Part 2
Chapter 13: Then
2023 - Eight Years Later
--
Marie.
…
Marie.
…
Darlin’.
Wha? What, Logan?
Time to wake up now.
I don’t…want to.
Enough of this.
Enough of what?
This. You gotta get up now. You gotta face it.
I can’t.
You gotta job to do. That ice prick’s in the building. So is Erik. They’re not far off. They need you.
No one needs me.
Liar. Don’t start it with the self-pity.
I just want to stay here. With you.
How many times I gotta tell ya? It ain’t real, darlin’.
Real enough.
You deserve more.
You’re enough.
I can’t be with you baby, although you don’t know how goddamn much I wish I could. Every fucking day. But I can’t.
But…all this time… you’ve been there, kept me sane during, during… the worst of it. He hasn’t.
I know. But he probably thought you were dead. Or maybe he’s dead.
He can’t die.
Oh he’ll die one of these fucking days. He better hope he’s dead, at least, or he has some explaining to do.
Logan….I’m scared.
I know. But it’s time to wake up, baby. They need you.
They need you.
Wake up.
Marie.
Wake up!!
--
She was on the edges of a vivid dream, she thought, as the Blackbird regained its speed after the attack, the dark hazy world screaming around them. For a long time, she thought she was dead, or in some kind of purgatory, another star in the installation of one of Dante’s outer circles. She had existed this way for what felt like months, until, one black night, he had come back to her, the man inside her head, and they began to speak quietly in her own mind, shrouded in darkness. For years, like this, as she was medically brought in and out of comas, the experiments while she was conscious so intolerable at times that she could barely take it. But he had been there, keeping her alive, keeping her sane, refusing to let her slip into that uncharted current, that drifting oblivion.
And out there? What had been bad had only slipped into something unbearable. Bobby had died getting her out, and then everything was a whirlwind, the Blackbird, seeing Charles and Erik, the attack on the jet. A state of firm shock had a tight grip on her, but as the Blackbird descended to the temple below, an uneasy feeling of reality took hold. Before she got off the plane, she already knew.
As they walked through the solid doors of the temple, the light danced in the room, the colors odd and irregular, so very much unlike the dark they all knew. The people around her had witnessed the sort of shadow the world now harbored, but Marie’s dark had been the one you can only experience through closed, unconscious eyes. Each step made her quiver, as she turned the corner and there he was, in all the chaos, still alive, still a bright, steady pulse in a galaxy that threatened to be snuffed out. Always the vigilant Wolverine, the refusal to die, the refusal to give in, even though he had earned his right to a shred of peace decades and decades earlier.
His appearance was mildly shocking. Of course, he looked even more hardened, they all did. But she noticed the grey on his temples had bloomed, the lines on his face slightly more pronounced.
Fuck, he looks older, at least for him. Fucking war did a number on him, the Logan in her head murmured.
The Logan in front of her was asleep, somehow absent, lost in the past, but his brow was furrowed in concentration, or frustration. She noticed, too, he was strapped down to the table, his knuckles dried with blood, and that’s when her glance slid up to Kitty. The other woman was struggling to hold on, and Rogue realized immediately what had happened.
They want you to take over, he whispered. They need your power, one last time.
They’re using me.
So? He needs you. They need you. Take it from her, Marie.
Kitty crumpled to the floor when Rogue clasped her hand, the pull not taking near as much effort as it usually did, and Rogue realized that Kitty was likely dying, her weak spirit now filling Rogue’s consciousness. Then Marie was leaning down, reaching over, the power of what she could now do strong in her capable hands. So strange, to hold someone in place, to hold someone in the past. She cradled time itself between her two palms, with Logan’s mind nestled in between them. She could feel him there, and he was strong, so strong, and resilient. It was like holding a heavy weight while being suspended in mid-air. No support, no bracing or solid foundation underneath them.
As the night wore on, people began dying. Storm’s presence suddenly ripped away from them, then Bishop’s. Dutifully, Rogue held on, trying as hard as possible to keep him grounded in the past. And then, he started shouting in pain, convulsing on the table. His mind also bucked wildly, trying to free itself of the jump, of the torn reality he was experiencing. She held him there still. His claws ripped through his hands again, and then he was choking, suffocating somehow, and she still held him. She was silently crying when she heard the floor start to rumble, the room tightening, Logan still gasping for breath, his mind growing lighter, parts of him falling away. The sentinels were here, and still she held him. The last moments, their deaths, or their rebirths, she held on, until the life that they had known fell away and it was him and it was her in a black hole, a dead star, slowly compacting everything and everyone down into a flat, black sphere, a decaying universe. And still, through it all, she held him.
--
For eight years: the world burning. Bombs falling from the sky, shards of metal and glass glinting off the sun from the wing of the Blackbird. Women being injected with serums that would render them barren, because they carried a recessive X-gene. Storm’s face falling into grief as he held her close, both of them having barely escaped a children’s internment camp, with no one left to rescue. For eight years: day by day, life by life, until what little semblance of humanity they had left in them corroded, drying up into something bitter and wrong.
And then, the new plan. Kitty would hold him in the past, keep him there, and they would alter history. But then…something had changed. Someone else had kept him there, her ivory hands lingering just at his temples. She was on the brink, hovering just beyond the edge. It was her, he could have fucking sworn it. But what that meant…Logan stopped the thought in its tracks, and Charles opened his eyes slowly, staring at him in concern.
“Dear god,” the professor said quietly, staring back at Logan. “Your memories are as sharp and clear as they were all those years ago.”
Logan said nothing, feeling a small frown on his face form. He sat in a chair opposite of Charles’ desk of his office. What he couldn’t get over was how quiet everything seemed. A small clock ticked in the corner. The sound of light laughter outside the door. Fucking footsteps. All normal sounds that Logan couldn’t quite figure out. Since finding Charles in his office, he had been in here for hours, the new, bright world around him calling from the outside, a call he wasn’t sure yet he wanted to answer.
“Your thoughts of Rogue…” Charles murmured. Logan stiffened.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “I think someone found her, somehow. Something must have happened to Kitty. They made the switch. I don’t know why, but I remember feeling it.”
“It probably kept you in the past, which enabled us to finish what we began,” Charles said solemnly. They said nothing for a moment, letting the truth sit between them.
“You thought she had died,” Charles murmured. Again, Logan said nothing, arms crossed.
“Logan, if you’ll permit me, I believe understanding what happened will take several sessions, and, trust me in this regard, I want to be sure I have the whole story. But there is…much…to sift through. Also, as soon as possible, the faculty will need to know what has happened here today, what happened then.”
“Why?” was the first word out of Logan’s mouth.
“For one, you are an entirely different person than when you retired for the evening yesterday. People will notice soon, and begin to ask questions.”
“I don’t…feel any different. How the hell am I different?” he asked.
“You’re still you…. but now have impossibly different memories and experiences that have helped to shape your perspective.” Logan frowned, but still said nothing.
“And what happened with Jean and Scott…and then with Rogue-” Charles began, before Logan immediately cut him off.
“I’ve put them out of my mind for a long time, Charles. A long time. It was about survival,” he said plainly.
“And I trust you understand…that now everyone is different. That now, they are different people, especially those born after the time I found you when we first met in the early seventies.”
“Yeah, I got it,” Logan bristled.
“I can restore some of the previous memories of what you experienced after DC.”
“I’d rather not. Got enough memories for a couple of lifetimes, professor. And it doesn’t seem like I had a lot of fun after that anyway.”
“That is partially my fault, my friend” Charles said, a deep frown contorting his features, and Logan was reminded of the other Charles, the one before the jump. “By the time we went looking for you, someone had found you first.”
“Don’t sweat it Charles,” he muttered. “It’s in the past now. Apparently.”
“Some of the experiences were the same, but as I am reading your thoughts, for as many memories that have a similar shape, some are wildly variant from what they used to be.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve seen some shit,” Logan said caustically. Charles offered a small smile at this, and for a moment the other man’s lightness broke through Logan’s steadily souring mood, and Logan offered a small grin back.
“Indeed you have, my friend,” Charles murmured. “But it’s good to have you back.” Logan frowned for a moment, recalling memories he had left dormant for years in the time of war. To place himself back in the world of Westchester, in the world of the X-Men restored to everything they once were, was an odd feeling indeed. It was the first time in a long time he had permitted himself to think about them all, and then, as these thoughts persisted, another gnawing fear rose to the top.
“How’d I end up here, Charles?” he almost whispered.
“She wasn’t there with you, Logan,” he said solemnly.
“That’s not what I asked,” Logan countered, a bit bitterly.
“It’s the question you wanted answered, though,” Charles said, without pretense.
Logan exhaled, the frustration coming back to him, and he suddenly was filled with the urge to stand. He did so, and began pacing the room a little.
“Can you just…give me the rest of the day? Tell ‘em if you have to, whatever you think is best, but I think I’m gonna go for a ride, see some normal shit. Take in a bit of the scenery.”
“The concept of normal, my friend, is entirely relative,” Charles said, looking back up at him. “But that is a completely understandable request. If it’s alright with you, we’ll come back together tonight as a faculty, and tell the rest of them then.”
“Looking forward to it,” Logan grumbled.
“For now, Logan,” Charles added with a knowing glance and a small smile, “Go enjoy the world’s beauty. You’re the one that saved it.”
--
The garage was the same, in the same eerie way the whole fucking school was, and while most of it was becoming steadily more off-putting, when he happened upon the shiny, polished metal, the surface gleaming and winking at him in the light, he felt grateful that some things hadn’t changed. He smiled to himself, running his hand over the smooth surface. She was well cared for, this machine, a beautiful thing to behold. And then the beauty became power as the growl and rumble of the engine purred under him as he gripped the clutch, in the way only a classic, combustion engine could, and then the Davidson V-Rod was flying through the forested, winding roads of upstate New York.
Deafened by the roar of the engine in his ears, he drove for a long time, his path winding and without direction. He hadn’t seen the fucking sky this clear in years. It was a bright blue, all the color filled into the world again. The pollution, in the old place, had been unbearable at times, particularly for Logan’s senses. Through the crisp air of a good day, the wind flying around him, Logan steadily gained a greater sense of control, as he leaned into the curves, and took the edges hard, the powerful engine and his uneasy mind working as one.
The thing about a bike, Logan knew, was that it was a bike. That was all. Maybe the style or the body changed, but the mechanisms were all the same. It did the one thing. Nature was similar that way, too. No matter the pattern of the wood, the circles for each passing year infused into the timber, a pine tree’s sole purpose was simply to grow, reach toward the sky. To achieve this, it didn’t need to be filled in on the state of the world. It survived or it didn’t, letting the inevitability of its existence just be. Logan knew the animal inside him was the same. It was what it was. Entirely predictable in its movements, needs and wants. Always demanding the same, simple things, no matter what the rest of him was doing. Rest. Eat. Kill. Fuck. In all of his years alive, his instincts hadn’t changed.
But as for the rest of him? The part that Marie had so determinedly said was human? For the rest…
It had been a fucking trip seeing Jean. The last time he had been that close to her he had been ending her life. She had had an ethereal, eerie quality that seemed to haunt her, a solemnity that spoke to a past she no longer was a part of. Scott, too, had been a shock. Those people had been ghosts to him for a very long time, twenty years almost, and something about them didn’t quite seem real, even as they spoke and breathed and walked out of Charles’ office and down the hall this morning. But, as for Marie…
.
He had subtly been tracking her scent and the sounds she had made all morning before he had left, while in Charles office, sensing her move through this room and that. Her scent was different, somehow, still nectar and earth, but it was now inlaid with a hundred other things that hung like mysteries in the air. But there was nothing ghostly about her. She was real, warm and heart beating steady in her chest. He could sense her fears and anxieties as she moved through her day. He realized after some time listening to her that she was teaching classes and had also taken a break for coffee, and then the crisp sound of her taking a bite of a small apple for lunch. So very much like the Marie he had encountered that day in Mexico, the Marie he had known.
And the fucking platinum in her hair. How had that happened? Had it been him, up there on lady liberty’s torch, giving life back to her? Had he been there in that hole in the wall in Laughlin, feigning apathy as he let her climb into the passenger seat? Charles had laid that question to rest though, Logan reminded himself. She hadn’t been there. But what about the rest?
I love you. You hear me? I love you.
Logan closed his eyes. That was too fucking much. He had spent years replaying what he had thought had been her death in his mind, what had happened in that med bay, what he could have done differently so she hadn’t felt the need to selflessly offer up her own fucking beautiful life to save his sorry excuse for one. Over and over again, the way she had looked when she had happened upon the children, her strength throwing off the guards as she ran, the world burning in her eyes, the veins in his heart combusting for her as she gave it all up. She hadn’t let him have her that night in the barracks, so afraid that his taking of all of her body, effectively claiming her, would leave him all the more heartbroken. She had been wrong about that, though. Logan, despite the animal inside of him, was still a man. A human being. And it had been a fucking tragedy.
Logan slowed the bike for a moment, deciding to turn off the main road and kill the engine. He hopped off it, suddenly no longer comfortable with the loud noises it was making, and he felt a little manic as he stalked around the side of the empty backroad. He could feel himself panicking slightly and, for a moment, he closed his eyes, listening to what the world around him was saying. The tall pines, the moss on the ground, the scents and sounds harboring him, the wolverine finally drinking his fill.
She had held him in time. He fucking knew it. What had happened on that fucking table? Where had she been since? Why hadn’t she come back to him? Had she saved him? Had she watched the sentinels tear down the door, stared right into the faces of those fuckers? How many had suffered the pain of dying again, and again, to hold him there, in the past? Had she died? As the forest stood tall around him, quiet and still, Logan already knew he had come back from something, something close to the brink of death. He might have actually died in that fucking river. But now, he was alive. And what did that mean?
He thought of the school again. It was Xavier’s, but it also wasn’t. Coming down that hallway, down the stairs, the place bustling, full of students and laughter and life, he had felt relieved that it had worked, but it was also a funhouse mirror, where everything looked wrong, even if it felt the same. That wasn’t his Marie in there, clasping that prick’s hands in hers as the morning light littered the hallway. The Wolverine growled in disagreement, and he once again ignored the animal. It didn’t matter if she had been alive long enough to see him in the last few hours of a timeline that was now done with. Marie, his Marie, had still died that day at Two Rivers, choosing to stay while he could do nothing but leave. And his thoughts, his memories of her, were the only sort of quiet requiem she was likely to get.
--
Logan had made his way back to the school eventually, a steadily growing hunger in his gut, and he realized he hadn’t remembered the last time he had eaten anything. The dining room was quiet, and he got the sense that the students were about to start their last round of classes. He sniffed around the place for a bit, a little crestfallen to see most things were between meals and there wasn’t much available in terms of food, but the aroma that had called out to him in the first place was dutifully promised.
He sat near the window at a smaller table, quiet and still, and took his first sip of the hot, strong coffee. It was the first time he had something like this in at least three or four years. The aroma flooded him, the mark of the espresso beans bold and pungent in his nose, and he settled into the mug for a bit, the steam rising up to greet him. Of the few kids that were idly moving about, no one seemed to bother him. He wondered if they were avoiding him; God knows, to them, he probably looked like a dazed idiot today. But too have a moment without the tension, the constant looming threat of attack, was miraculous. And he planned to relish it.
Just then though, over his steaming mug of coffee, distracted in his contentment, he had missed the warning signs of her approach, and he found himself staring right into her chocolate eyes. She was standing next to the table, holding books in her hands, her streaming long hair falling softly over her shoulders. She wasn’t a girl, hadn’t been for a long time. She was older than when he had even seen her last, then he had ever seen her really, by several years. She had to be approaching her late thirties now, but she was still all long brown hair and doe eyes and a beautiful physique. As always, fucking gorgeous.
“Hey,” she said quietly, seeming concerned.
“Hey yourself,” he said before he could stop the words, and winced at his token response. She didn’t seem to notice though, taking the seat opposite of him. They sat there like that for a while, Logan peering at her beyond his coffee mug he kept close to his chest. She still hadn’t shaken that mild look of concern, and maybe, now that he was really looking at her, also vague annoyance.
“So, spill,” she finally said. Logan said nothing in response.
“What’s got you acting so strange? And where have you been for the past five hours? Scott and I had to cover your classes,” she said, moving her hand up to tuck a strand of platinum hair behind her ear, the soft pads of her fingers running through the silken locks. Fuck. This was going to be harder than he thought.
“Havin’ an off day,” he murmured through gritted teeth as his grip on the mug tightened.
“That’s not a very good excuse,” she grumbled.
“Yeah, well, I’m not in the mood for giving excuses right now.”
“What’s the matter with you? It’s like…you flipped off a light switch or something,” she was saying as she shifted her body uncomfortably in the chair.
“You so uncomfortable in the dark?” he asked bluntly. She looked at him strangely, while he was helpless to offer her a too-knowing glance in return, and she stiffened a bit. He knew he was confusing the hell out of her, but he didn’t feel like trying to explain. She’d know soon enough anyway, at least part of it.
“No. It’s just…today you’re so…”
“So what?”
“Grumpy,” she said, with a small frown. “Brooding.”
“Baby, you have no fucking idea,” he muttered before he could stop himself. Her eyebrows shot up at this remark, as she stared at him alarmingly.
“What?” he grumbled, suddenly all the more frustrated.
“Baby?” she asked.
Ah, fuck. Old habits did die hard. Unenthused with how uncomfortably she reacted to the nickname, he only offered her a moody shrug of the shoulders in response.
“I’ve gotta go,” she said, sighing and suddenly gathering up the books she had set down on the table again, the note of annoyance still in her voice.
“Where?” he asked. Again, she shot him a look like he had finally fucking lost it. She gestured to the books she was holding in her hands.
“Literature won’t teach itself,” she offered.
“Literature?”
“Yeah. It’s Tolstoy today. We’re working our way through the Russians, remember?” she asked, before shaking her head a little bit. “But you knew that...or did you forget about our deal?”
“Deal?” he asked. She offered an eye roll in response.
“You’re always trying to back out of these things. You promised to read War and Peace, if I paid you in pecan pie. You know. The kind you like. My mother’s recipe?”
He looked up at her then, the world blurring at a concept so fucking sweet he could barely breathe. Marie, making pies for him? Marie, alive and well and reading weighty books? Marie, standing in front of him, teasing him gently? The shock of it all, of today, he realized, was very quickly wearing off. She was so like herself sometimes it was terrifying.
“You still swim?” he murmured, before he knew better to shut up.
“What?” she asked, glancing down at her watch idly.
“You swim, at the pool here?” He didn’t know what had made him ask the question, but now he was dying for the answer.
“No. I mean, once in a rare while, but you know I’m not much of a swimmer,” she said, now seeming to quietly accept his strange mood. He kept staring at her, and he felt her grow uneasy. She gestured to the hallway.
“Literature calls,” she said.
“So we’re all a bunch of academics now?” he grumbled, realizing, like a damn addict, he didn’t want her to leave. She frowned a little, then offered a slight shrug of her shoulders.
“We work at a school. We teach. These kids have got to learn something. Speaking of, are you doing your last history class tonight or you just going to be lazy and have Scott teach it? Because his knowledge of the Byzantine Empire is shit.”
Logan couldn’t help but smirk at her sass, and he realized it was the first time he had done so since the conversation got started.
“Thinking of switchin’ disciplines,” he finally muttered.
“To what?” she asked.
“These kids could use some sparrin’ lessons,” he said.
“What are you talking about? We don’t let the kids spar.”
“We used to,” he said blankly. Again, her furrowed brow, the questions apparent on her face.
“No, we didn’t,” she said resolutely, before sighing, patting the books in her arms once more before heading for the hallway. “Get some rest, Logan,” she shouted after to him. “It looks like you need it.”
--
Logan sat through the first part of the meeting, mostly reticent. They were congregated in Charles’ office, Logan, Rogue, Storm, Scott, Jean, Charles, Peter, Kitty, Bobby. All the X-Men restored to their fucking glory. Logan had taken his usual place during meetings from so long ago leaning on the wall nearest the door so he could bolt if he needed to. He stared at their faces one by one, minimally disturbed at all these people alive and well all in the same room. Rogue stood over by Bobby, but they weren’t making any sort of physical contact, likely because her gloves were off for some reason. That asshole has always been afraid of her, he thought, and then he fought back the foreign, bitter feeling of jealousy, shaking his head a bit as he did so.
Most of the meeting was tedious and a bit dull. There was talk of curriculum planning, of attrition rates. The population at the school had been in a steady decline, and no one seemed to have a very good clue as to why. They also appeared to have conflicting solutions, Storm arguing the need for a better advertising campaign, and Logan chuckled at this from his spot toward the back.
“Something funny, wiseass?” Scott asked turning to look at him.
“Since when did we advertise? It’s not like these kids pay tuition,” he offered back.
“It’s about letting them know we’re out there, Logan,” Storm said solemnly. He looked to her, and instantly it was her face from the time before, tears in her eyes, as he turned to embrace her in her grief for the world that was constantly burning. A shiver went down Logan’s spine. He felt the need to clear his throat.
“Fair point, Storm,” he finally murmured, dropping it.
After a while the subject tapered off, and, lastly, Charles settled his gaze on Logan, and Logan nodded curtly back offering his approval to get started.
“Friends, the last thing I have to share with you is… significant. And it involves Logan,” he said. He saw Rogue instantly look up to him, and for a moment he locked eyes with hers, hazel and brown meeting, as Charles continued on. “Cyclops, Storm, Jean, you grew up knowing Mystique, were taught about her…heroism in school. Trask Industries was effectively dissembled after Erik’s blunder in DC.” They seemed to all nod at that, like it was a well-known fact, straight out of one of Logan’s student’s history books. Again, Logan felt the unease growing. For him, that had been…what? Yesterday? Maybe the day before? Shit. Marie had been right. He needed some fucking sleep.
Charles went on, and Logan only half-listened. For the most part, he let Charles speak, offering up a nod here and there for agreement, trying to maintain his noncommittal exterior. After only a few minutes in, though, most of the people in the room were actively staring at him with increasing alarm and concern, and he felt himself becoming uneasy under their gaze. He hated this kind of attention.
“So, you’re saying…he’s not…who he was?” Scott was asking.
“That’s correct, Scott,” Charles said.
“And we were also so close to something… impossibly terrible,” Storm murmured. Logan’s attention peaked at this comment, a new wave of cynicism overtaking him at Storm’s choice of words.
“You were in something terrible, Storm. You and me and Charles, for most of it. And, for a while, Rogue,” Logan murmured, and he could see her look up to him again, her eyes darkening as she stared at him. He stared right back at her blankly, too tired to offer the decency of anything verging on reassuring or comforting.
“And Jean and I?” Scott asked.
“Dead long before things got started,” Logan grumbled.
“Shit,” Scott said, and Logan couldn’t help but tiredly grin a little at Scott’s humor.
“And I know, to you all, it sounds impossible to believe, a legend or fairytale at best, but I have recently begun witnessing the memories from Logan’s mind, and let me assure you, what happened was very, very real. We live in a time of peace, now, where humans ultimately champion us, because of his efforts.”
“Yours too, Charles,” Logan murmured, reminding the man for whom this had all happened fifty years previously.
“Thank you, my old friend,” Charles offered in return. The others all stared at the two for a moment, Logan’s and Charles relationship suddenly appearing far more mature and evolved than it probably had been the day before. There was some silence, before another question hit the air.
“But, professor, what I don’t understand is…. if it had already happened to you, why wait to tell us?” Everyone turned around at that comment, and Logan realized that it had been Rogue to ask the question.
“I only knew part of the story, Rogue. And it didn’t seem…ethical…to deny the former version of Logan the decency of living his life. If you were all waiting for another one to appear, wouldn’t you have treated him differently?”
As they all tried to wrap their minds around this fact, Logan shot another look at Rogue.
He could tell she was becoming visibly upset. Oddly enough, she seemed to be the only one. For most of them it wasn’t a world they had ever experienced or known, and they had listened like children at a nightly bed time story. It was real, Charles had urged them, but even hearing it out loud Logan knew it felt fictitious. A tall tale. A story that might have not happened, actually now, Logan reminded himself, never had happened. But Rogue seem disturbed deeply by the news. He had no fucking clue as to why, although her inner rage and passionate urge for justice reminded him momentarily of the Marie he had known back in Africa.
As the meeting finally adjourned, everyone but Charles filed out silently. Scott clasped a hand on Logan’s shoulder, and Storm had offered Logan a brief hug, which he found himself appreciating. He was accustomed to the smell of her especially, fighting alongside of her for so long, and it felt good, familiar, to have it in his near vicinity again. He sighed then, determined on getting a head start out the door before the rest of them could. He was growing steadily more resolved on some getting some rest and hoping to hell his former self had squirreled away some whiskey somewhere, because it had been a while since he had had that, too, when he heard her footsteps quickening in the hallway, brushing past Bobby and all the rest, intent on catching up to him. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Logan, wait!” Rogue said, before she caught up to him, grabbing his wrist with her bare hand, and a shock of surprise flying through him. As he stared down at it, unbelieving, before he looked up at her cuttingly. It was almost as if she had burned him, but of course, that wasn’t right, because her skin wasn’t working. As her eyes widened in response to his reaction, she let her hand drop helplessly.
“You can control it?” he asked cautiously, before he could help himself. He saw her blush, the rosy color working her way up her pale cheeks, and he winced at what the sight of it did to him. The others walked down the hallway awkwardly around them, Bobby waiting for her frustratingly for a moment, before stalking off down the hall alone.
“How?” she finally asked. Logan breathed out, too exhausted and drained to offer up any sort of meaningful response.
“Be more specific, Rogue,” he said a bit moodily.
“How did you know that I used to not be able to… control it?” she whispered barely enough for even Logan to hear her. “No one knows that but Charles.” Logan felt his eyebrow raise characteristically to that response. Well, that was fucking different.
“Did you not hear Charles just tell you the story, kid? A lot of things ain’t the same,” he said. He felt her stiffen at this, folding her arms around her uncomfortably, the nickname making her look all of a mere seventeen again. As she seemed to realize the unease his quip had made her feel, a new swell of anger blossomed on her face.
“You think you know me so well?” she murmured, a fire in her eyes.
“Baby, I helped write the fucking book on you,” he said simply, before walking off without another word.
--
It was the sword placed from on his mantel that Yashida had given him. It was the books on the shelves, stuffed with titles he didn’t recognize and wouldn’t likely care to read. It was the dog tags, the fucking dog tags, that he had thrown to Stryker’s feet a lifetime ago, suddenly reappearing, hanging idly off the closet door knob. He stared at them angrily for a moment when he had first noticed that, not daring to touch them.
It was the odd inconsistencies like these that sent his head spinning. All similar things just slightly out of place, some things he wouldn’t have picked for himself and others he would have. It was like another man had been in here with his things, living his life for a while. And, hell, had been so bloody long since he had owned anything, and now, it was all wrong. Who the fuck was this guy? Suddenly, Logan was reminded of being fresh out of Alkali, missing everything all over again, a blank slate. And, on that thought… he unsheathed his claws, double checking that they were still there, staring at the glinting metal, wholly unfazed. Well, some things had gone the same fucking way, at least. He retracted them instantly, intent on rummaging through the couple of cabinets in the place until he found what he was looking for. Finally, in a drawer in his desk, a small bottle of whiskey, half-empty, and a few fresh cigars. That’s more like it, you stupid fucker, he thought to whatever Logan had been mulling around this room last night. He didn’t even bother to wipe the left-over blood from his hands as he knocked some of the liquid back, and it burned harsh and good in his throat. He stood like that, for a while, breathing in the night air.
It was really messed up to think so, but Logan realized he felt homesick. Fucking homesick for a world so broken and ugly it was practically perverse of him to miss it. But, there it was, the truth hanging heavy in his mind. It had been a broken world, but it had been his world. That had been the world he had met Marie in, the world where they had shared those few fucking short weeks together in Mexico and Africa and Canada, the one he had fought so damn hard to save, the only world that had mattered. And now, it was gone.
But you did it, sugar. You saved them all.
Just like that, her voice, as clear as day in his head. Logan whipped around wildly, turning and finding nothing. The Rogue he had met today was still downstairs he guessed, from how far away her scent was. This, this was something entirely different.
“Marie?” he said aloud, to nothing but an empty room. There was no response, just his head spinning from the booze, his breath coming in hard, his senses heightened. A few moments passed like this, before he sighed, running a hand through his hair. He had to be insane, and sleep deprived. But Logan knew he would always likely be poised, always ready for the next fight to be his last.
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Chapter End Notes:
Sorry this took me a long-ass time to get to you. I didn’t do any writing for a few days, a little bit because the last one took it out of me emotionally for some time, but mainly because I had to think about everything for a long while, working through the various events in DOFP, trying to understand and consider how Logan would have responded to seeing Marie, particularly given the eight year gap in the chapters. Needless to say, this one didn’t come easy. But I hope you enjoyed it! Thanks for all the love and support so far.