Chapter 22: Now

Marie had started thinking about time. She had read Einstein. She knew that the notion of minutes and hours depended entirely on the perspective of the person counting them. It was General Relativity. Time was a pinwheel. You gently pressed your lips to it, just barely kissing its metallic feathers, and you blew. Only then did it spin.

She had always viewed life linearly, even as she and Logan had discussed the multiple timelines, the dual nature of both their lives and their perceptions of each other. But what if she had been wrong? What if their lives were not lines at all, but merely points, all existing in one or infinite dimensions? Multiplicity wasn’t an idea that scared her; Marie was a blend of many minds as it was. Maybe it was all happening at once. Maybe, just maybe, even right now she was giving up her life to save his at Two Rivers. Maybe she was watching Logan slowly take a sip of his morning coffee, his hair mussed from their lovemaking the night before. Maybe they were apart, aching for one another, but they also were together, right now, in the future, in the past, somewhere, happy and safe and in love. It had been a comfort to her, this theory. at least in the beginning.

Marie stared blankly forward as she leaned her head against the steel frame of the helicopter. It was impossible to speak over the thrum of the rotor, but considering how exhausted as they all were and how little they all knew each other, it seemed appropriate. The chopper was also freezing, and Marie held her arms closer to her thin body. She was in a cargo jacket, but lacked a parka she knew she was going to soon need. In her headset they had given her after she had strapped in on take-off, Marie heard the pilot’s static scratch of a voice, “Bird descending in seven minutes,” and over a transceiver she heard a woman’s voice say, “Copy.” Marie sighed, closing her eyes wearily.

For two years now, she had searched, all to no avail. She had traced Charles’ bank accounts as far as they would go. She had traced Logan’s too, but the trail dried up early on, which didn’t really surprise her. She knew Logan would have made himself scarce if he was protecting Charles. After her own resources ran out, however, she began following countless mutants’ rights groups, trying to find a mutant with telepathic powers strong enough to track him. That’s when she had discovered the secrets behind Transigen. She often found herself a part of these groups, working on occasional missions to try to bring down various distribution centers up north. She had been in Canada for over a year now, helping, searching, hoping. So far, she had come up empty.

That’s when the doubt started. The paranoia. Marie knew that Logan was getting sick. She knew, too, that he wasn’t likely to get better. Even in the most fundamental parts of life, in veins that ran their course, she knew time was cradled in the difference. In the spaces in between. It had still caught her off guard, sometimes, those hitches in breath, those clicks of seconds. Irrevocability had graced the grey-tinged coarseness of his hair, but also the elasticity of her own skin. All cellular promises eventually got broken. No matter how hard either of them tried to stay whole, in the end, all bodies were careless, breaking from the inside out.

Maybe they always had been leaving each other.

Marie opened her eyes once more, glancing over the frozen landscape with a slight frown. It had recently snowed, and now an eerie, unending blanket of white shrouded the pines as the trees crept up the mountainside, but then, as the helicopter cleared another pass, the pine trees, the snow, all of it abruptly stopped, and the still grey surface of a lake opened up to them, and she realized the helicopter was slowly descending. Of all the memories she had from Logan’s mind, these were, of course, always the worst. The dam. The lake. The labs. Alkali. She had been mildly disturbed to hear that Alpha Flight had set up base here, even if it made tactical sense. However, the briefing on this latest mission had disturbed her more deeply. The idea of using children was haunting, morally distressing on the best of days, and she had felt compelled to help. But now, on the lip of Alkali, she wondered if she had done the right thing.

“Two minutes and we’re on the ground. Take off the headsets and prepare to land. Remember, the bird comes back in 48 hours for whoever’s left, no matter how the mission goes,” the pilot said gruffly, and then everyone was jostling around, undoing their harnesses, but Rogue didn’t move.

She listened to the helicopter make the last of its descent, already bracing herself from the likely cold that was bound to triple in intensity once the door opened, and as she felt them touch down she experienced an overwhelming sense of dread. She didn’t want to be here. She hesitated as the others moved around her, lingering still as she looked around the empty cabin.

“If you’re getting off, you need to do it now. And, if you are, slide the door shut behind you,” the pilot said gruffly, and, willfully making up her mind through a frustrated sigh, she jumped out, boots making contact with the frigid ground as she used her strength to shut the door, hair snapping in the wind. The roar of the helicopter was in her ears as she exhaled, the cloud of her breath escaping her lips as she turned, and then, he was there.

Multiplicity. Life lines. The debris of memory. The idle rhythm of frozen breath. Another age exhausted, the numbers piling up. To stop everything from happening at once, they measured out their lives and called it time. Marie’s heart thudded heavily as point and line converged. Their eyes met, and suddenly whole worlds, galaxies were crashing into each other. God. He looked so, so much older. The pain in his eyes was unmistakable, and she realized that, whatever he had seen, it had been too much. She found her legs involuntarily pulling herself toward him, helpless to his magnetic force, his gravitational pull.

“Logan?” Marie whispered desperately, but as she took one more step forward to him, he took the slightest of steps back, staggering slightly. He said nothing as she noticed tremors in his hands, his breath deep and uneven, as he slightly swayed on the spot where he stood. She watched those hazel eyes, those same eyes, look about the platform wildly, as if Logan did not believe what was in front of him. And then, just barely under his breath, he spoke.

“I heard your heart stop beating,” he whispered sharply.

“So you were there,” she murmured, and something heavy fell through her with this understanding. Marie could practically feel the involuntary anxiety and panic rise within Logan then, and she found herself closing the distance between him, drawing him close. He did nothing but bow his head and lean into her shoulder, but as she ran a hand through his hair, stroking it gently, she felt the slightest of shudders ripple underneath him.

“It’ll be ok,” she whispered in his ear, voice shaky, even as another part of her mind wondered if it would be. What had he seen? Dear lord, what had he seen?

Marie finally stood back from him, feeling the warmth of tears stinging in the cold wind, before she finally took a deep, brave breath and faced the other mutants still awkwardly standing around them both. Her eyes caught Mirage’s gaze, and she managed a smile.

“Dani, it’s good to see you again,” Marie said genuinely.

“Rogue,” Mirage said through a smile. “I knew it. The names were never officially released, but they said the body count was seven. Seven. I had no idea you were working with the new Canadian mutant initiative.”

“I wasn’t, at least, not in this part of the country, until last month,” she murmured, before her gaze once more crept over to Logan. He continued to stare at her if she wasn’t there, wasn’t real, tired eyes blinking slowly. “I’m assuming we were all about to be briefed?” she added.

“That was the plan,” Dani said looking from Logan to Rogue again. “But… if you need time…” Dani trailed off. Marie gave her a sharp nod in agreement, and then Dani was throwing her a spare walkie-talkie that Marie caught with ease.

“We’ll call you in when we need to brief you. Two hours, easy.” Marie slowly turned back to Logan, still sensing his unease, his disbelief, and quietly murmured to him, “Take us somewhere private, baby.”



---

As Marie closed the door behind her, they once more found themselves in the room he had just caught a few tired hours of rest in. The keys to the Bronco were still on the fucking desk. His wallet lay open, a Canadian ten peeping out of the billfold. On the cot, a light spatter of blood from the nightmare Logan endured, and, in front of him, her. Logan’s desperate attempt to regulate his breathing was leaving him, as a feeling of claustrophobia set in. He stared back at her with a mild paranoia, a panic, as his mind still struggled to figure out the catch, the cruel joke. Nothing sounded right. Nothing was registering correctly. He was about to fucking lose it. As the man struggled to stay in control, he found himself pacing in front of her, a manic feeling rising alongside the animal within him.

“I tried to save him,” Logan was saying defensively. “I tried. I took him to Mexico. I hid him, and for a while, we were fine, well, not fine but, uh, then Transigen was hunting us, hunting Laura. We didn’t stand a chance,” he said, and then he was coughing again for a moment, before he anxiously ran a hand through his hair. What the fuck was he doing?

“It’s okay, sugar…slow down,” she said, keeping her tone careful and even as she watched him pace back and forth.

“Why are you here?” he finally asked sharply, a slight accusation in his voice as he stopped his pacing and faced her once more. Her eyes widened as she stared back at him.

“I….woke up. I could feel it baby,” she said, putting a hand to her temple. “Your powers in me, stitching me back together. The place was ransacked, soldiers everywhere…” she stopped, looking a little tired herself all of the sudden. “They had orders to kill him on sight,” she whispered.

“Well, he hurt a lot of people, Marie,” Logan managed to say.

“I know that,” she said, through a small frown. They both stood there for a moment, breathing a bit heavily, while a tension, an awkward weight hung between them. He allowed himself to look closely at her for perhaps the first time since he had laid eyes on her, taking her in. She stood with one arm clutching the other, a boot scuffing the ground. If she had aged, it was only slight. But the rest… the same strand of platinum hair, the same bridge of her nose. The same fucking curve of her face. Yet another version of this woman to stomp into his life, after she had already left him. Another fucking ghost.

“I tried to find you,” she finally said, and she had fresh tears in her eyes. “I tracked down his bank accounts. Yours, for a while. But every time I’d get a hit, you had moved on. And then…the trail disappeared. I thought…well, I didn’t even know if you were alive anymore,” she said, glancing down to the floor.

“You were out there, looking for me? All this fucking time?” he asked, and then, he could feel a hot wetness on his face, and he stopped his pacing, breathing heavily. Logan finally looked at her again, a blank look in his eyes. “But…. you died. You’re dead.”

Marie looked up to him sharply once more, realizing perhaps why he couldn’t accept what was in front of him. Then her eyes grew darker, as a determined, fiery look crossed her features.

“Come here,” she said, tears in her eyes. When he hesitated, she added a “God damn you, Logan,” and she deliberately strode over to him then, clutching him hard against her, tilting her neck just slightly, granting him access for him to smell her, breathe her in, and then it was her scent, that fucking scent, cradling him, nestling itself in the grooves of the worst of his doubt. Earth. Nectar. Mint. Marie. Then, the rest of Marie’s chorus: all those tiny sounds her body made that he had memorized decades ago, the steady thrum of her pulse, her lungs quietly breathing, and her heartbeat. Thud. Thud. Thud. Steady, and real.

“You see?” she asked, pulling back a bit, as silent tears fell down her face and she made no move to stop them. “Use the gifts you were fucking born with, baby. You smell me, hear me, feel me here?” she said through a harsh whisper. He closed his eyes tightly for a moment, as the thoughts were running rampant through his head, trying desperately to hold onto himself, to not become lost in the moment that was slowly unraveling before them. Because, if it was real, oh god, if it was real…it’s real.

“Marie,” he murmured into her neck as he moved closer to her, desperate for more of her. He breathed in deeply, that was the only moment he got, before she was leaning upward to kiss him, and kiss him hard. The feeling almost had him dropping to the floor, the intense, longing rush of her touch wildly igniting synapses, all those connections he had thought had long since been snuffed out. He finally kissed her back then, but then her hands were running up his shirt and before he even realized the full extent of what he was doing he grabbed her wrist forcibly, bringing it out in front of him in warning.

“Baby…” he managed to breathe, still through closed eyes.

“What?” she whispered, and when he opened his eyes to meet hers they were wildly searching him for clues, until, as a frown appeared on his lips, she understood. She scowled a bit at him, but didn’t move an inch.

“Don’t you dare,” she whispered, even as tears once more sprang to her eyes. “Don’t you dare feel sorry for yourself. Stop that right now. I won’t have it.”

He still didn’t yield though, and only looked at her seriously once more, grip still firm on her soft wrist. She looked down to truly take in his scarred, marked hand then, before giving him her clear, unafraid stare once more.

“You don’t think I know everything’s changed?” she hissed at him. “That nothing is the fucking same? For months, no, years, baby…” she trailed off, overwhelmed with it all, but the way her voice broke had him giving in, had him growling as an infinitesimal fraction of confidence coursed through him as he released his hold on her wrist and moved to bite her bottom lip roughly, desperately. His hands were on her body then, pushing away her jacket to get to her, fingers running over the sheer lining of her shirt, and even over the fabric he could feel the prominent notches in her ribs.

“Too thin,” he murmured, before leaning back a bit to look at her again through a slight frown.

“Yeah, well, I think from the look of both of us it’s been a rough fucking year,” she muttered. His lips tugged up in the smallest grin at this for a moment before frowning again as her hands once more went for the hem of his shirt. He finally let her have her way with him, though, and he closed his eyes and shuddered slightly as her soft, nimble fingers made contact with the worst and most recent of his scars, the one he had received from the farmhouse on that fateful, terrible night.

“Do I wanna ask about this one?” she murmured quietly.

“S’deserved. That one’s for not gettin’ to Charles in time….” he softly breathed.

Marie looked up to him painfully, but didn’t ask him to elaborate. It wasn’t the time for it. He knew somewhere, deep down, they both needed this. It wasn’t just the time that had passed, that unending lonely void. They had always said things with their bodies, sometimes more than with their minds. If she wanted to know him again, like the way he needed to know her, she needed to see every fucking scar, welt, and ridge. They both knew it.

There was a quick, sharp intake of breath on her part, as she moved the shirt up and off of his chest, and he opened his eyes once more to see her still facing him bravely, refusing to deny or shy away from the pain he had most likely suffered, from what had happened to him. Who he was, here, right now.

It was a torturous process in every kind of way, as Marie worked her way up his body. The gunshot scars in his arms, the buckshot that had pelted his chest. Long, trailing scars, scars of knife wounds running along his back. She was silent as she traced them all, quietly accepting each one as she went, and then, she was planting kisses where she could, worked her mouth up the side of his collarbone and then to his neck, placing a the last of the kisses on his cheek, his bottom lip. He also felt her hands take his and then she was massaging his knuckles, so very much like that first night. She took in those scars silently, too, before placing her mouth gently to them.

“It’s the adamantium, isn’t it?” she whispered into his knuckles. “It’s making everything worse.”

“Yeah,” he barely breathed, and the sound of truth had a crisp sharp bite to it as it hit the air. Finally, she let him go, and she let his hands explore her once more, even as he lowered them both gently down to sit on the cot, her legs now straddling his waist.

“Fair’s fair,” she murmured, before taking off her jacket and removing the thin tank top. She was still as gorgeous as ever, all fair skin and even, sturdy muscle, and then he was peeling off her sports bra, needing to take all of her in, every single inch, no stone left unturned. Her breasts were soft and the same, but as he felt her body he noticed the tiny beginnings of stretch marks, here and there, thin, shallow lines, and then, further down, on her still-toned mid-section, four thin red surgically straight lines, one on her left, one on her right, one right next to her navel. He stopped, stiffening a bit.

“And these?” he asked, his voice even and careful.

“Ah, laparoscopic….hysterectomy…” she trailed off, and he glanced up at her sharply for a moment, eyes wider.

“Hell, kid. Are you ok?” he said, as a new swell of profound guilt rose within him. What else had he fucking missed? She smiled at him, her voice fragile and on the cusp of something sad, as she murmured, “Fine now.” And then he knew she wasn’t going to tell him all of it. That that story, like probably so many more he had missed, would have to be earned.

“Looks like you’re not the only one who’s earned a few scars, sugar,” she smiled slightly, and then, he swallowed heavily, cradling her to him as he turned them to lay her down on the narrow cot, and she was already peeling off her jeans, and he could sense her, moist and wet. Her scent had everything in him reeling, the room woozily dancing before him. Fuck. How the fucking hell was he going to recover from this? As she leaned up to kiss the side of his neck, impatient, he still found himself hesitating.

“Baby…it’s been…” he trailed off, unsure of how much he should say, how much it really mattered.

“Since that night after the gym?” she guessed knowingly, looking up to him once more. He closed his eyes for a moment and let out a quiet, “Yes. Been a little too fucking busy.”

“Me too,” she said softly.

“Marie,” he said, trying again, trying to get the words right so she would understand. “I can’t…if we do this… I can’t lose you again, or I’m done. Hell, I might already be done. Losing ya, kid,…it was already fucking killing me,” he muttered.

“Then don’t lose me,” she said simply, her eyes dark, and he noted the challenge in her voice, the desperate charge she was giving him. His grip on her tightened as she moved to fumble his belt buckle.

“You gonna just lay there staring at me some more are you gonna help me? Didn’t I just admit I’m rusty at this?” she asked. He still didn’t move to help her though, muttering a “I think you know what you’re doing, kid” and she smiled at his playfulness, a spark of the old Logan taunting her, and then the levity of it all was coming back as they shed the rest of their clothes like they shed their inhibition, and then he was inside her in one, fluid motion, and everything around him melted, all the edges blurred.

She rose up to greet him, sliding her nails down his back, as it took them a few staggered moments to establish a pace, relearning what they already knew about each other, until they found it, their old rhythm, as Logan became increasingly grateful for small favors. He thanked fucking god his strength was still relatively intact, thanked god that his cough seemed to be kept at bay, even as his lungs still ached. Sex too, though, felt different, and he realized he was more in tune with himself somehow, more prone to feel aches and tiny pains a normal person would have, the way her nails dug into his skin or the way her teeth grazed his neck after his had already found and sucked on the pulse in hers, and he was glad she was giving into it, melting into him and letting herself go, far beyond being too fucking gentle. There was a long way between dying and being dead.

It wasn’t supposed to be a monumental thing, he realized. Maybe it had the potential to be, eventually, but as much as they both sought and found pleasure in one another, something in Logan understood this was about establishing some sort of baseline, giving themselves something to hold on to. Even as he held her, biting down hard as he spasmed inside, filling her body, there was a deliberate, intentional need to understand one another again at the heart of every movement.

Afterward, she lay there on his chest for a long time, her face rising in and following with his steady and even breath, as her hands lightly lingered over the most recent scar. Logan breathed out a little, trying to relax, but he realized that bit of peace that being with Marie should have afforded him was still out of reach. A different sort of pain still ached deep within him; everything was not alright. He had intentionally had avoided the subject up until this moment, but now, they were here. Somehow together again. And she needed to know.

“Marie?” he asked gently, stroking the soft edges of her hair that lay nestled close to his face, his vision slightly out of focus with everything this close up.

“Yeah?” she whispered from his chest.

“We need to talk about Laura.”


---

Alarms were wailing as she flew down the hall. All the doors were the same, an endless row of white rectangles, but she could smell Rictor from a few doors away, pacing in his own cell. She could feel the tremors in the earth, the signs he was sending out, the rush of it all, as her blood pumped loudly in her ears, everything on fire.

She was at his door then, easily jamming her claws into the lock and ripping through the metal framing, his door of course made up of different material than hers, and as she whipped the door open, Rictor was looking at her, a small smirk on his face.

“Laura,” he said, through a knowing smile. She shoved the badge she had nicked off the dead guard into the other mutant’s hands.

“Salva a los demás. Voy a volver para el científico. Mata al resto!” she shouted.

He grabbed it from her, cocking a brow at her once more, and then she was off, running through the hallways again. Esto estaba funcionando. This was working.

She turned down another hallway, scrambling to a stop as she found three more guards. She braced herself, planting her feet in a fighting stance like her papa taught her, and snarled.

There were screams and hisses of air as she sliced, spatters of blood flying onto the walls before she easily mowed through the door she needed, the door she had been seeking. He had been writing notes, despite the screaming alarms, and as she crawled in through the mangled doorway, he calmly looked up to her, putting his pen down slowly.

“Laura,” he said simply. “You’ve found a way out. Only a matter of time, it seems.”

She knew her papa had lied that night at the lake, but she knew why he had. He was trying to protect her, but Laura had seen the truth blazing in his eyes. His words said one thing, the rest of his body another. There was something sinister, something malo in them both, however good sus corazones were, however decent they tried to be. It was singing in her right now, and she realized she was bloodthirsty, intent on the kill. The sounds of the lakehouse were all fine and good on quiet nights under the stars, but they were also cuentos de hadas, the things of stories. In front of her stood a very bad man, un monstruo, and the reality was that he needed to die.

She was swift, ruthless as she lunged through a scream, quickly slicing his jugular, a fresh spatter of blood streaking across her face. He sat there, eyes wide with surprise, as a soft gurgle escaped his neck. Laura sneered, muttering “Nos vemos en el infierno” under her breath before she spat at the floor near her feet, the saliva tinged red from the blood spattered on her lips. Just then, however, all the scents pouring in from the hallway changed, and she looked up just as Delilah sent out a mental warning through her mind.

Laura, mas! As she whipped around, she realized Delilah was right; there was just more. Mas. More guards, more guns, more handcuffs waiting to contain her. It was then she felt the wild thing within in her rise up, as it whispered the insidious, hungry truth into her willing ear. Matarlos a todos. Matar a todos los bastardos. Hacerlos morir. Kill them all. Kill all the sorry bastards. Make them die for what they did to you, to your papa, to Charles.

A new round of bullets flew through her back as she growled, using the force from the floor to propel herself up, stabbing, gutting, kicking and flying through them all, blood drenching the halls, sticky and wet in her hair, as she desperately clawed her way to the others, to the outside, to her papa, and to that fairy tale all the stories she read had called home.




---

A quiet stream of static emitted from the walkie-talkie from the desk as Marie ran a hand through her hair. They both sat on the small cot now, facing forward towards the door, as the faucet dripped in the background, the quiet groan of the heat coming on.

“Holy hell,” Marie finally said.

“I know,” Logan said, through gritted teeth. They were still in partial states of dress, but were now at least relatively decent, if any other of the mutant militia thought it was a good time to drop in for some stupid reason.

“I mean, it makes sense. If Alkali, this place, once had your genetic code,” she murmured.

“That’s what Charles had said,” he muttered, and Marie looked up to him. He knew that she knew he didn’t want to talk about Charles yet, and she let the remark go.

“So… all this time, she’s been alive? Even… when we were at Westchester?” she asked carefully. Logan sighed a little. He really didn’t like thinking about that part.

“Yeah, I guess,” he trailed off for a moment, and then he added through a sharp whisper, “How did we not know about Transigen though?” Marie exhaled slowly, sliding a hand over his forearm and gently stroking his skin. Logan noticed that, since they had found themselves in this room, Marie was touching him in one way or another constantly. She simply refused to let go, and Logan was growing more and more comforted by her constant touch, even as he wondered how much of it was for him and how much of it was for her.

“I think I can answer that question, at least, if you really wanna know,” she finally said, tucking a lock of her now-loose hair behind her ear with her free hand. Logan’s eyes widened a bit in surprise as he looked over to her again, her answer to a question he had meant to be semi-rhetorical surprising him. Marie shot him a bit of a nervous glance, toying with her own red, swollen lip a bit from where he had kissed and lingered on her mouth only a short twenty minutes before.

“Don’t…get pissed at me, baby, but I did some digging… through your memories,” she muttered. “I was trying to find any sign, any hint of where you might have gone, and although that led me nowhere, I did get somewhere.”

“Which ones?” he asked quietly.

“What?”

“Which ones led you somewhere?” he asked, and he could see that she relaxed a little when she realized he wasn’t really angry with her at all, just curious. He doubted he had ever been truly angry at Marie for having to sift through his memories when she had touched him with her skin on, and if he had come off gruff and surly due to this news, it was typically because he hated the idea of her having to deal with the weight and baggage of the stuff.

“Well…” she said softly. “I already knew the old ones. I mean, maybe I picked up one or two new ones here and there after the jump when we would…you know…” she trailed off, and Logan found he liked the way the flush crept up her ivory cheeks and the old, familiar feelings it was stirring inside of him. He liked it a lot.

“But… the night in the gym…and then, at least I think the morning after, when you tried to save me…hell, when you did save me,” she said, pausing for a moment, “I got a lot of new ones, sugar. A shit ton.” And then, there it was, that old swell of guilt rising up, even as he tried to immediately squash it, tried to desperately remind himself that, just as she had saved him in the past life, he had saved her in this one, and that a bucket-load of shitty memories was more than worth it.

“Hell, baby, I’m sorry,” he found himself still muttering.

“It’s okay, sugar. I don’t know why I have to keep reminding you, but I’m not seventeen anymore. I know how to handle it. I know what to do,” she looked at him assuredly, and he offered her a small smile back before she continued on. “Remember when we went down south, that night we…promised some things?”

Logan frowned a bit. He sure as fuck did remember that, at least, everything leading up to when he had let the Wolverine loose. Logan had always considered those their vows, and because of it that night was one of the few goddamn memories he couldn’t seem to intentionally forget, and it was the one that had passed idly by in his mind the afternoon Laura had disappeared.

“Of course I do,” he said quietly.

“Well, remember when you told me about her that night, about the old Marie, and you said she was double agent, right? But you didn’t know…how did you put it, you said you didn’t know the how of it?” Logan’s eyebrows raised in part suspicion and part curiosity, as he tried to understand where she was going with this. Before what had happened at Westchester, Marie as he knew her in this timeline very rarely brought up the old Marie, as he rarely brought up the old Logan. To do so, they both had realized, only seemed to open up old wounds and cause confusion.

“Yeah…so?” he asked softly.

“Well, first off, after she had taken the cure she ran into that guy named Henry-”

“Henry?” Logan blinked for a moment, before he recalled the conversation in Capetown just before the Sentinels had arrived.

“Yeah, Henry. She didn’t know it then, but when she met him, or maybe shortly after, he started working for Trask Industries. He didn’t even know she was a mutant back then. At least, that’s what she told me,” Marie finished, glancing up to Logan a bit guiltily. Logan’s eyebrows shot up at this, genuinely surprised by the information. It was one of the first times anyone had been able to surprise him in a long while. Well, except when Marie had stepped out of that fucking helicopter. And when Dani had conjured up an image of Laura. And when Laura had punched that kid in the face on the first day of school. These women were going to be the fucking end of him.

“What she told you?” he managed to say.

“Err…this is going to sound really weird, but, uhh, she and I…had a little chat,” Marie said, still looking a bit embarrassed as she toyed with her hair, smoothing it over a shoulder with her hands.

“And how the hell did you do that?” he asked. She looked up to him intently, then, and he noticed now her own eyes were the ones full of questions.

“I was actually going to ask you for that answer. When I take you in, I just get back what you gave me, which means… Well, why didn’t you ever tell me you had ever her in your head in the first place, sugar?” she whispered softly. Again, Logan’s eyebrows shot up at this as he tried to process what she was saying.

“I-I didn’t know that what it was. I thought I was fucking crazy, like I’d lost a bit of sanity after the jump. And, it wasn’t until after…after I lost you that she...” Wouldn’t shut up and leave him to off himself like he wanted, was the phrase that came to mind, but instead he went with, “That she started talking more. And then, after Westchester, I really did think I had just fucking lost it.” Marie once more bit her lip as she considered this carefully.

“You’re not crazy, baby. I know having voices in your head is typically my modus operandi, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, and I think the jump’s what did it. I think she held you there, and some parts of her just…stuck around afterward. I doubt that would’ve happened if Kitty had stayed on the job, but I think I tend to leave… an impression,” Marie finished quietly. Logan sat back a bit on the cot, running his hand over his face for a moment, considering this. An impression, an echo, an afterthought… that was what it exactly had felt like.

“Hell,” he murmured to himself more than anybody else.

“Anyway, let’s just say old Marie helped me figure out that somebody back then definitely was coercing mutants to be spies. And, no big fucking surprise, Transigen bought what was left of Trask in the seventies after they went belly-up in this timeline, so the same fucking shit was going on, they were just way more quiet about it all. Coercions. I think they conned several telepaths to help influence the government to let the shit happen, and where that failed, money seemed to take care of the rest. And this Henry fella? In this timeline at least, his boss’ boss paid off the higher-ups at the CIA, helped write dirty contracts with the American government,” she mumbled.

“Shit, baby,” he muttered, looking at her once more, and he couldn’t help himself as he felt the slight tug of his lips turning into a bit of a grin. He’d bet money that Marie, the little spit-fire, stuck it to the bastard. “Should I even ask what ya did with that information, then?” Logan slightly teased, and Marie was now grinning too.

“I paid a few favors to a mutant rights group first, and then we took him out and all of his friends in high places. And, while I hope he was the same son of a bitch that fucked with the old Marie, even if he wasn’t, the sorry asshole won’t be coercing anyone again anytime soon. Not in Canada at least. Or in the US,” she finished.

“Fuck darlin’,” he muttered through another smirk. “You’ve been busy.”

“What? You thought I just was good for sitting around teaching literature all day?” she asked.

“Ahh, no. But from what I remember you weren’t all that mission-hungry,” he murmured. Logan recalled that Marie had often opted to stay behind on the rare missions that did crop up, and he had mainly chalked it up to another difference, another strange quirk that separated the old Marie from the new one.

“That’s because I thought most of them were pointless, because they didn’t need us. And boy, was I wrong about that, in the end. Besides, I’m good at intel. Always have been. I know how people think. You should give me more credit. I think I would’ve made a fan-fucking-tastic double agent in this timeline, too. And, anyways, I can still kick some fucking ass if I have to,” she said teasingly, before wetting her thumb with her tongue and running it gently over his lips and murmuring, “And what I’m hearing, you were still running around kicking ass too.” It was supposed to be a playful quip, but at this last though, however, Logan’s smile fell slightly.

“Sure as hell a lot good that did,” he grumbled. Marie frowned a bit more at that, considering what he was saying, as she moved to cradle one of his large hands between her palms once more, gently running the pads of her fingers along his knuckles.

“I’m sorry I didn’t know… about the kids,” she said more solemnly. “I stuck around Canada because I was for sure that you’d go there. You always hide out in Canada. All your memories suggested that’s where you’d be. I shouldn’t have relied on them so heavily, I guess. Although…you did end up here, in the end,” she finished.

“You know, Laura had to drag me kicking and screaming most of the way up north. A stubborn one, that girl,” Logan said through a small smile.

“Sounds familiar,” Marie murmured, a new grin forming on her own lips.

“You know, I guess I just thought I’d be safe, that far north. We were at the fucking edge of the world, Marie, and I think, well, I think she might’ve been happy there, but…” he drifted off, thoughts once more settling on the one thing he still needed to make right.

“Hey. We’re going to get her back,” Marie said intently, a fire burning in her eyes. There was a bit of silence for a moment, as Logan exhaled deeply.

“Kid fucking grew on me, that’s the problem,” he finally muttered, and Marie was smiling again, as she leaned into his shoulder, sitting back on the cot with him.

“Tell me more about her,” she said. “You haven’t said all that much, and right now she just sounds like a mini feral version of you.”

Logan chuckled a bit at this, squeezing Marie’s thigh a little as he did so.

“Well, that ain’t that far off the mark, darlin’. But, uhh, she’s, well, hell, she’s an eleven-year-old, you know? Quiet a lot of the time, but then she’ll fly off the handle, get fucking angry as hell sometimes over some pointless shit. Did I tell ya she gave a kid a concussion the first day at school? I mean, the little racist fucker deserved it, but…. Heh. Like I said, stubborn as fucking hell.” He realized Marie was now grinning widely at him, a devilish look in her eye.

“Please, continue talking about how she’s not exactly like you,” she teased.

“Oh, come on now. Don’t fucking start,” he laughed, his mood was lightening as he realized Marie wasn’t just humoring him, but really did want to know more, really did want to understand the person that had pulled Logan through the worst of her own absence, the worst of his own grief.

“Well, uh, she was trying to eat me out of house and home, but she’s a petite lil thing—
probably the damn healing factor—and she speaks Spanish faster than anyone else I’ve ever met. She was trying to be patient teachin’ me a bit of it, poor thing, and I was teaching her math, you know, startin’ with multiplication and workin’ on up to the harder stuff…” he trailed off then, as he realized Marie’s look had grown a bit more serious the more he spoke about Laura, the more evident it became that the kid had wormed his way into his fucking broken heart, and had made a place inside of it.

“I wish I had been there to see some of that,” she murmured. He breathed out steadily while he gently tucked a white lock of Marie’s hair behind her ear.

“The best part, though? She loved some readin’, just like you. Started her off to brush up on her English, and then, well…it got her good, baby,” he smiled a bit, a little lost in the memories of the books stacked up in her room, pouring out of her backpack, just as Marie’s had been.

“You love her like a daughter,” she murmured, and he came back to them once more, looking up at her.

“Hell baby, weren’t you listenin’? She is my daughter,” he said quietly.

“No, I know, but… but I mean, you love her like you’ve always had her,” she said, through a sad sort of smile. As she did so, an image of one of the first few nights he and Laura had found themselves in Canada came back to him, when he had acted like a jack-ass in the motel room, chugging whiskey, but then later on to when the rain had fell hard outside, and he felt the crisp, worn pages of the comic book, settling on the image of the Blackbird. What had she called it? Pajaro Negro. But also…familia. Family.

“Yeah,” he finally said, looking down at his hands slightly, before staring back up once at Marie. “Guess so.”

They stared at each other oddly for a moment, before the noise of the static grew over the receiver, and they both whipped their heads around in its direction instinctively.

“Logan or Rogue. Come in. Over,” it said. Marie was across the small room in an instant, her thin hand grasping the receiver.

“Yes, Dani. We hear you. What is it? Over,” she said

“Uhhh,” was the response and Logan shot a worried look over to Rogue.

“Dani? We can’t hear you. Over,” Marie said again.

“It’s cause she ain’t talkin’, kid,” Logan said warily, and he realized he was standing too, striding over in just his jeans to the desk and Marie.

“Yeah, sorry. Umm, there’s been a situation with the children. Over,” Dani’s voice said. Again they quickly and sharply glanced at one another before Logan was grabbing the receiver from Marie and bringing it close to his mouth.

“What the fuck happened, Dani?” he growled into it.

“…Logan. Our delayed video footage showed the children somehow sprung themselves, and we think by now they’re currently trying to apprehend the last few of the guards. Over.”

“Hell,” Marie whispered.

“Then fire up the fucking jet or whatever you got that’s fastest and get us there, Dani,” he growled. “We’re headed outside.”

“Logan…wait.”

“What?!” he growled into the receiver. A bit of static hung in the air, as Logan impatiently waited for the response.

“Xander Rice is dead. Laura stabbed the fuck outta him... over,” Dani’s voice muttered. Logan’s eyes widened as he looked to Marie, whose stunned expression was now sliding into another wicked grin.

“Oh, I’m gonna love this girl,” she said, before she grabbed her jacket off the chair, throwing Logan his t-shirt. “Let’s go fucking get her.”


---

The next half-hour or so passed in a blur. Print outs of the briefs were shoved in their hands, and they had suited up Alpha Flight style, which was to say they wore what they wore. Two helicopters had already taken off with some of the team, but Marie and Logan found themselves in a larger air force plane that seemed to have some fairly impressive modifications to it, because as it rocketed forward into the sky Marie could feel the g-forces. It was still a far cry from the Blackbird, but Marie couldn’t help but feel a little guilty as some of that old, mildly sadistic pleasure rose in her when she saw Logan grip the paper brief he had been holding tightly, looking just as nervous as he always did when he was in the air. Marie smiled a little, as the convergences of similarities and differences between this man and the Logan she had left in Westchester kept hinting to be known. Marie had already caught him bringing up the paper brief more closely to his face as he had tried to quickly read it when they had been waiting for their clearance to board the aircraft. She had turned to him and he whipped it back down, not wanting to get caught in the act of not being able to see the words properly. She couldn’t help but contain her small grin, because this was a difference she sorta liked, and images sprung to her mind of Logan sitting on a couch with a cup of coffee over a newspaper with readers perched on his nose, maybe with Marie sitting on the opposite side with her feet in his lap, too. She smiled a bit more at this thought, and then she noticed Logan was scowling, thinking she was teasing him about flying. And then they gained more altitude and even Marie’s own stomach did a flop, and she realized now Logan had discarded the brief entirely, clutching the sides of his seat in his typical anxious fashion.

“You know, I hear meditation’s good for flight anxiety, baby,” she said through a small quirk of her lips, and he practically snarled back at her.

“Remind me to smack your ass for that quip when I’m down on the ground where I fucking belong,” Logan only grumbled.

Marie smiled once more. The fact of the matter was that until Logan had spoken about Laura, Marie hadn’t been entirely sure how exactly Logan had wanted this thing to go between them. He had still been hesitant, slightly removed with the knowledge Laura was still missing. Even as they had shared their bodies with each other, Marie knew there were truths, dark, necessary truths about them both they hadn’t yet discussed, and they would need to, eventually. But the way Logan had talked about Laura was in a way Marie had never heard him talk about anything ever before, except for maybe herself in their good years. But the fact of the matter was that how he talked about Laura was still different. Laura was his blood, his child, product of lab experimentation notwithstanding, and it didn’t take much for Marie to guess that that fact would run deep with Logan and the Wolverine. Marie was far from jealous, and in fact it had been the depth in his voice, the richness of his words, that Marie herself realized she never wanted to be without either of them, and that she wanted to, needed to witness everything they ever did or said again. And Marie hadn’t even met Laura yet.

Marie smiled faintly at this, but then as the report that they were nearing the base in Sioux Falls came from the pilot, her mood grew more somber as a new sort of worry kicked in. There were three buildings at the old military base turned distribution plant, and the children were being held in various rooms of them all. They had news all three buildings were in the process of being compromised, and that Laura had apprehended Rice in building A, but Marie still hoped they weren’t too late. There were too many variables to consider, so many possibilities. They knew Transigen’s resources were thin here, although nothing was stopping them from calling in a new insurgence of soldiers. There was also nothing stopping the children from having already fled. Both of these scenarios haunted her. She realized now, how desperately she wanted there to be children. She wanted them alive, and not only because they symbolized hope, but also because Transigen was barely hanging on by a thread, and if the death of Xander Rice was indeed true, well, Laura probably didn’t realize it but she had most likely just cut the last bloody artery keeping the company in power.

Marie realized that Logan’s tension was also building within him, as he uncomfortably squirmed in his seat, rubbing his hands nervously. If he had been standing, he would’ve been pacing, and Marie knew the animal was closer to the surface than Logan would have likely cared to admit.

“Hey,” she said softly, turning to him in her seat.

“Hey yourself,” he muttered, without even realizing he had fallen into their old bit.

“All this is a little reminiscent isn’t it?” she asked.

Logan snorted, suddenly good and distracted for a moment, just like Marie wanted him. “Hell, baby, I already told JP that I’m retired after this. The only mission I ever wanna go on again is trying to hunt down a decent box of Cubans this far north.”

“Sounds like my kind of adventure,” Marie teased, and he cocked a brow at her with a little smirk on his lips as she knew he was trying to parse out exactly what she meant, before the pilot’s voice came over the planes intercoms again.

“We’ll be on the ground in two minutes. No one’s asked us for landing clearance, and there’s a lot of commotion on the ground outside building A where Laura was being held. Parts of building B and C also seem to be on fire,” the voice said. Marie shot Logan a bit of an anxious look she couldn’t quite help as they both felt the jet began to quickly descend, their previous banter now forgotten. It could be either good news or bad news why they hadn’t been asked to report their presence or explain why their unmarked jet was landing at the military base, even though Alpha Flight had fabricated clearance orders to make it to the ground.

Rubber met pavement as the landing gear touched down, and Marie could make out a plume of smoke from one of the buildings as they deplaned. Neither Logan nor Marie had opted to carry any weapons with them, such were the old ways of a classic X-Men mission, but Marie noticed the others did, heavily armed as they were.

“Split up,” she heard Jean-Paul saying. Helicopter 1 takes building B and 2 takes C. The plane crew takes building A,” he finished, but Logan was already deliberately headed in the direction of A before Jean-Paul had given the order, and as Marie ran to catch up to him, a chill shot through her as she began making out the adult bodies of mostly men sprawled on the ground outside of the two-story building. But any children? She kept morbidly searching for smaller figures on the ground as now they could hear the alarms from inside the buildings going off in their ears. All the bodies on the ground were soldiers, military it looked like now they were close enough to notice, and it was then Marie realized many of them had been stabbed through the head and neck, although some of them were also missing limbs. A new sort of tension was building in Marie, and she almost missed Logan suddenly darting off to the left away from Jean-Paul and the others, and Marie knew to follow him. She trusted his senses, and whatever he had picked up on had to be important. Just then, they both heard shots being fired, and Logan was running along the side of the building, and then he stopped abruptly and Marie almost ran into him as they both turned the corner.

Around the far side of the building, only one more man was standing, but there were dozens more on the ground. Marie saw a thin girl practically crouched in front of him, facing the guard with an intense, fiery growl in her throat. Marie could sense Logan’s body going rigid as the guard tried to shoot at the little thing, before Laura pounced on the soldier. The man screamed, wildly whipping around to get her off his shoulders, before Laura unsheathed a… was that a fucking foot claw?! and stabbed the sorry bastard in the heart with her foot before finishing him off with a claw to his neck as they both fell roughly to the ground. Logan was brimming with tension, but for a moment simply watched the scene play out, seeming to instinctively know better than to interfere at this point. Laura was already getting up again anyway, seething as she cracked a neck joint with a loud snarl while a couple of bullets fell out of her shoulder, and then she roughly wiped a fresh spray of blood off her face with the sleeve of the faded blue of her t-shirt, the words Chase your dreams! sprawled across the front. Marie’s eyes widened as she turned to Logan momentarily before quietly muttering a “Holy fuck.”

---

Logan watched as Laura mutilated the last of the guards. He could still make out her smell, even as covered as it was in the smell of other people’s blood, a heavy tang of iron looming in the air. From somewhere far off he heard Marie’s walkie-talkie statically ring out, “All children alive, most in building B. All three buildings apprehended, all guards dead, in addition to 5 personnel, 58 dead in total. Most of them stabbed to death. A couple electrocuted.”

Logan whipped his head back to Laura, who was still seething as she wiped a smear of blood off of her face and stood up straight. He realized she was squinting then, taking in the sight of both adults in front of her, breathing heavily in confusion. But then, something in her senses must have clued her in, because she was shouting “Papa!” a knowing smile breaking on her lips. Logan’s heavy heart thudded forcefully inside of his chest as he found himself deliberately striding over to the smaller girl, Marie temporarily forgotten at his side, and just as he kneeled next to her, Laura tackled him, almost knocking him over with all that force and strength. She flung her thin arms around his neck, and he could hear her heart still beating wildly from exertion. “Papa,” she said again, nuzzling into his chest slightly and breathing in the scent of him, as Logan tried to summon the right words, even as they refused to come. A little time passed, and then he realized she was whispering, “I’m sorry. I had to kill them…” and he held her a little closer to keep the guilt within her at bay, as he finally muttered, “Ya did what you had to. Ya did good, kid. Real good.” She smiled widely at him, and he moved to wipe a bit of blood out of her eye. “You’re a real mess, you know that,” he said finally, voice heavy and stilted, and as she shrugged her shoulders, she finally caught the eye of the woman still standing a few feet behind them. Laura looked over to her, then back to Logan, eyes wide once more.

Logan turned to find Marie standing a bit awkwardly now, boots on the cracked asphalt, and he realized that the woman was nervous in a way he hadn’t seen on her in an awful long time. He coughed a little then, standing from where he had been kneeling as he did so.

“La mujer?” Laura asked, eyes wild and bright as Logan gave her the slightest of nods.

“She came to help me rescue ya kid, but we should’ve known that maybe you didn’t need a whole lotta help with that,” he mumbled, and Laura smiled once more before letting go of his hand to carefully make her way towards Rogue, and Logan could sense Marie’s feelings of anxiety build a little, breath coming in a little faster and heart beating a little more wildly as Laura approached her. He watched as Marie bent down a little to look Laura in the eye.

“Hi, Laura. It’s nice to finally meet you,” Marie said softly. As Marie took Laura in, Logan caught her stealing a glance back at him before turning back to the smaller girl, and he realized that Marie was quickly noticing and assessing the similarities between father and daughter, her nerves now easing as she saw so much of himself in the younger mutant.

“La mujer con el pelo hermoso,” Laura was saying, as she lifted a small hand and gently patted Marie’s hair. Marie smiled quizzically before looking at Logan then, and Logan cleared his throat.

“Uh, yeah, with the pretty hair,” Logan said, and Marie shot him a glance at his surprising knowledge of that much Spanish. Then Logan added, “Uhh…del comic. Rogue,” he said simply.

“Or Marie, if you want,” she said a bit stiltedly, even as Laura was running a hand down Marie’s braided hair once more.

“Bonita. Can you teach me?” she asked excitedly.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah I can,” Marie was saying, confidence growing by the second, and then Laura’s small, blood-stained hand was in hers, gripping it tightly.

“You can cook too, si? Papa said that you could,” Laura said, and Logan could tell Marie flinched a little at Laura’s use of past tense, although she was nodding her head through another smile.

“Yep,” she said. “I sure as heck can.” Laura shot Logan a look, but kept her hand on Marie, still making sure the woman was real and alive.

“See, papa? Now you don’t have to learn how to. Ella te ha salvado. Right?” Logan felt a small quirk of his mouth as he understood Laura’s real meaning, before glancing down to the two of them once more.

“Yeah kid,” Logan said quietly. “That’s right.”
Chapter End Notes:
One more chapter left. I can’t believe I actually made it, but there it is. Let’s take this puppy home, shall we?

Thank you, as always, for the beautiful comments and feedback. Y’all are steadily becoming a great and powerful source of joy and happiness for me.

(PS: The line: “There was(is) a long way between dying and being dead” is not mine. A version of the line actually originally appears in Wolverine by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller. I consider this a little dorky tribute.)

Thanks again for reading, bubs.
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