The girl opened her eyes again unwillingly, watched as her roommate shifted with drunken grace to to lay sideways on the mattress. She bent her knees, tried to cross her legs but her ankle kept sliding off, an apparent source of endless amusement. She gave up, left her legs crooked, spread, turned her head to see if the girl was watching and pantomimed something filthy. "You must--", she tried again and failed. "You must be really good to make him stay this long," she choked out eventually, shaking with suppressed chortles. "Really fucking good."
The girl felt her face grow hot. She rolled over to hide herself as the sounds of Jubilee's laughter slowly transformed into quiet, desperate sobs--so smoothly she couldn't pinpoint when the change had taken place.
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Her eyes went wide when Logan told her that he would not be there to eat with her. The chocolate orbs shifted from the strap of the backpack to his his face, back and forth as if tracking the birdie in a tennis match. She asked about lunch, dinner, the next day, and the one after that, and each no deepened the crease between her eyebrows and made him feel overwhelmingly sick for a man who could not recall having ever been ill.
If he'd been more of a coward he would have left without telling her, before dawn, claimed his old preference for an early start later. But if he'd been less of one he would have warned her the night before. She brought up timidly, hopefully, a football game scheduled for tonight and got the names of the teams right for a change.
Logan said, "I'm sorry, Kid," and could not meet her eyes. "I have some...things...to take care of." (Would everything have gone differently if he had told her of Xavier's request? Or would they simply have taken a little longer?)
And then the girl asked quietly if he would be back after the three days. His resolve faltered, and then collapsed. "Maybe."
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Logan left with a peculiar weight to his feet, as if after all this time his body realized the how much it took to move two hundred pounds of metal and muscle. He eased, or buried, the feeling by going over again the starting points, the places The Professor had suggested as favorites of Magneto.
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Time and space which was supposed to hold Logan but did not felt unnatural, passed slowly and grudgingly. Rooms seemed disturbing and off, like a supermarket after hours, like a doze that any moment will end with a sudden fall and the sleeper jolting into unhappy consciousness. At mealtimes she sat at their preferred table, alone with the heat of an almost-forgotten spotlight. She picked at what little food sat on her plate, Logan not there to urge more onto it, found herself feeling guilty for every forkful, for starting without him. She looked up each time someone entered the small dining area in expectation that it would be him and not a surge of disappointment that she would find.
Without the threat of Logan, students filled the entertainment room with their sweaty bodies and raucous laughter. The girl passed the door but didn't go in; it was a foreign land she possessed no passport to. And her roommate (to who had no more been explained the reason for Logan's departure than the girl) dropped smirking hints whenever their paths crossed.
She meandered around the mansion, a traveller who's landmarks have vanished inexplicably. Everyone carried a smile, talked a bit louder than usual, as if this were a holiday, a day for a field trip, and the atmosphere was more relaxed and exuberant. The girl wondered how something that so pleased others could make an irreparable cut inside of her--but only briefly, it was a worn-out question.
She thought of what Jubilee had said last night, and how this morning Logan's gaze had tracked the movements of well-shaped female passerby when he said he had things to take care of. The former had been been pulled back into her mind over and over, like the line of an impatient fisherman, hummed in an incessant loop now. The girl found herself in the library (where else?), the gilded titles of unread tomes withholding their usual siren call and her fingertips drawn to the spines of certain spines held before. Her roommate's words beating a drum's steady rhythm. Half-thoughts and half-plans coursing under her consciousness, not yet ready for her to acknowledge them yet.
The girl filled her arms with books, some thicker than others, carted them to a chair in a guilty corner of the room. One by one she opened their pages, sought for pages depicting romance--sections she had previously skipped with a rare, silent anger and the desire to insist, aloud, "No. That's not how it happens." She read these, and tried to understand.
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It was late when Logan returned, raindrops racing their siblings on every window, and the teachers telling all the card and Foosball and video game enthusiasts, "last game" and rubbing their temples--Ibuprofen wearing off. And though he sought her out almost immediately, before the motorcycle's engine had even cooled, it was only to let her know that he was back, to refuse any television offers she might have, to ask how she was and not listen to the answer, to stare at her with a haggard face and wild eyes, to touch her hair once with a jerky hand and then brusquely declare that he had to go, he had to speak with The Professor.
She watched the back of his flannel shirt walk away, the same he'd worn three days ago, and then went to her room, to the bathroom. She closed the door and sat on the toilet, thinking of that swoop in her stomach when his fingers had brushed the strands of her hair. She bit her lip until it bled.
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The girl's feet did not waver on the way to Logan's room. She wore her pajamas, in part because she'd had to wait until Jubilee fell asleep, and to help herself pretend that this would be no different than last time--at least until she got there. Her heart was beating fast; she could hear each wet throb, and wondered absently if her skin was on, if it would turn on.
Her time to change her mind dropped from the hourglass, the two last grains soundless as they struck the rest of the pile. Logan's door was before her; she stared into the eye a swirl in the wood made, raised her fist. She thought, "If it will make him stay.", and let her knuckles fall once, twice. There was no reply from withing, and the girl fought a brief battle with the temptation to run, or wet herself.
She knocked again, and after several long, torturous moments or years, the door was pulled open.
Logan's eyes were dark and pinched, and the girl discovered bizarre triumph in the notion that he hadn't found too much satisfaction in being away. He looked at her, first with confusion, and then with wariness. Some dynamic between had shifted, some change he must have been sliding toward had happened while he was gone, and she felt the crushing pressure of those unwanted.
"What do you want?", he said, and she flinched at the unspoken but very present now at the end of his sentence; the lines in his forehead tripled. "Kid? What do you need?" The correction, the attempt at gentility, was a weak and ineffectual. Too late.
"I just...I just...Would you....Do...do you think if I...."
Logan stared at her unhelpfully, an impatience she wasn't accustomed to from him. It flustered her, made her voice skip like a pebble on concrete, all the things she'd rehearsed leave her mind like they'd never been there to begin with.
"Could I...Can--can I....can I...stay?"
He was shaking his head even as she choked out the words. or a moment he looked away, as his head turned from side to side, but then his eyes snapped back up to hers. His face was not softer, nor more like the man she'd known for nearly three years now, but pained and, somehow, pleading. He was still shaking his head as his arms moved, as he drew back enough to let her in.
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Logan was silent, stood by the door with his fingertips still on the knob, digging into the bridge of his nose with his other hand. She made an uncertain, nervous circuit around the room, came to the corner of his bed and touched the post lightly. Her back tingled faintly, because it faced him; she sought for her nerve but found it shivering in a corner.
His movements were, as ever, silent. She did not notice that he had left his position at the door until he walked past her, running his hands through already crazed hair. The girl felt puzzlement, but oddly little surprise at Logan's attitude...because it wasn't new, was it?She'd seen it in a moment's breath worth of looks in his eyes, in his increasing reluctance to be in her presence, in Jubilee's rarely subtle but always cruel words, in all of the whispers and not-so-whispers that fluttered around the mansion like errant moths, in the assumption that he'd been staying for her and the knowledge that she not must be enough anymore.
And yes, she was afraid. Of course. Of whatever pulled the muscles of Logan's back so taut and angry, of this lightless room, of what she thought she had to do, of that jump in her stomach and the concept of never feeling it again because he might not be there to sit beside her, to touch her, of how the place that had been her home became a stranger when he was not there. In times of the unfamiliar a body returns to what it knows best, seeks it out to help process present surroundings--and the girl was very familiar with fear.
"Are you going to leave again?"
Logan turned, his expression terse and confused, as if struggling to translate her words. It took him a minute. "I don't know, Kid. Maybe. Probably. Didn't really get done...what I needed to."
"How long will you be...be...."
"I don't know."
She thought she might cry--another Familiar, her tear ducts eroded smooth enough from frequent use to create an unobstructed, unhesitating path for tears.
Logan blinked at her, and softened, though it seemed to cost him quite a bit of exertion. He nodded toward the bed, and suddenly the girl's plan felt silly, stupid--as surely anything based off Jubilee's teasing must be. She would keep her mouth shut; the two of them would lay down and sleep, and the only difference between the last time she had come here and this would be that she would know he was only doing it from courtesy.
But she didn't move, and neither did he. The space between her eyes burned and she saw a blurry Logan swallow, take a stiff step her way and then, as if his legs contained some magnet he couldn't resist, four more. Her eyes focused on one of his shirt's pale button,s the threads crossing the four holes. She hadn't expected him to draw so near, hadn't expected his brown hand to reach for her and then return to his side, hadn't expected to see his chest vibrate, a not-so-faint tremble.
The girl's fingers curled in upon themselves, bit into her palm's fleshy pillows.
"Kid. Baby," she heard him say, "I'm sorry. I think you should--"
"Logan?" She interrupted his words with a whisper she doubted even he could hear.
"What?", Sharp, unreasonably exasperated with an even more serrated edge that resembled panic.
"You know, you...you can, if you...if you want...."
"Can what?"
"You can...you know. If...if it makes it...I mean, I'll...I don't mind...You can..."
She reached out unintentionally, touched the button she'd been staring at and then the soft fabric beneath, and underneath that, an oven, wrapped in many layers of muscle and Logan. The sensation took up all the available space in her mind.
He groaned, with low agony. And after that, things happened very quickly. His hand closed over her wrist, thumb overlapping the knuckles. She was against his chest with no recollection of having been pulled or of moving. Her vision was a world of red, the crimson stitches that made up his shirt. An arm securing her against him like a band, planes of firm, unforgiving heat, an entire landscape of muscle--the ridges and cliffs and a mountain pressed against her. The girl felt small, thin, inconsequential, her body molding itself against him like a blanket. Unable to find the mechanisms required to turn her head; she blinked idiotically at the strands of hair that had found it's way into her eyes.
She was paralyzed, limp--but how then, she wondered, could she be clutching fist fulls of him so fiercely?--and the only places she seemed to feel alive at were those touching him. A dozen previously unknown and darkened beacons scattered at various points throughout her being glowing and pulsing their light, as if with enough determination their heat could break through her skin and furrow into his. Urging her to press closer and closer, as if that were possible.
And then his mouth came down, nuzzled aside her hair, tunnelling through locks. His lips found a hollow where her throat became her shoulder, clamped there with wet strength, a brand. It did something strange to her muscles, sucked away all their strength. Tickled, pulled them up, up into Logan's mouth. She felt a long cord of sensation running from that spot (which she had never viewed as holding any particular importance or sensitivity but was, she now realized was the place where every nerve in her body was centered) down through her body, past organs and various tissues to somewhere between her legs.
The girl's knee spasmed, but she didn't fall. Logan's hand at her lower back and then everywhere, everywhere, like his scent, like his teeth. Roaming, filling themselves, and if they weren't gentle or moved frantically, she did not notice. Cords being plucked, jumping and twanging inside of her. She felt dizzy, blind, overheated and sleepy but quivering with energy at the same time. A movement of his hips that carried her along helplessly, a skilled pressure that wasn't and could never be enough and the certainty that something absolutely terrible would happen if it stopped.
This wasn't what she expected, but can't focus enough to recall what it was she did. And there was something...something about her skin, a worry, but that too was lost as his hand managed to find it's way between their bodies to do something jolting and wonderful. The girl cried out, a gasp-laced shriek, and felt Logan's chest shake against her lips with his growled response.
The sound of mattress springs scrunching down was the only thing that told her Logan was sitting; she hadn't even felt him turn. The girl's legs parted, but whether they did so with assistance or on their own she didn't know. He pulled her onto his lap, her thighs sliding easily but with a delicious friction over his own and wrapping instinctively.
Finally able to see now, the bedroom around them jarring and nonsensical in it's sameness. But black, wild eyes and the rough hair of across his jaw. The breath barrelling through her was a steam engine on rusty tracks. His head lunging forward to bite, to slip his lips across her mouth, her cheek, her ear. But Logan wasn't wasting any more time.
His palm ram one last time over her breasts--a muscle ticking in her stomach, her flesh apparently capable of doing little else but clenching an wriggling--before reemerging from the hem of her shirt. Everything moving so, so fast, and the cords beneath her skin twanging a beat too random and discordant to understand. She wondered if they were her veins, shaking free of their casings.
She watched his arm reach between them, his knuckles slide against a cloven place where the damp cotton was clinging abnormally. It freed the bottom of his jeans with a violent haste. This accomplished, it did not rest but began tugging and manipulating the edge of her pajama bottoms--enough for his intent, without her needing to stand. The elastic band made this task simple.
Swift, nimble, experienced....And it reoccurred to her, like a forgotten item on a grocery list, why she should be afraid. Her heart, already and understandably pounding, threw itself against her ribcage with the rigor of a battering ram. The dulled metal teeth of his zipper offered her a low copper grin and she remembered, she remembered...
It didn't matter anymore that this was what she came here to allow. The sheer fact of everything that was happening was cascading around the girl, burying any other oppositional voice. She blinked, turned her eyes to a space behind his shoulder.
Logan gave an involuntary, eager grunt, and she realized how badly he was shaking, his whole body, trembling with something still suppressed. He put his arms around her, the apparatus pressed so unyielding against her stomach released and no longer requiring his assistance. It would be easy, so easy, to let herself be enveloped by his warmth, by the largeness of his frame, by his insistence. She could lay her cheek on his shoulder and close her eyes and breath in the skin of his neck and ignore anything lower than that.
But before she could make this decision he was leaning back, lifting her hips, positioning her so subtly ans she felt the faint stirrings, the phantom of the tingle before her skin awoke. She felt the long-past weight of the man, motionless atop her. Panic, the drumming speed of a thousand frightened and dangerous horses. And she couldn't--she couldn't--she couldn't. And the girl forced the unintelligible noises in her throat to form the word, "Stop."
Logan's lips froze where they'd been exploring the skin beneath her chin. Instantly, and she imagined she could feel the incredulity sweeping out of him. But after a moment she realized he wasn't listening, only lingering.
Cracking protests tumbled out of her, whimpers, a string she could barely understand herself. "Stop, oh, stop, stop."
His hold tightened. He pressed light, gentling kisses too desperate to actually sooth everywhere within reach, made little humming sounds. But the girl twisted her face away, pushed though his arms rendered her immobile, let her fingers curl and scrape as much as they could but these efforts were as effective against him as they were against the ones she were really fighting. The head of something brushed against her entrance ans her entire lower half flinched. He snarled--and then whined, once, pleadingly, brokenly.
She begged, "Let me go. Let go. Let go," but they were token words now, empty of real hope until he did--all at once, the arms she'd strained against disappearing without warning and with them, her balance. The floor rose up to strike her spine with painful reproof. For a few seconds shock kept her undignifiedly sprawled there, staring at Logan's ankles and up, to the statue he'd become.
It took a lot of concentration and strength the close her legs and then to scramble back, up. Her heel touched something hard, slick, and the reflexive jerk knocked whatever it was over. A bottle, larger than and smelling much stronger than beer; she stepped in it's contents.
Logan hadn't moved. The girl's last image of him was of a slightly hunched body whose every muscle was locked--arm's crossed over his lap and ending in fists. A cold, grimacing face that did not look at her.
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It took several corridors for her leg's half-run to slow; her breath refused to consider anything remotely calmer than a pant. She strode quickly, and then less so, until she thought she had the time, if not the inclination, to count the rug beneath her's ever fiber between steps.
She waited to hear Logan's heavier tread behind her, turned her head to look again and again--first with fear, then with confusion, and then with something she didn't quite understand. Something that had the agony of a vital organ being ripped from it's place among it's brethren. And every step forward was one more she wanted to take in the opposite direction.
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Logan felt like the shell of a grenade who's pin had been torn from it's casing and tossed carelessly away. Hard to the touch, but half of a heartbeat away from exploding, transforming it's exterior into nothing but heat and dust and shards of shards.
He sat as one who has never moved before and cannot comprehend how, his insides systematically being stripped and destroyed by mechanical flames that would quickly run out of fuel and begin to seek it elsewhere. Logan paralyzed himself, not even risking tuck himself back into his jeans, lest the slightest shift gave the fire a direction for that new material.
And when the smoke had satisfyingly fused itself into every pore, when the heat had thrown itself against his bones and licked every tissue beneath his skin, Logan lowered his head slowly and wearily into his hands. The flame had burnt itself out in a shockingly short length of time. He was left with ashes and a cold hurt and the memory of the girl's taste.
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He was waiting for her in the hall the next morning, beside a landscape painting she hated and a supply closet she was rather fond of. His hair was--not brushed, but less wild than usual. Logan wore fresh clothes and a friendly smile that alarmed her more than his presence.
He said, "Hey, Kid," cheerfully. A tone and a Logan she hadn't seen for months.
She'd hidden in her room all morning, avoiding and waiting for Logan both. Now her feet fumbled, and she froze, debated the merits of flight. The unusual expression on his face dipped, just slightly. "What's the matter?"
The girl did not reply. Thoughts like birds who'd flown into a storefront and now darted, fought amongst each other and battered themselves in search of the exit, while he waited for her reply. Her limbs were locked, like her lips.
"I...thought we could go out, get something to eat," he suggested this with a gentle hesitancy, an unprecedented hitch that could be vulnerability--but even that seemed off, somehow, not least because of who was speaking.
She was mystified, but maybe...maybe he wanted to pretend last night hadn't happened. Maybe he was sorry. Maybe things were going to go back to the way they were before. Maybe--
With such ease did her mind and emotions shift, lacking the roots to cling to one opinion for long. It was these flitting ideas, coupled with those that had kept her eyes from shutting last night, that moved her feet toward the beckoning hand.
Acidic sensation in her stomach, but the girl told herself she was only nervous. Even now it was surprisingly difficult to really fear Logan. But stepping toward him didn't bring the relief her body had been quietly insisting it would all morning, and the ache remained. She shrugged off the arm he tried to place around her shoulders. He looked mildly affronted.
"Are you mad at me?" She'd hadn't meant for her tongue to shape the words.
"Why would I be mad?" Confused for a moment, but shakes his head quickly. "No. It's okay, honey. But we do need to talk. So let's go, okay?"
The girl stared at him, at his urging eyes, at the plaid shirt she'd thought grease from the garage had ruined weeks ago. She nodded, jerkily.
Logan grinned, ushered her though the corridors and the stairs at an even greater pace than his usual--but he did not try to touch her again.
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They bypassed the garage, and the car he led the girl to outside, though probably one of Xavier's spares, was unfamiliar to her. It sparkled in the sunlight, a pleasant if nondescript silver, but up close one could see thick clumps of dirt, grass in the tires and grill, unfortunate insects on the windshield. For a brief moment, as she pulled up the metal handle, the girl felt a spasm of panic. She imagined Logan taking her back to the city. She'd failed. She wasn't worth all this, wasn't worth him.
She shook the thought away--how stupid. She opened the passenger door, folded herself inside. Creased seats with bits of foam poking through and a strong stench, fast food and something rotting; the girl pretended not to notice. Logan was faster than her already shoving a key into the ignition. Impatient and apparently annoyed with the engine, though it had started up almost immediately.
"Put your seat belt on."
The girl opened her mouth, asked a question she wouldn't remember later.
It happened smoothly, in a matter of heartbeats. She'd been looking out the window, at the climbing ivy on the school's walls and Jubilee's pretty, Hispanic friend entangled with John by the soccer fields, when she felt the pinch in her neck. The fleeting, but sharp pressure and the wave of vertigo that followed.
The girl turned her suddenly sluggish head, but that was the last voluntary movement her body made. She gaped at the hand that dropped the now-empty syringe into the cup holder, felt herself slide sideways and shoved when she got in the way of the gearshift.
Perhaps because she'd been staring at the driver, things did not go black, as they say, but blue.
:::::::::::::::::
She woke to cold, and a hand on her ankle.
Thought came to the girl slowly and in useless, blurry fragments, like words of a letter left out in the rain. Swirling darkness and fog and an upside-down world. Damp, hard surface beneath her and drool on her cheek. A chill of open air, more biting than any she'd felt before, and the girl shivered convulsively. Her breath appeared in clouds like the smoke of an atomic bomb. Her feet were blades of ice--she wondered if she were wearing shoes....and then forgot the reason for the question, her mind drifting away from the question, a rowboat undocked.
Black space above her, beyond the misty half-clouds. The openness of Outside Beautiful and nauseating in it's endlessness. A moon, but no stars.
Something hurt, but she could not assign it a location or severity. The cold...the cold was worse, because it was strong enough to return to her attention again and again. Sharp enough to slice through the numbness and, she feared, intensify the pain if she woke too much.
The cold....
A face above her's, grandfatherly and familiar, distorted like a reflection in rippling water or an surrealist painting.
The cold....
The hand at her ankle, her socks, playing with her toes....
Yellow, bright eyes and an azure nose....
Cold....
The moon, emanating grey and depressing light. A stain on it's surface like blue blood....
The older face again. Wrinkled, elongated. Xavier's friend, the one who had used to visit the mansion so frequently. The girl felt a brief spurt of happiness, pride in identifying something more local than the sky.
A bizarre complacency suffused her nerves like a rich paste, making it difficult to wonder or worry about where she was and how she came to be there. Sounds came next, slower and less interesting to the girl, usually garbled because she was rarely inclined or capable of focusing. . But sometimes the noises accompanied a face floating in her vision, and the motion of lips helped shape them into recognizable patterns, though the phrases themselves remained meaningless.
"--used perhaps a little less--" Eyes slanting from her to something or one she couldn't see; a touch of ire in--what was his name? What?--their rheumy orbs that made this fragment of statement more accusation than suggestion.
"Three guards, I told you--"
"--should be making it's circuit past--"
"Toad, put that down----a job to do---all shot to hell because you were playing with yourself," This heard without the benefit of lip reading. But a throaty female voice, honey dried into sticky crystals, and her heel striking the ground distinguished the words.
Something wet was dropped on her face in splashing handfuls. It ran into her fluttering eyes, her nose, her mouth. More liquefied sock than water, a taste gleaned perhaps from the palm that cupped it, perhaps a flavor indigenous to the fluid itself. She was faintly aware of her body, particularly her throat reacting--gasping and spluttering--but was more concerned with the sudden clarity. Cutting through her, waking her to things she wasn't sure she wanted to be aware of.
The girl turned her head. Reality was dizzying. Dark tile beneath her, booted feet--one pair of which ended at calves the moonlight lent a sick, mossy tint to; these sprang to some edge she couldn't see, and away--a flash of movement and a swish that implied distances further than human ability.
Dark, indistinguishable shapes, a cramped space that rocked back and forth--less like a cradle than a branch about to snap.
The elderly man again, crouching over her. Asking if she was okay, how she was feeling, but though the girl tried to remember how to answer, he continued speaking without pause. Things she couldn't understand: "pivotal moment in history" and "unduly harmed" and "most important moment in your life". But though he was looking in the girl's eyes, it was somehow not her he--what was his name?--he addressed, but himself.
She blinked, shivered, wondered where Logan was. He'd been sitting on the bed, looking sad....No, in his pickup, driving them to the city for lunch....Wait, that was wrong....He was in a car, Xavier's, about to leave for...for....No.....
The old man--Lensherr!--was still talking, but she knew suddenly and completely that his words were not something she wanted to comprehend. She craned her head away--a boat? Were they on a boat?--and found a mountain, a monster of a man. Though she appeared to be laying down, she couldn't imagine he would be any less enormous from a stand's perspective. Perhaps he'd just sat down,though the girl had not felt or heard him move. Long, greasy locks hanging around his head, a mane of indeterminate color from dirt and darkness. His features a visible if not clear profile, lumpy and distorted, a caricature of a beast that faintly resembled man.
And the odor that had previously been ignored or blocked from her mind swarmed every possible airway now, like frenzied ants into their hill. Spoiled yeast, and sour meat, potent enough to coat her throat like water about to fill her lungs. He'd been staring off in brutal contemplation but turned as she gaped and placed the weight of his eyes--dull, sneering, a yellow cast to that not covered in hair--on her's. He smiled, or snarled.
"The other is ready to be loaded."
The girl's head followed the sound, if only in a cringe away from the feral man's purposeful teeth. Her gaze found a creature that studied her with detached revulsion--some cross between female and feline. Naked, lithe even when still and (aside from that bob of slicked back and immobile) utterly, unfathomably blue.
Something clicked into place in the girl's mind like a drawer sliding shut. She rolled onto to her side, and quietly puked.
::::::::::::::
The small pool of sick was not cleaned up, though it was complained about in vulgar tones--chiefly those of Lensherr, from whom swearwords sounded very unnatural. She lay beside it for several minutes (the smell rather dim compared to that of the one sitting beside her) before she felt herself being grabbed. Swept up unceremoniously, as if she were a box whose contents were neither fragile nor valued.
Arms too strong to be gentle, even if they were remotely inclined to be. She was jostled up beneath a face of nightmares, of fevers, of screams. Pointed teeth behind stains or mold. Up close his skin was papery, old though not wrinkled. He viewed her with amusement, with hunger, with vicious promises she was not unfamiliar with.
She cringed, but felt, besides fear and nausea, an odd sensation she did not have time to recognize as anger. The girl struggled as fiercely as she was capable, which wasn't much and had even less effect, but stopped soon after. He was moving, taking a step and bending his legs and then jumping. She saw several feet of dark, green water churning beneath them, the side of another boat--yes, these were boats. It's edge was considerably taller than the first, and he was surely too ungraceful heavy to do anything but plummet. The air she'd just expelled retreated quickly into her lungs as if it could take shelter there. She shut her eyes, braced herself....But there was a thump instead of a splash, the pain of her body being jarred against his forearms, not the slap of water.
Where he'd landed, a crater of splinters was made in the wood. She could see a little better here, though it came only from a flashlight that was quickly turned off, from the reflective white paint (on which in several places were inscribed the words "National Coast Guard"), from her adjusting eyes. Crates, items covered in cheap tarp, were being shifted from the other boat and she must have lost an integral part of her sanity, because they seemed to be floating on their own.
The monster carried her into the cabin, a small shed for office space and the steering wheel and various radar equipment. Her heart lurched, and a place in her mind that had always been prepared to shut down in an emergency did so at the site of the cot in the corner of the room.
He did not whisper, but she heard him as if from a great distance. "You're going to scream for me."
She reacted with violent resistance, but he merely laughed--if the sound could be called such. He tossed her to the floor with ease and amusement. She could not control the fall, struck the marble with a solid crack to her elbow and head--the latter of which elicited a ringing like a church bell, peeling without hope for a reprieve. She hardly noticed when the feral man left, still chuckling with his own private joke, too distracted by by pain and by the sight of the body, a few feet away. An army cap that that fall off a head dark hair, still thick in middle age. A neck twisted in a way one never should be. The life vest, on which she could make out the letters "NATI" and "GA".
The girl closed her eyes, and wished for Logan.
::::::::::::::
When she came to again--from an unwilling doze she hadn't even been aware of falling into--the girl was a little less drugged, a little more aware of the danger she was in, that tonight would be another one of those monuments in her life (however short that might be) that would separate all time into Before and After.
An hour, or perhaps only a few minutes, or perhaps only a prolonged blink--had passed. Like the space between shifting dreams to the sleeper, it could have been any length or none at all.
Lensherr was standing beside the cabins little window. Through it they both could see the famous statue, adorned in twinkling lights and over a hundred years of supposed liberty. "Magnificent, isn't she?"
There came that feeling again, peculiar only because it stirred so infrequently in her blood. Fury. Hate. She pulled herself into a sitting position, staring at his back and imagining ripping his spine from it.
She asked if he was going to kill her, and Lensherr turned.
"Yes," he said, with deep and slow satisfaction.
:::::::::::::::::
Atop the torch, wind and those blades of metal whipping around her in unnamed colors that lived at the far end of the spectrum.
When the pain obliterated every other thought, the girl found herself thinking, musing, that when this was over she would go up to Logan's room. He was waiting for her, and she would be safe there.
:::::::::::::::
He heard her heartbeat sputter and fail even as he landed on the uncertain platform--three feet in diameter, any misstep guaranteed a fall over the edge, to an ocean so far below it was merely a faint grey tint, lost in distance. But his healing factor, his heavy metal skeleton, and most importantly the horrible silence that followed the last of her heart's pulses made the height a thing that barely registered.
He broke the monstrous shackles that made the girl the filament, the power source to Lensherr's machine, gathered into his arms.
She smelled of fear, of vomit, of pain, of peaches and vanilla and ocean and of things dying and dead and his. Her lids were closed, her lips slack; he'd seen her sleeping and less peaceful. Soft, unresisting against him in any way. And something inside of Logan roared until he thought his eardrums would shatter.
The hand he pressed to her cheek was pointless, because her skin did not react against his, did it? It became a caress. He pulled up the corner of her lip, a parody of a smile, stroked her neck. Already she was stiffening. The soft and smooth skin against his palm, which he exchanged for his lips. He kissed her cheek, her eyelids, breathed, "Marie," into her ear like a secret, like a password. What he wanted now, to hear her organs shift and gurgle and pump, to feel her move, breath, made all other pain that had ever touched his body or his mind nothing, as if they were erased from his body's memory to fit this new colossal agony. All previous desires were gifts, now offered to replace the rejection of this one.
And the pull of her mutation, when it began, was less than worthy of mention compared to the absence of her pulse.
.
The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000
Author's Chapter Notes:
Ahoy there!
I offer my sincerest apologies for the long wait you guys have had for this chapter, for which I can only blame....Myself? What?! Are you kidding me?!! Preposterous. No, put down the brick. I can only blame:
1. Sahara, for introducing me to the side-splitting wonders of Hyperbole and a Half (Google it, and never get anything accomplished again), which had me A).obsessed and unable to pull away until I'd read all the posts. B). Wishing I were as funny as the the author. C). Realizing I'll never be as funny or creative as the author. D). plummeting down a spiral of misery and self-disillusionment.
2. Moviemom, for...well, she knows what she did. Throw things at her. (That squeal-worthy review you left only took my mind of it for a moment. It's gonna take a lot more. You hear me? A LOT.)
3. Cauliflower (*see number two*)
4. Don't throw things at cauliflower. It's senseless. And after spending all your anger and Number 1 and 2, put down the bricks, promise not to hurt them anymore, and give them a hug, because they are so incredible even unicorns doubt their existence.
5. Have forgotten the purpose of these numbers.
6. Oh. Right.
7. The sheer length of this chapter--sixty three (untyped) pages!!
8. A certain scene that dug in it's stubborn, writers-block heels into the ground and screamed, "I won't be written! I won't! I won't!"
9. Work/imminent cancellation of both foodstamps and healthcare, despite an illness that requires four pills a day and the need for...well, food.
10. Lastly, but most importantly, Preying Mantises. The time it took to write this chapter can almost completely be blamed on those godless insects.
That being said, and because I'm really getting into this list thing, this chapter is dedicated to:
1. Newly downloaded songs
2. Magic rings.
3. Amazing nursing home residents.
4. Ripe mangos.
5. Rambling.
6. Yogurt pretzels
7. People who read authors notes--bless your hearts.
That being said, I hope you will enjoy the following and please, please review. The structural integrity of my heart depends on it. A small, smutty epilogue awaits following this that should tie up a few tiny loose ends (NOTE: was not, in any way referring to Logan as "tiny")....In all honesty, thank you for accompanying me throughout this long process. I hope it was worth it, that many better reading experiences await you, and that you will see fit to hit that review button. It is he greatest possible gift you could offer me.
I offer my sincerest apologies for the long wait you guys have had for this chapter, for which I can only blame....Myself? What?! Are you kidding me?!! Preposterous. No, put down the brick. I can only blame:
1. Sahara, for introducing me to the side-splitting wonders of Hyperbole and a Half (Google it, and never get anything accomplished again), which had me A).obsessed and unable to pull away until I'd read all the posts. B). Wishing I were as funny as the the author. C). Realizing I'll never be as funny or creative as the author. D). plummeting down a spiral of misery and self-disillusionment.
2. Moviemom, for...well, she knows what she did. Throw things at her. (That squeal-worthy review you left only took my mind of it for a moment. It's gonna take a lot more. You hear me? A LOT.)
3. Cauliflower (*see number two*)
4. Don't throw things at cauliflower. It's senseless. And after spending all your anger and Number 1 and 2, put down the bricks, promise not to hurt them anymore, and give them a hug, because they are so incredible even unicorns doubt their existence.
5. Have forgotten the purpose of these numbers.
6. Oh. Right.
7. The sheer length of this chapter--sixty three (untyped) pages!!
8. A certain scene that dug in it's stubborn, writers-block heels into the ground and screamed, "I won't be written! I won't! I won't!"
9. Work/imminent cancellation of both foodstamps and healthcare, despite an illness that requires four pills a day and the need for...well, food.
10. Lastly, but most importantly, Preying Mantises. The time it took to write this chapter can almost completely be blamed on those godless insects.
That being said, and because I'm really getting into this list thing, this chapter is dedicated to:
1. Newly downloaded songs
2. Magic rings.
3. Amazing nursing home residents.
4. Ripe mangos.
5. Rambling.
6. Yogurt pretzels
7. People who read authors notes--bless your hearts.
That being said, I hope you will enjoy the following and please, please review. The structural integrity of my heart depends on it. A small, smutty epilogue awaits following this that should tie up a few tiny loose ends (NOTE: was not, in any way referring to Logan as "tiny")....In all honesty, thank you for accompanying me throughout this long process. I hope it was worth it, that many better reading experiences await you, and that you will see fit to hit that review button. It is he greatest possible gift you could offer me.
Chapter End Notes:
I hope you were not disappointed!!!!! Am fairly desperate to hear your opinion on this conclusion to this six-month piece (and please, do not allow the fact that I stayed up writing til I was slap-happy and giggling at a blank television set and spent my one and only day off typing this up be in any way a factor in your critique....>stares....whistles