The thick blades of the helicopter’s rotors sliced through the humid air. The roar of the Blackhawk overhead filled their ears, the sound descending from the sky. Thick plumes of smoke rose up from the tiny village, as an orange rain began to fall. The toxic, chemical smell burned through his senses, clouding his head. Everywhere, people were screaming. Naked children ran through the streets, people speaking languages he couldn’t comprehend. Everything was on fire, people were on fire, and even as he tried to help whatever victims he could carry or usher to the nearby foliage, he smelled the lack of hope. He felt his body race to catch up, quickly stitching his flesh that burned, smelling of napalm. He reached for a small boy on the dirt road, offering his arm, but the boy’s skin slipped off his hand like a glove….

Logan woke with a start and a hoarse yell, his body seething. He was covered in sweat, the tepid room hazy around him. He coughed, gagged, couldn’t quite breathe as he sat up, trying to regain consciousness. Slowly, the dream, the memory—whatever the fuck it was—slipped away, and the room faded from the toxic orange flooding the Vietnam jungles to the sick, muted yellow of the room he found himself in. The ceiling fan tossed the damp air around the room. The bed sagged under his weight. Sheets stuck to his skin, as he noticed the telltale spatter of red. Claws. He retracted the adamantium instantly and put a shaky, bloodied hand to wipe the unruly hair from his forehead.

What year? What year was he in now? 2015, his mind slowly responded, aching from the effort. Where? Where the fuck was he? Mexico. In Mexico with Storm, waiting for Charles, another, slower part of his brain repeated, like a young child anxiously stuttering a memorized address.

Before he had even made the conscious choice, he was stalking over to the bathroom and flicking the shower on. The pipes moaned and rattled before lukewarm water rained down. His breathing slowed, but the steam still rose off of his body, the obvious evidence from a fevered, sleepless night.

If this kept happening, Logan thought he would snap. He was no stranger to nightmares, none at all, but this brand had a new sort of acidity. They were memories, somehow he inherently knew his, the memories that had been missing for the greater part of three decades. After Japan, after Nagasaki and Mariko, these sort of visions had been flooding back, tangled up and spiraled, wavering in terror and intensity.

He fingers felt the rough grit of lime scale on the handle as he snapped the water off and stepped out, toweling off and finally facing himself in the mirror, gripping the edges of the sink. Even after the shower, the heat from the room had summoned beads of sweat from his temple. He looked up at the faded glass of the mirror, and his own eyes eerily stared back.

Logan knew it wasn’t the first time he had witnessed children die. The narratives were convoluted, but the background details always gave the timeline away. There had been internment camps. Nigerian villages. North Carolinian townships, fatherless and neglected from the strain of war. The dream of Vietnam surprised him. Lately the memories had been from further back, before electricity. They were images of corseted women, some of them starving, holding naked infants, suffering while the opposing sides of America fought.

Before electricity. Fuck.

He suspected that deep down, perhaps even immediately after Stryker, he knew he was this old, but it was not something he liked to be reminded of. And these dreams, these visions, only made things harder.

Something had changed, something had expired and was now rotting in the world. He had willfully remained ignorant, first in the northwest territories of Canada and then later in Japan. It was no surprise, then, that he had been blindsided by what had happened during that time in the United States. The Mutant Registration Act had passed; the dangerous ones had been rounded up. In his absence, Trask had happened. Inhibitor collars. The prison camps at Guantanamo Bay. And then, of course, the X-Mansion.

A swell of guilt rippled under his skin. Fucking coward. His hazel eyes suddenly seemed singed with gold for the quickest of moments. The Wolverine didn’t like to be degraded by the man, and snarled angrily against the bars of his cage. He had protected himself. He had done what he needed to do. Except that, the man interjected, while he had, others had suffered.

The X-Mansion was gone, converted into an experimental laboratory overseen by Trask Industries. When Charles and Erik had approached him in the airport two months ago, the mansion was already no more, long since destroyed, but they still had the Blackbird. When it wasn’t in use it resided in an abandoned warehouse about an hour out of town in the northern Mexican desert. Mexico was where the most mutant rebels resided. Charles and Erik were quickly in the process of recruiting as many as they could.

For two months now, Storm and Logan had been commissioned to stay here, and they currently found themselves in Yécora. They moved restlessly, finding everything from letted rooms to abandoned houses to reside in, fading in and fading out of small towns, maintaining something of a fluid home base around the vast perimeter of the Blackbird. Logan hated this role, and had been pacing, itching to do more. These towns, this desert, were overwhelmingly desolate. He had never felt uneasy by the vast expanse of isolation before, but now, with a supposed mission in front of him, the open sky and flat land felt suffocating. There was some solace in having been given the time to know Storm again, after just shy of a decade of absence, but a part of him also realized these missions, whatever Erik and Charles were trying to do, was all happening far too late. The X-Men were disbanded, the remnants of what had been fractured.

The gnawing feeling of guilt recoiled in his stomach again, just as his cell phone from the bedroom sang in the air, a jarringly loud tone to his sensitive hearing even on the lowest volume setting. He padded over to the bedside table, hair still wet, as he read the text message.

News. From Storm. Logan didn’t always immediately receive word directly from Charles. He knew he was not entirely trusted yet on this new team, no matter how many times he had formerly donned the black leather suit.

Minutes later, Logan was dressed and downstairs. Storm and he never met at the same place twice, but always agreed on where to meet the day before. This time it was a tiny, cramped bar, one of the few in the area. It was surprisingly full of patrons, all of them likely trying to escape the overwhelming humidity. The putrid scent of sweat and coffee beans and Tecate and stale air hung all around him.

He found her in the corner, sipping bitter coffee. As ever, Storm was cool, collected, present. Age had only just found itself a place in the corners of her eyes, but otherwise, Logan had not been surprised to see she hadn’t changed all that much.

He slid into the chair next to her, trying to appear less obvious as he compacted his tall frame into the tight space. One more day here, at most, his instinct whispered. People wouldn’t have noticed yet, but yet in this case was probably far too soon. As he sat, Storm stared at him intently. She took a sip from the mug once more, set it down more gently than the ceramic seemed used to being handled, and spoke.

“Hank McCoy is dead,” she said, a hardened mask carefully prepared on her face. He knew instantly she had been preparing this demeanor, this cool exterior. Logan was not ready, however, and offered the tiniest visible flinch at his news. Hank. Dead. Inside, his gut twisted.

“Jesus. Shit. ” Logan said, a breath too loud. He closed his eyes momentarily. “How?” he softly added.

“Mob. Human Majority. Dragged him out of his home in upstate New York and onto his lawn,” Storm’s voice broke at this, wavered. She didn't want to have to explain, and he didn't want her to. His hand moved instinctively, barely grazing her own. Storm looked down at his closed palm, a bit shell-shocked, and her mask slipped more. Meanwhile, an anger had begun to swell inside him, gaining strength, an anger that he did not yet fully understand.

“Fuck,” Logan cursed again under his breath, casting his eyes downward. “And Charles…?” Logan began, before Storm intervened.

“Charles is coming back to reassess. Erik is staying in the field,” she said, regaining composure. Quietly she withdrew her hand just slightly from his, sensing his tension and giving him the space she thought he needed. Logan breathed out unsteadily, leaving his hands on the table, well aware there was no way to use them that could make any sort of difference. The metal sang under his skin uselessly, longing for release.

He sat quiet and still, waiting. He knew there was more. He could smell it on her.

“Logan, he's still not coming back alone,” Storm stated evenly.

“How do you mean?” he asked, prepared this time for the worst.

“They’ve acquired more help. That’s the decent part in all this mess.”

“Ok,” Logan said.

“Logan,” Storm breathed, finally bringing her eyes to his. They locked briefly, an unspoken language between them.

“Yeah?” he asked, before he had even known he had spoken.

“They’ve finally located Rogue.”
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