Logan’s blood was liquid fire, he was being burned alive from the inside. He flailed his limbs, claws scritching uselessly against the glass of the tank. Thick fluid flooded his lungs as he tried to draw breath to scream. Suddenly, the restraints were released. He surfaced with a roar, the viscous fluid blurring his vision. He saw a shape looming in front of him, and dug his claws in with predatory satisfaction, feeling them part flesh and bone until the knuckles of his hand were pressed up against a heaving chest. He blinked his eyes and his vision cleared. With shock, he realized it was Marie in front of him, his claws piercing her chest, her eyes staring at him in stunned anguish. He shook his head in denial, but it was too late. As he watched, her eyes dimmed, her body slumped backwards, sliding off his claws to the ground. He stared into her vacant dead eyes in disbelief. “Logan,” her dead mouth said. “Logan!”
__________
“Logan!”
Logan came awake with a roar. Claws out, heart pounding, chest heaving, he peered into the darkness. “Marie?”
She was standing a good distance away, waiting for him to become fully aware. “Here,” she said.
“Christ.” He could still feel his blood thrumming through his veins at double speed, a cold sweat prickling all over his body. “I’m okay,” he said, sheathing the claws and turning on the bedside lamp. “Sorry I woke you.”
She seemed to be making her mind up about something. Finally, she took his shirt from where it was hanging on the back of a chair. “Put this on,” she said.
“We goin’ somewhere?” He pulled the shirt on anyway.
“Scoot over.”
“Marie...”
Her eyes were serious. “It helps. You showed me that. Now scoot over.”
He swallowed any further protests. It was a big deal for her to choose to be close to someone, he realized. She rarely initiated any kind of touch. He moved over.
He finished buttoning up the shirt and lay back, and after a moment of hesitation Marie turned off the lamp and nestled close against his side, ultimately settling with her head on his chest and her arm wrapped around him.
He held her close and found to his surprise that it did help. Feeling her warm and alive in his arms, breathing her soothing scent, hearing the gentle thump of her heart against his side -- he slowly felt himself relaxing as the last of the nightmare’s effects dispersed.
“Is it the same one every time?”
“Yeah.”
They lay in silence for awhile.
“Do you want to tell me?”
He thought about it. Everyone at the mansion knew he had nightmares, but he had never really talked about them with anyone. Feeling the soft, trusting weight of Marie against his body, he suddenly did want to tell her. Maybe it would help her. Maybe it would help him.
“I’ve had the healing for a long time, I think, and the claws, but they were made out of bone. Now there’s metal in me...not just on the claws, but all over. All my bones are lined with metal, making me damn near indestructible. I used to not remember anything before I had that, but I’ve been finding out more about what happened to me. The government did that to me. I let them do that to me.”
“And that’s what you dream about? When they did that to you?”
He nodded, knowing she could feel the movement against her hair. He felt the hitch in her breathing as the realization hit her. She pulled back to look at him, her eyes glowing in the dim light. “You were awake? When they did that to you, you felt it?”
“Yeah.”
She put her head on his chest again, and squeezed him tightly. He smelled that hint of salt again. “Dammit, don’t cry, Marie,” he said thickly. She shook her head against his chest, although in denial or answer, he didn’t know.
He lay there for awhile longer, listening to the steady thump of her heart and the soft susurration of her breath, feeling the rise and fall of her chest nestled against his side.
“So it’s not just a nightmare, it’s a memory,” she finally said softly. “Like mine.”
“Yours are memories too?”
He felt her nod against his chest.
He smoothed his hand over her hair. “Wanna talk about it?”
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I’ve never told anyone what happened.”
“You don’t have to...”
“I want to. I’m just not sure how.”
He smoothed her hair again, waiting.
“I was sixteen when my mutation activated. I was kissing a neighbor boy. My first kiss, and I put him in a coma for three weeks.” He heard the hitch in her breathing, but she continued with only a slight tremor to her voice. “Things got pretty crazy at home. My mama thought it was God’s punishment on me, for being...well, she called me a lot of things. ‘Whore’ was her favorite. My daddy just kind of disappeared. I only lasted a few weeks before I ran.”
He gave her a reassuring squeeze. “I hitched as far as Atlanta, and then just kind of lived on the streets for awhile. I was staying in a youth shelter when I met another mutant. His name was Bobby. He could make things cold -- create frost or snow, even turn his body into ice.”
Something nudged at the back of Logan’s mind. Bobby...hadn’t he heard something about a kid named Bobby? Something about ice? Before he could pin it down, though, Marie continued.
“He told me he knew about this guy who would help mutants like us. He was going to meet up with him, and he asked me to come with him. So we both went to find Erik Lehnsherr.”
Logan’s breath caught in his chest. She sensed it, and looked up at him. “You’ve heard of him?”
Logan was thinking furiously, acutely aware that the wrong word could expose everything. “I think so...he’s the guy who started the Brotherhood, right? The one who does stuff with magnetic fields?” In fact, Logan knew every detail of Erik Lehnsherr’s life, he had studied his file exhaustively in planning missions against the Brotherhood. The only thing he didn’t know was his scent -- Xavier had been obsessive in ensuring that Logan was never on the team for missions where Magneto might be present, knowing his metal skeleton would make him an instant liability.
“The Brotherhood,” Marie repeated bitterly. “Back then it was nothing so organized, just Lehnsherr and a couple of his thugs.”
“Is he the one you told me about? The one who hurt you?”
She nodded. “He wanted to use my mutation. Give me his power, and then use me up. He had found out about me, and tracked me to Atlanta. And then he sent Bobby, to meet me by ‘accident’ and bring me to him. He told Bobby I would be ‘useful to the cause,’ but he didn’t tell him what he really intended.”
Fuck. This was sounding all too familiar for Logan’s comfort. “Sonuvabitch,” he said out loud.
“I was just so stupid. Bobby was the first other mutant I had met, and he was so nice to me. I never thought...it just never occurred to me to be suspicious. And then we got to Lehnsherr, and instead of some mutant hero, he was just...just an evil old man. He and his shapeshifter friend -- Mystique -- they didn’t even really look at me or talk to me, they just locked me away, like I was a piece of equipment or something. Like they could just put me in storage and pull me out when they needed me. When Bobby realized they were going to kill me, he tried to get help. He was going to contact some old teacher of his...”
Logan’s heart skipped a beat.
“...but they found out about it. And then Lehnsherr decided that Bobby would make a good...’test case,’ he called it. He wanted to see how long it took my mutation to kill Bobby, so he could know how much of his power he could give me and still be okay.”
“Jesus, Marie.”
“That was when I realized I could control it. They made me touch Bobby, and I just...I don’t know, pushed with my mind, and I was able to not absorb him.” He saw a bitter smile cross her face in the dim light. “We thought for a minute we would be okay. We were so stupid.” She took a deep breath. “Lehnsherr was furious when he realized I was resisting...he smacked me as hard as he could. And when he did, my mutation started.”
He could feel her tears falling now, wetting the flannel of his shirt. “That was all it took. Lehnsherr figured out that I couldn’t control it when I was in pain. He stripped me and Bobby down to our underwear.” She laughed bitterly. “At the time I think I was more embarrassed about that than I was scared. No one but my mama had ever seen me in my underwear. He strapped us together so that every inch of our skin was touching, and then he told us what he was going to do. He was going to hurt me until I absorbed the rest of Bobby. And then he did.”
He felt her breath coming in short sobs now, even though she still didn’t make a sound.
“Marie...baby, don’t cry. It wasn’t your fault. There’s nothing you could have done.”
She shook her head. “That’s the thing. There wasn’t anything I could have done. But Bobby...he could have.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bobby...he could have turned his skin to ice. My power doesn’t work unless it’s skin-to-skin contact. If he turned to ice I couldn’t hurt him, and we all knew it. I begged him to do it, but Lehnsherr told him...” Her words were choked out between sobs, now, and Logan squeezed her tight, trying to give her the strength to continue. “Lehnsherr said that no matter what, they would never unstrap us. If Bobby turned to ice they would let me freeze to death. If Bobby wanted to stay alive, he would have to kill me. And he wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t.”
She took a few more deep, shuddering breaths, gaining control now that the worst of it was out. “Even having him in my head afterwards, I still don’t know exactly why he didn’t do it. Part of it was that he felt guilty for bringing me to Lehnsherr. Part of it was that he just wanted to be a good guy. But I think the biggest part was that he just didn’t really understand until it was too late. He had never been out on the streets, like I had. He was just so sweet. To him it was...like a game of cops and robbers or something. I don’t think he really understood until it was too late that they were actually going to kill us. And then when he did realize it, right at the end -- he wanted to live, so badly, but even then he wouldn’t turn to ice. He just kept thinking about this boy he loved, John, and how he never told him and now he’d never see him again...”
She stopped, nuzzling her face into Logan’s chest as if that would wipe the memories away. John, Logan thought. Fuck...Pyro. He had heard something about a friend of Pyro’s running off to join the Brotherhood. Bobby...Iceman...it was years ago, before Logan had come to the mansion. Logan had always dismissed Pyro more or less as a self-absorbed brat, but for the first time Logan wondered if Pyro’s habitually insolent attitude was a facade.
“A lot of times I wish that Bobby had been the one to live. At least he had friends...a home to go to, people he loved. I don’t know that I’ve done enough with the life he gave me to justify what he did. To make his sacrifice worth it.”
“Don’t say that shit, Marie.” He rocked her against him. “Don’t say that. You got the harder part. It’s harder to be the one who lives.”
Her breathing was calming down now as he smoothed her hair, although her voice was still thick with tears when she spoke. “Anyway, that’s what I dream about. Sometimes I’m Bobby, wanting to turn to ice so badly, wanting to live so badly, but holding out for just one more second. Sometimes I’m myself, trying to make it stop even though the pain was so bad, feeling Bobby rush into my head no matter what I did. And then sometimes...sometimes I’m Lehnsherr, calmly looking me over to decide where to hurt me next, just watching us scream and struggle.”
“Sometimes you’re...is he in your head too?”
She nodded again. “Lehnsherr didn’t really understand my mutation. He thought he could just transfer his power to me, like...I don’t know, a vessel or something. Use me up like a battery and throw me away when he was done with me. He didn’t understand that along with the power, I also got the knowledge, and the memories. And that when I learned to push, to keep from absorbing Bobby, I also learned to pull, to make it go faster when Lehnsherr touched me.”
“That’s how you got out?”
“Yeah. I pulled him into me as fast as I could, and it knocked him out cold. He was so arrogant...everything in the place was metal, and he had given me the power and the knowledge to manipulate it. It was almost easy after that. I used the metal to bash Mystique and this other toad-looking guy who was there, and then I took a little of Mystique too.”
“Of the shifter? Why?”
“Hrrrmmmm....” She made an indistinct noise. He peered down at her. She looked almost...mischievous?
“Marie...” Logan said, his amusement clear in his voice. “Just what exactly did you do?” He had the feeling that Lehnsherr had underestimated Marie in more ways than just her mutation.
She seemed to be smothering a smile. “Well, Lehnsherr was a paranoid man. He had a lot of different accounts in a lot of different banks. And now I knew about them all...account numbers, passwords, everything. He didn’t trust anyone, so he kept all that information in his head...”
“You didn’t!”
She smiled. “Only the four closest banks. I didn’t want to press my luck. I just used Mystique’s power to look like Lehnsherr, and walked right out with the cash.”
He chuckled and gave her another squeeze. “That’s my girl.”
She snorted. “That’s not the usual response when someone confesses to felony, but I had a feeling you wouldn’t turn me in.”
“Turn you in? I think you deserve a medal.”
All the laughter faded from her eyes. “I don’t know...I don’t know what I deserve. Maybe what I got. The life I have now. Always looking over my shoulder, always being alone...”
“Hey,” he interrupted. “You’re not alone.”
“No?”
“No.” He kissed the top of her head. “Not anymore.”
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Here ya go! The chapter in which all your Bobby questions are answered. Next chapter will be smutalicious (I'll change the rating then too), and will answer your questions about what happens when Marie finds out. ;-) Thanks again for reviewing!
ETA: Oops, just realized I titled it wrong. "The Complication" is actually the next chapter. Doh!
ETA: Oops, just realized I titled it wrong. "The Complication" is actually the next chapter. Doh!