To Run in Circles
He watched Jean Grey put her hands around the woman’s throat. She wasn’t strangling her, although it would look that way to anyone newly entering the room and wasn’t entirely an act she might be opposed to. Blood fauceted out between Jean’s fingers, blood the shade of her own hair after a shower. It dyed the collar of the woman’s coat, white cloth drinking in the color as if thirsty for it. Gulping. A coat was like the one Jean wore in the X-lab, which must have felt surreal--exactly like; perhaps they favored the same stores. The woman’s shoes were similar as well to those Jean wore when she was being a Doctor and not an X-men. “No no no no,” Jean choked, applying more pressure. “Scott!”
Her husband was at her side in a moment, helping her lay the woman flat upon the floor. Frantic eyes darted there and here; lips opened and closed fish-like. No one bothered to shout at Logan for what he’d done--that’s how he knew how serious it was.
Funny that such a grasp should be grasped to save a life, Logan thought, watching Jean pinch down on the neck like arterial spray was a Jack she could keep In The Box. Funny that the woman should have looked at Logan like that, the moment he’d leaned around Rogue and towards her, nipping his claws across her pulse. A little defiant. A little grateful. As if he was sparing her from something worse. Perhaps he was.
Startled by his sudden presence behind her, the stomp of his boots on the wet tile, by his touch on her spine—Rogue had turned and glared up at him the same way. Fleeting, but there. He was sure of it. Then both women had flinched, curled inward, away from him. Only one of the two were bleeding and only one of them smelled afraid.
Now, they all watched Jean try to slow the process, stop it, although this went against everything he knew about these sorts of missions. Mercy hadn’t been part of the agenda for a long time. It was surreal. It didn’t make sense, and made even less when she looked over her shoulder at Rogue and snapped, “What are you doing just standing there? Do it. We need this. Do it!” Dark patches of anger bloomed on her sharp cheekbones. Logan stared at the doctor and wondered, suddenly, ‘How long have I known you?’
The redhead glanced at him and away, rattled off an order to Scott, who was practically kneeling on the last man Rogue had touched in his haste to be close, to be useful. He’d taken the gag out of the woman’s mouth, he was stroking her hair. Some instincts went too deep, but some orders seemed to go deeper “Come on, can’t you just do it?” he asked Rogue. Rogue, who had her fists balled against her stomach and her teeth embedded in her lower lip, looking back at Scott, at all of them, as if the only thing she wanted to do was run.
And keep running.
‘How long have I known you?’ Logan thought a bit harder at Jean. The answer, surprised and surprising, was years longer than he’d imagined, years longer than he’d ever expected to know a person (although, to be honest, he had never ‘known’ her in the way he’d teased Summers about). He’d known Jean through the Xmen’s Idealistic Years, when she’d been at her flirtiest and her marriage at, ironically, its strongest. When the world began crumbling Jean had hardened, turning colder and dreadfully polite. He’d known her before the transformation and after. He’d seen her lose at card games. He’d seen her put a latte to her lips and moan in a way that made every person in the room distinctly uncomfortable. He’d also seen her chug a black coffee like water. He’d seen her correcting papers at two am and hug Kitty after a third breakup with Bobby. He’d seen her run training sims when everyone else had quit for the day. He’d seen her fall asleep on her husband’s arm during a film and slap his face during a fight Logan wasn’t supposed to walk in on. He’d seen her on television, charming senators—earning respect as a scientist and a person but unafraid to use the wiles of a woman. He’d seen her talk a gunman into turning himself over to the officials and he’d seen her talk an official into putting a gun into his mouth. He’d seen her hold Ororo’s head in her lap and cry openly, unabashedly, breathlessly, like an infant.
Watching her now, Logan was baffled at the depths to which he didn’t understand what she was doing or why she was doing it. ‘Why are we doing any of this?’ a very, very faint voice asked inside him. One he hadn’t noticed in some time. Like a cold breath on the back of his neck, tickling the hairs, there and gone.
Jean refused to meet his gaze again. “Do it,” she told the girl, softer but commanding. Rogue straightened, shrugged as if it didn’t matter. As if nothing mattered.
“Wait a min-“
“Shut up, Logan.”
“Gimme another fuckin’ order, Summers—“
“Shut up.”
“It’s gotta be quick,” Rogue said. The first time she’d spoken. “You can’t be touchin’ her when I’m touchin’ her.” Jean nodded.
Logan started to reach for Rogue when she started to kneel. She shook him off. His understanding of the situation was piecemeal but disturbed; he was more than ready to drag the girl out of here. Scott was watching him pointedly, finger raised to a specific button on his visor. It was clear that would be the only warning the Wolverine would get.
The woman on the floor was struggling. One of her palms were slapping the tile floor in an arrhythmic pattern, the other holding tight but ever looser to Jean’s arm. She was still wearing surgical gloves, green ones. Her skin was paling and so were her eyes. But she was watching them, and Logan saw quivering fear turn into something harder, harsher as she did so. Incapable of arguing with them, but not incapable of protest, the woman began to pry determinedly at Jean’s hands.
“Diane,” Rouge said to her. The woman froze, looking as comically surprised as a person can while dying. She wore no badge, no lanyard, and no nametag. None of the once-people-now-bodies in the room did. How did she know?
“Diane?” The woman’s pupils were huge with alarm. Rogue’s voice was gentle and, though the woman might have cheerfully dissected them all given the chance, full of pity--a little for herself as well. “Diane, I know. But it’s quick. It really is quick. I’m sorry.” She reached out, and Jean let go. Hands up, leaning well away, as if the girl were a crackling stick of dynamite.
They’d over-estimated the woman’s strength of will. Logan might have told them that; he could smell it. As the trickle turned to gush, she began to flail. Her foot struck Rogue in the chest; she was knocked back on her tailbone. “Oof”, she said. (She actually said ‘oof’, he marveled, distantly. He thought that was only done in comics.) Jean and Scott rushed to subdue the woman, but by the time they had such measures were no longer necessary. Logan and Rogue hadn’t offered to help, for reasons of their own—the girl because they wouldn’t have wanted her hands in the tangle, the man because he didn’t give a shit.
For a while they all were still, a huddle, a tableau in the damp room. Incapable of moving (some more than others). And then Scott Summers, man of infinite control, did something that startled The Wolverine. “Damnit,” he snarled. Snarled, in a very un-Summers way. “Damnit, damnit, damnit!” He twisted and punched the bare tile floor, drummed it with his fist. “Damnit! Goddamnit!” Logan heard the first hairline fracture, and the second. He was almost impressed and almost worried.
“Scott.” Jean put her hand on his jumping shoulder, and it stopped. Just like that. The man stared at the floor for a few minutes, swallowing loudly. When her husband turned to look at her, it was Scott again. Back. Passive.
“He’s going to be mad,” he said to Jean. Simply, like, ‘lunch is ready’ or ‘you’ll need an umbrella today.’
“I know that.”
“What the fuck do you mean?”
Logan’s question was ignored and so was he. As if he were a stone in a stream, barely worth diverting the current. The only one who made eye contact was Diane, on the floor, and she couldn’t help it.
“Was he watching?”
“Yes,” Jean said.
“We need to go.”
“Yes.”
Awareness seemed to be returning to the couple, consideration stretching beyond their immediate, bloodied surroundings to include the sound of other team members performing their duties in the rest of the clinic. Young X-men they were responsible for. They noticed Rogue, struggling to get to her feet and made the appropriate concerned noises without touching her. Her arms were wrapped around herself; she didn’t seem willing to use them to get up. Logan listened to the teeth clacking in her skull. A part of him wanted to demand answers, another part wanted to step very, very, quietly to her side and place his nose against her hair. He wasn’t sure which urge belonged to Him and which to The Wolverine.
“Where are my gloves?” she asked helplessly, like a child. Summers found them for her, returned them pinched between two fingers. She pulled them on clumsily, drunkenly, stealing peeks at the bodies. She swallowed again and again; he heard the saliva go down her throat. She didn’t seem too conscious of what was going on around her--but backed away with remarkable dexterity when Logan moved towards her and sniffled a few things that made him think her stronger than she looked. A bundle of potty-mouthed contradictions.
“We need to go. Rogue? We need to go now,” Jean, who saw only the trembling, said. She was back to playing The Comforter, but it took a bit of urging before the girl would come along. When she did it was with Jell-O footsteps and eyes attached like magnets to the ground. His team members filed out of the room, no words to spare for Logan, filled with frustration and confusion and more of the former because of the latter.
It was as if the four had spent years in the room; the rest of the clinic appeared foreign to him, new. Even those carcasses he was responsible for; they provoked an odd stutter in his thoughts when he saw them. He looked at a handprint on the wall and wondered where the animal went—The Wolverine should still be writhing and raging in his chest, not sniffing the air for Rogue’s vital signs. All the way down the clinic hall, Scott discussed the evacuation with Jean. Calmly. He radioed John to begin burning the evidence in the far wing and Kitty to start up the jet. Calmly. Sent Jubilee to requisition certain items. Calmly. Logan was accustomed to a little bitching from Summers; the lack of it made him itch. The courtesy crawled under his skin. It happened without warning, as they reached the lobby, Jean shepherding the girl through the doors. Scott spun to face Logan and put his finger back on the visor button. Not angry—even a little apologetic. He breathed evenly, his jaw relaxed. Logan stopped in his tracks.
“Do we leave him?” he asked his wife without looking at her. Scott, a man he’d worked beside and taught beside and lived beside—who he had fought and taunted and respected for just as long as he had Jean. Logan popped his claws, but they were a mere reflex. The men were too far apart and he knew how fast Summer’s lasers were. How effective.
Jean paused in the entrance, put a hand over her mouth. For one heartbeat she seemed horrified, in the next a far-away expression came over her face. Logan knew who she was consulting. He could feel pressure on his mind, like faint tapping fingers, and it wasn’t difficult picturing The Professor far away in Cerebro.
“He says it’s,” she began.
“Don’t!” Rogue stumbled back through the doors, tottered towards them. Her face was bloodless, except for those threads in her eyes. She reached Scott and touched his elbow, and the man flinched before he recognized the two layers of leather separating their skin. “No. I got enough from the others. We didn’t really need her. I collected enough. I swear I did.” It was with some surprise that he realized she was pleading, and for him.
She looked at Jean, who looked at Scott, who looked at Logan, who looked at Rogue.
Doctor Grey swallowed. “Not worth the risk.” Her voice was small.
“Okay, then,” Scott said. He exhaled.
Logan shifted his weight, heard the cheap carpet crackle. He could also hear the footsteps of the junior team, the crackle of COMMS and boxes and the radiator and the copy machine and Rogue’s lungs. Conversations loud and soft. A gurgling stomach. The breath of everybody in the building and the splash of urine a particularly bold coyote left against the Blackbird’s wheel. The heart palpitating under Rogue’s ribcage. Scott’s grunt when she kicked the back of his leg and her scream when Jean—determined expression, little paranoia of skin contact now--wrapped a restraining arm about her waist. The scream didn’t last long. The girl was overtaken by a coughing fit, and when she next raised her head he saw a drop of blood slide out of her nose and down her upper lip. A painful sensation in Logan’s chest, like he might fall through the floor and keep falling, although this clinic only had one level. A sick, oily something in his gut.
“I’m not going to forget this,” he told Scott and the girl simultaneously. He didn’t growl it.
“You shouldn’t,” Scott said, shortly.
And then a violent quantity of red filled Logan’s vision, a greater amount of heat accompanying it.
For some time those were the only things he was aware of.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
I don't actually know how to introduce this. I mean, what kind of psycho updates something *four years later*? Even apologizing would have a distinctly jack-assy ring to it, and I'm not certain the readers who deserve the apology are even active on this website. For what it's worth, I am sorry--very sorry for leaving this story unfinished for so long. There was a time when writing these fics and reading reviews were the reason I jumped out of bed in the morning, and kept my eyes open after long days at school and work. It meant so much to me, so much it's embarrassing. Embarassing in a way I know you'll understand if you're here reading this because, c'mon, fanfiction? And then a not-nice situation got even not-nicer, and for a few months I was homeless. No joke. So for awhile other concerns took precedence. Life got much better very quickly, but the thread of this tale snapped--it wasn't writer's block; the story just picked itself up and left. I lost interest in fanfiction overnight.
But this morning I woke up and it was like "Oh, what the hell" had been painted across the backs of my eyelids in capital letters. It's the New Year, and I wanted to start things off right. I felt an irresistible pull, drawing me back in like a lasso around my writing hand. I thought, okay, I'll just take a look at it. Just a peek. I barely remember where I was going with it. If it's not completely awful, I'll play around with some ink. No promises, I lectured myself.
I wrote for eleven hours straight, stopping only to make coffee and yell at my chihuahua for peeing on the cabinet. I'm not sure if anyone will read it. I'm not sure if you'll like if you do read it. But if there is a You, and if you read this long-overdue update, I hope with all my heart that it is worth your time and generosity.
But this morning I woke up and it was like "Oh, what the hell" had been painted across the backs of my eyelids in capital letters. It's the New Year, and I wanted to start things off right. I felt an irresistible pull, drawing me back in like a lasso around my writing hand. I thought, okay, I'll just take a look at it. Just a peek. I barely remember where I was going with it. If it's not completely awful, I'll play around with some ink. No promises, I lectured myself.
I wrote for eleven hours straight, stopping only to make coffee and yell at my chihuahua for peeing on the cabinet. I'm not sure if anyone will read it. I'm not sure if you'll like if you do read it. But if there is a You, and if you read this long-overdue update, I hope with all my heart that it is worth your time and generosity.
Chapter End Notes:
Okay, lemme just say it--I love you. If you actually made it to this end note (and through the drama queen bog of the introduction), I totally love you. I'd physically hug you if I could. And bake you a pie. And buy you a kangaroo. And buy you a dog when PEETA took your kangaroo away because I'm not sure you're allowed to keep those. Anyway--if you made it this far, I would be so very grateful to hear your thoughts on this belated chapter.