The contraption coughed and spat, and before it could start sputtering bubbles at him, he opened the damn thing, the heat throwing clouds of steam and—was that fucking smoke?—into the kitchen. He snarled a bit, hitting the thing with his boot, cursing under his breath.
That’s where Laura found him; hurling profanities at the dishwasher and physically abusing the thing. He whipped around like he had been caught robbing a bank, as he frustratingly gestured to it.
“This thing is a piece of shit,” he growled, giving it one more light kick of his boot for good measure. Meanwhile, in the sink sat piles of plates, crusted bits of food stacked up high. It had been a few days since either of them had washed a dish, and it was becoming a fucking problem. Logan sighed, grabbing a hand towel off the counter and flicking on the faucet. Laura, meanwhile, was just about to sneak off back to her room, when he caught her.
“Uh uh, kid. This is your mess too.” She turned back around to look at him, before he handed her the dish towel. “I wash. You dry.”
A few minutes later, with one of the sink basins filled with warm soapy water, Logan was vigorously scrubbing a plate while Laura dried off a mug from the growing pile of wet, warm dishes sitting on the counter. He stifled a cough with the crook of his arm momentarily, before attacking the plate once more. If he was being honest, the hard work felt good, the warm water rushing over his often-sore hands welcoming. Another thing humans occasionally got wrong in their never-ending quest for convenience. Sometimes, it did a restless brain good to do it the old fashioned way.
“So,” he finally asked, glancing up to Laura. “You practice your Kata today like I told you to?”
She nodded a little bit, and he realized Laura was in one of her quiet moods. It had been a few days since the first day of school, and while she hadn’t been sent home again, he got the sense she was thoroughly miserable. The Kata, he thought, would help, running through the memorized physical movements, relying on your muscles to do something more than just get you from point A to point B. However, with quiet Laura who rarely shared her opinion, the jury was still out on if it was helping.
Logan, however, intent on getting her to talk, kept asking questions.
“So whatcha reading, lately?” he asked, as the dishes in the sink dwindled and her clean stack grew. It was obvious one of them was more intent on finishing the job than the other.
Logan knew what the answer was, at least partially. Nowadays, she was practically using Kay’s shop as a library of sorts. Sometimes he’d catch her quietly picking a dusty, neglected book for sale off the shelf, before sliding one that had been missing for a few days back in. If Kay had a problem with this, she never voiced it, and Logan noticed, upon seeing Laura with a different, familiar title every few days, Kay would smile a bit knowingly. He knew Laura’s English was growing in leaps and bounds because of it, but, it was doing little in the way of helping her make friends.
She smiled a bit, the first time he had seen her do so in a couple of days, hopping off where she was sitting on the counter, and pulled out the book from her pack. Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
“That’s about…what exactly?”
“A woman is engaged, but they get separated for many years. They come back together again. Enamorarse una segunda vez. Another chance.”
The water was still running and hitting Logan’s hands, but he ignored it, staring at her carefully.
“That’s a little, uhh, sophisticated for middle school, don’t cha think?” Laura just shrugged her shoulders.
“I like it. It’s romantic. Like un cuento—what is the word people here use?—a fairy tale.” Logan looked at the young girl who was using a lot of grown up words and dancin’ around a lot of grown up ideas, and a terrifying fear instantly struck him.
“Uhh, and you um, know about… romance…and all that?” Laura’s eyes got a little bigger when she realized where he was going with this, and she started shaking her head vigorously.
“No, no- I mean, SI! Si, papa. You don’t have to explain anything to me. Entiendo,” she said hurriedly. Logan awkwardly cleared his throat, fucking relieved. He hadn’t even thought about having to explain that shit to her. God knows how she knew, or if she knew the whole story, but he was quickly realizing he had dodged a fucking bullet on that one. At least for now.
“You know,” he finally said, snapping off the water and picking up another towel to help her dry the dishes now that he was finished, “You could put down those books down sometime, try making a few friends, now that you’re at school.”
Laura looked down a bit, quietly picking up another glass to dry from the counter and setting it back down once again.
“No one talks to me,” she murmured, holding the dishtowel a bit uselessly in her hand.
“None of the girls?” he asked cautiously.
“No. Tienen miedo. They’re afraid,” she said quietly.
“The boys?” Logan asked, blindly hoping for a different answer.
“Ellos tambien…” she drifted off. Logan sighed a bit, throwing the dish towel over his shoulder, crossing his arms after he did so.
“Well, have you tried...you know…actually talkin’ to them?”
“Que? About what?” Logan sighed. He was the last, literally the last, person who felt qualified for this conversation. Again, he mourned Charles’ absence and the professor’s way with students.
“Uhh, ask ‘em ‘bout themselves? Say hello?” he lamely offered. She looked up to him a bit skeptically. Logan thought better for a moment, but then still decided to ask.
“Your friends… at the lab,” he murmured.
“Mi familia,” she corrected him.
“Yeah, well, how did you talk to them?” he asked her. She offered another slight shrug of her shoulders.
“Fuimos similares. We were the same…” she trailed off. Logan kneeled a bit to look at her more closely, an intentional non-verbal move that showed he cared, he was listening. He wanted to fix this.
“You might have things in common with these folk too. Just… different things, you know? How about your books?” he asked.
“Que?”
“They might read the same things. Or maybe some of the other, easier stuff you already read. Ask them about it,” he said, realizing it was a thin suggestion at best. She, however, glanced up at him a bit more hopefully.
“We all need a few people, kid. It can’t be just me. You’re gonna eventually need people your own age to talk to, huh? People who understand what you’re going through right now,” he offered.
“Si,” she murmured.
“You try tomorrow, eh? Ask ‘em about a book they’re readin’,” he said, extending his hand to take the dish towel from her.
“Si, papa,” she said, smiling a bit more, handing him the damp towel. He took it from her, throwing it over his shoulder along with the other.
“Hey kid,” he said, and she stared up at him again.
“Yeah?” she asked.
“You’re my daughter. You know that? I won’t let anyone mess with ya, if it came to it.”
She looked up at him quietly, but then started smiling widely at his admission, and he offered her a genuine smile back.
--
Logan woke coughing violently in the front seat of the darkened Bronco, lungs in abject protest and agony. He sat up helplessly, chest heaving in pain, and when it was over he groggily noticed a spatter of blood speckled the steering wheel of the parked car. He groaned, struggling to breathe, as he wearily looked around the cabin in the pale twilight, trying to figure out where he was.
And then, it came back to him: that bloody fucking scene. Staking around the place, tension and panic growing, helplessly tracking her scent. It had been winding, sprawling this way and that but then it had stopped, just near the side of the lake house where he had thought he had heard her. Logan had stood in the wet mud, heart pounding and lungs on fire as he circled the spot like some wild, rabid dog. The scent was there, and then it was gone, like someone had lifted her straight off the ground into the air. That night, his mind was manic, body in overdrive as he scoured every inch of the lake well into the night, walking its whole perimeter and ending up back at the house again, none the wiser. The whole time he had been at it, his mind screamed Transigen at him over and over, but now the paranoid questions that came along with that truth filled him as he blindly searched the lake. How had they taken her right under his fucking nose? And, if they had taken her, where would they have gone? How could he find them? Would they head back to Mexico? Back to the US? As the questions and the string of endless possibilities swirled around him, his head danced with the lack of a steady flow of oxygen as his lungs struggled to keep working, his body exhausted from the mindless searching. The Wolverine was out for blood, desperate to sink its claws into the nearest thing and rip the jugular out of a throat, but Logan needed his rational brain if he was going to find her. It was steadily becoming a fucking riddle, but, if it led to a fight, well, he’d find the will to give the fuckers hell one last time.
Even as he had madly driven back to the apartment, ripping the place apart for any small sign, his mind was already settling on the most likely course of action, a truth he couldn’t almost bear to face: someone here had to have figured out who they were and that same someone had ratted them out. Logan and Laura’s path north had been too winding, too unpredictable, and Logan knew that Transigen was a blacklisted company in Canada. It was almost impossible for them to operate here, even undercover. And why would they? Laura was a liability, yes, but for a behemoth corporation like Transigen, it seemed unlikely that they would spend so much time and energy in a country where their work was illegal looking for a single failed experiment. At that last thought, Logan’s heart thudded heavily.
He had waited outside of that shitty little house that night, waiting for that fucker to come home. The Mustang had finally rolled its way up into the drive, and he knew the man was drunk. As Dwayne carelessly stumbled out of the car and up the path, Logan was silently behind him in an instant, a hand to his mouth, extending his claws just enough to show the man he wasn’t fucking around. Even in his diminished condition, Logan easily overpowered Dwayne as the other man kicked and shouted, and Logan quickly and instinctively plunged his right set of claws into the other man’s foot. As Dwayne began to scream, Logan quickly covered his mouth with a hand towel turned make-shift gag as he threw the fucker to the browning, patchy grass in the narrow alley between the houses, effectively limiting Dwayne from going anywhere.
“You scream, I torture you,” he breathed roughly, his body heaving, Dwayne’s eyes wide.
“Who the fuck was it?” Logan finally managed to say, his hulking form still looming over Dwayne. Meanwhile, the smaller man was trying to drag himself further down the alley, while also trying to cradle his foot and stay the heavy flow of blood. Logan snarled, grabbing him by the throat and throwing him against the side of the house. Dwayne still squirmed underneath his grip and Logan made the snap decision to throw his claws into Dwayne’s right shoulder. Dwayne screamed one more into the make-shift gag.
“Shut the fuck up!” he growled. “You try and go anywhere, you keep screaming, you fucking move, I cause you more pain. You understand? Now, listen to me …who the fuck did you tell?” Logan asked, before ripping the gag out of the man’s mouth so he could speak.
“I don’t-” he breathed heavily. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about man.”
“You had to say something to somebody…” Logan spat, but even as Logan said these words, he could tell from his senses, as much as he didn’t want to admit it, that this sorry piece of scum was telling the truth.
“The other guy,” Logan said suddenly, effectively switching his tactics. “Your body guard…who the fuck was he?”
“Carl? He ain’t from here. Up for late-season hunting, he’s from outta…outta town.”
“You tell him anything?!”
“No man!” Dwayne practically shouted before grimacing again in pain. “Couldn’t have anyway. He got of town real fast man, real fast that night…” Again, Logan sensed the truth on him. Motherfucker.
“Now, you’re gonna listen to me bub. You listenin’? Good. I’m willing to let your sorry piece of ass live if you give me everything on this fucker. You hear me? Everything you goddamn know about him.”
After the conversation had ended, Logan had thrown more threats this way, he had left him there on the side of the house, not giving a shit if the fucker bled out in the grass or not. After slamming the door of the Bronco, he breathed heavily, wiping some of Dwayne’s blood out of his eyes, cradling his own hands in pain, his knuckles bloody and yellowed with infection. For an instant, Laura’s smile flew across his mind, before he shut the lights out on it, just like he had everything else. He couldn’t think about her. Not right now, not like this. The only thing he could think about was finding her.
He had driven all through the night and into the next day, tearing a path through the Canadian Rockies headed for British Columbia, to Kelowna, where he now knew the other man lived. It was a thin lead at best, but it was something. And, if that didn’t work, he would head directly for Transigen in Mexico City and start mowing fuckers over until he got some answers. The drive to Kelowna, however, had been over eighteen hours, and early in the next evening exhaustion finally caught up with him. Logan had barely been able to pull over to the side of the darkened highway and kill the engine before his weary body demanded rest.
As he finally, really woke up, he was already cursing at himself and searching blindly for the keys in the dark. As the Bronco groaned as it started up to life once more, it was then that the dark, sinister reality came back to him. You lost her. If they had just kept moving, had he not been such a sick, miserable son of a bitch, they could have flown to a different country, and he could have kept her safe. And then, of course, there was the other odious truth, especially if the Carl lead shed any sort of light: he was a fucking animal, and, because he couldn’t control himself, it had led to Laura’s capture.
Logan only prayed her ability to heal, her ability to fight, would lead to her continued survival. And if they somehow had gotten to her, had hurt her or worse in any sort of way, he was already resigned to kill every mother fucker in the place. And, if he was too late, he’d kill them all anyway before sending himself straight to hell.
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Chapter End Notes:
Nothing like a little light torture/suggestion of suicide to end your weekend right! :D Sorry ‘bout that. 15 is up too, and it’s way lighter in tone. A nice chaser for this shot.