Twenty Two
Logan
He doesn’t have a good feeling about any of it. Somethin’s off in the air, especially as the light begins fading from the late summer sky. He’s currently on top of a five-story office building downtown, sweating his ass off, crouching with binoculars as he stares across the street at another old, abandoned office building. He had checked the address Charles had given him four fucking times, and this dump was it. It didn’t make sense, and it sure as hell didn’t look like anything he’d seen so far in New York or Los Angeles This part of downtown was a shithole, empty office buildings reminiscent of the overblown architecture of the nineteen nineties, now in disarray and neglect. Taped up windows. Scars of where garish signs had been drilled into the building’s exterior. But no Army. No fucking sign of any life leaving or entering the building in four fucking hours.
Again, he pricks his ears and sniffs the air deeply, and that’s when he catches it. It’s a scent, had the last few fucked-up days not happened, he would have thought he’d imagined it. But he can hear the rustling of clothing too, and her heart beating as well. He doesn’t move, doesn’t look up, but it doesn’t take much to sense Rogue is suddenly hovering several feet above him, clumsily spying on him from her perch in the sky.
“I know yer there, kid,” he gumbles loudly enough, and he can hear her “ fuck” in response. He only grunts, not even bothering to look up as he sits back from where he had been kneeling, still careful that no one can see him from the building next store, not that anyone's there to look, as he grumpily adds, “And get out of the fucking sky. Yer blowin’ my cover.”
She slowly descends, her feet silently hitting the gravel of the roof, immediately crouching next to him. She’s in a jet black tank, bare arms, hair tied up high, with the same military pants and black combat boots. He finally shoots her a look, unsure if he’s expected this, or not. Somehow, nothin’ surprises him when it comes to Rogue, especially now. Anything is fuckin’ possible.
“There’s no one around to blow a cover for. And you took my bike,” she grumbles, as she peers over the lip of the building, taking in the abandoned business complex.
“It’s technically my bike, and you weren't using it,” Logan mutters. At that, Rogue turns back to him, biting her lip for a moment before asking the obvious.
“What are you doing here, Logan?” she says.
“None of yer business,” he barks, instantly annoyed as he brings binoculars up once more to eye the front door of the dilapidated office park.
“Sorry. Wrong question. It’s painfully obvious what you’re doing. But why are you here?” she adds through an annoyed tone, but he ignores this particular question.
“I ain’t seen one person go in or out of this fucking place for four hours,” he responds instead, putting down the binoculares finally and wiping the sweat from his brow. “Ain’t that strange?” he adds.
Instead though, Rogue only rolls her eyes, crossing her thin arms more tightly around her chest. The last of the sunlight is running out, and now she blends in more with the backdrop of night behind her.
“For someone so desperate to find the General, you don’t know a lot about the Army,” she grumbles, and at that remark he throws her a look. He shouldn’t care, doesn't care, but he still asks, regardless.
“You fly all the way here to offer me a running critique?” he asks. Her eyebrows furrow as she frowns, before letting out a tired sigh.
“ No. Well, maybe. Not because I care. Or, it’s not about you. It’s just you’re about to fuck this all up, and I’m here to tell you you’re in over your head,” she mutters.
Logan, despite himself, can’t help but let out a bark of laughter at this. He’s lived in a fucking ditch in France during trench warfare, has stormed the beaches of Normandy, has survived entirely from raw, animal instinct for years. This ain’t nothing like being in over his head. But Rogue keeps on.
“I mean it. We’ve drawn up schematics on this place,” she says, gesturing once more to the empty building, before frustratingly pulling out a blocky device from a utility belt that’s a little too large to be a cell phone. A quick numerical entry and she’s showing him blueprints. “There are at least a dozen entry points to a series of underground warehouses. This place is sprawling… massive,” she finishes, willing him to understand through the use of pictures.
“You’ve got fucking schematics on this place and you haven’t infiltrated or bombed the fuck out of it it yet? Why?” Logan growls, staring at her wildly once more. Again she exhales frustratingly, shoving the device back on the belt when she notices he’s not all that interested in looking at her intel.
“The X-Men don’t bomb things. And infiltrating a base like this takes time. It takes planning,” she mutters, and he detects the patronizing tone in her voice, and, despite himself, he throws her a smirk and a cocked brow that she’s lectureing him. Of course, he knows this, but this is an extenuating and time-sensitive circumstance.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Rogue mutters, before continuing on. “Listen, I want to bring this fucker down as much as you do, but it’s not this easy. You can’t just waltz in there and mow them all over. There might be hundreds of Army members down there. We don’t know how-”
He cuts her off, as suddenly a noise off in the distance has him listening hard.
“Shut up,” he barks, throwing up a hand up to silence her. She’s smart enough to stop talking, but throws him a nasty look for being shushed, as he strains to make out the sound.
“I can hear it. Freight elevator in the southwest corner of the building. Movin’, three floors below.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Rogue grumbles. “It’s in the fucking schematics.”
“That’s the way in,” he ignores her. “And the closer we get, the easier it will be to find those kids. Children’s heartbeats, they’re different,” he mutters, moving to stand from where he had been kneeling, shoving the binoculars back in his pack.
“I thought you were here to kill the general,” she hisses, even as she also stands.
“ I am. Yer gonna save the kids,” he mumbles, zipping up the back and slinging it over his shoulder
“I’m not doing anything,” she spits, crossing her arms in such a childish way his memory instantly takes him back to when he had known her last, as a scared, stubborn girl-almost-woman who he had pulled into the back of his camper so she didn’t die of fucking hypothermia.
“You sayin’ you gotta chance to save lives and yer not gonna take it?” he taunts, and at this her eyebrows raise to her hairline in skepticism, before she lets out a scoff and a laugh.
“I’d just be ripping out a page from your book,” she shoots back. He holds back a snarl, and tries a different tactic.
“Listen. The kids are here. I have it on good authority they are. Charles--” he begins, and silently curses himself for being an idiot and instantly shuts up.
“What?” she asks, eye going wide. He says nothing as she stares at him.
“What did Charles say?” she presses, but he’s already moving on.
“Nothin’. Listen. How strong are you?” he asks, changing the subject.
“Excuse me?”
“Maybe three people in my life have been able to knock me unconscious darlin’, for however brief, and yer one of ‘em. Congratulations. How strong are you?” he asks again.
“Strong,” she says, through narrowed, even eyes.
“How strong?” he presses, throwing a glance back over to the building. It was near dark now, thank fuck. They’d have to move and soon.
“I can throw a car across a football field,” she says, and he grins. Not only is this knowledge useful, he also knows he has her. She’s giving in. He can feel it. He humors her with a low whistle, and she rolls her eyes at him.
“And you can fly,” he adds.
“Obviously,” she grumbles. He nods, and grips his pack more tightly
“Meet in the southwest alley next to this building in an hour. I need a fuckin’ drink, and then we’re doin’ this,” he says through a savage grin. At this, Rogue frowns, clutching her shoulders in a way that tells him she’s not done talkin’.
“Logan-” she begins before he cuts her off.
“LIsten kid. You followed me, so you might as well pitch in a little,” he eggs her on, and finally she drops her hands before wiping the sweat collecting on her temple.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” she mutters.
“That’s more like it,” Logan says through a smirk.
--
He paces the tight space in the alley where he’s stashed the old bike and his belongings. He’s consumed a ridiculous amount of whiskey, but the effects are already fading. He isn’t sure, still, why he had been so fucking intent on gettin’ Rogue’s help, but now that he has it, if she shows up, he knows it’s gonna be fuckin’ invaluble, no matter how much she might be a pain in his ass. The truth is, his plan was simply to mow down a bunch of deranged fucks, but beyond that, he hadn’t thought much about how to spring the kids, in accordance with the deal he made with Xavier. He couldn’t fucking very well throw ‘em all on the back of his bike, and Westchester was a long way back.
The truth is he hasn’t been thinking clearly about any of this shit. He just needs his claws in the General’s chest, as soon as possible. The animal wants to taste his goddamn blood, bring him down, make him pay...
And then…
Then . He hasn’t thought of then. He hasn’t let himself. Because, likely, all then means is a drifting, desolate nothing. Then means he will be without purpose, without meaning.
Suddenly, he hears her behind him. He’d been in his head too much, and he hadn’t sensed her. He snubs out his cigar with the heel of a black boot, trying to shake off the feelings he had almost succumbed to. He has to get a fucking grip, if he’s gonna do this right. He turns, looking with a blank stare at the woman once more descending from the sky, even as she starts talking.
“The only reason I’m here is because the last botched mission was on me. I failed to extract those kids on Staten Island during the raid on the zoo, and god knows what’s happened to them since. And you’re right. Whatever you do with the General is your business. I’m here to right my wrong, you understand me?” she says sternly. For a moment he only blinks at her, this very, very different woman he doesn’t know at all, never really knew. The woman he knows, the woman he loves , is dead.
“Yeah, kid. Got it,” he grunts, before turning back to face the empty building.
“Stealth in the beginning. We need to get to the kids first, make sure they aren’t in the line of fire,” she hisses, nodding toward another dark alleyway that looks like a utility entrance across the street. He nods at her slightly, realizing in a quick moment that he’d benefit from her tactical strategy, along with her powers. Truth is he’s rusty at all this shit. Incredibly rusty. Damn you and your pacifism, baby, he sends a quiet thought to Itsu.
“We know this entrance is rarely used. That’s probably why Xavier gave you this address. We can probably take the freight elevator down,” she says as they both silently make their way across the street in the dead of night.
“Xavier didn’t-” he begins, but she cuts him off.
“Come on, Logan. You don’t have to protect the Professor. How else would you know about this place?” she asks as they reach the alleyway.
“I woulda found it eventually,” he mutters, as they now both stare up at the heavy steel frame of a utility door.
“Should I do the honors or do you wanna?” he asks, but he watches as she steps up to the door and easily pulls it open..
“It’s unlocked,” she says knowingly, before looking to him once more. “Schematics.”
He only lets out a stubborn growl as he follows her inside. The place looks dank and unlit, but small. In the corner is the exact thing they’re lookin’ for. The freight elevator.
“You think you can hot wire that thing to work somehow?” she asks him through a devilish grin and an arch of her brow, but he finds himself frowning as he stares back at the elevator.
“We’ll see. If it’s hydraulic, we won't need to. Just needta unlock it somehow. And you sure we ain’t gonna be noticed, using this hunk of junk? Aren’t there any fucking stairs?” he turns, asking her frustratingly.
Rogue’s already shaking her head as she’s shoving the grate open easily, gesturing him to follow her. “Not at this entrance. So… get to it.”
He sighs as he lets one claw slide completely out on his left hand, as warm drops of blood fall to the floor at their feet. He shoves it through the locking mechanism, jerking upward quickly, figuring he should start by dredging up an age-old memory of gettin’ old mid-century elevators to work without a key, and suddenly the elevator creaks to life.
“Fuck. It worked,” Rogue hisses triumphantly, but then he notices she’s staring down at the adamantium still extended, with wider eyes than he would expect before he quickly sheathes it. As the elevator slowly starts to descend, he’s not sure why she was starin’ at ‘em like she’s never seen ‘em before. Hell, he’d cut her own clothes off her with the same claw over a decade ago so he could claim her. Suddenly, an image of that first night in the camper, the night he learned some other fucking man had not only touched her, but had fuckin’ raped her, fills his mind. He clenches his jaw suddenly, willing the memory to leave, as he grimaces at all the fucking noise the goddamn thing is making. As it settles on the ground floor, Rogue expertly waits to open the door so that Logan can first take lay of the land.
He takes a deep sniff of the air, tries to listen, throwing out his hearing as far as possible. But... nothing. Logan gives her a nod, and Rogue finally shoves the door open. They’re met with practically pitch black darkness. He’s sure he can see better than Rogue, and intuitively he grabs her wrist, pulling her along. He half-expects her to yank her arm away like she had so many times as a teenager, but she doesn’t, realizing as much as he if she doesn’t want to end up lost in a fucking hallway she’d better stay close. They turn down this empty corridor and that, practically relying entirely on his instinct alone, until he senses a change in the atmosphere. Long before he can possibly see anything, he smells the scent of mercury-vapor. Fluorescent lighting.
“Be ready,” he growls, as they turn down another hallway. The further they walk, the more the smells he can detect. Chemicals. Rubbing alcohol. Dried blood.
“I don’t know what this place is, but it ain’t no zoo. Smells like another fucking lab to me,” he mutters, and she nods, before, finally, he makes out bright light flooding from an adjoining hallway. He offers Rogue one quick look, dropping her arm. She nods curtly at him, and he realizes he’s impressed. Whoever this woman is, she has seen battle. She fuckin’ knows how to be ready.
He pauses at the turn to the lit hallway, and listens. And then, he hears it. Heartbeats, some quicker than others, some of them definitely children. His senses color in the details of the map he’s quickly drawing in his mind, before he murmurs, “At least eight closed-off rooms. A kid or two in each. Don’t know where the fuck the adults are... wait,” he whispers, straining his hearing. There . “The first door on the left. A kid’s unconscious, but alive. Two adults with him.”
“Fuck, that’s a useful skill set. I’ve forgotten,” she mutters, and he realizes she’s talking about the time before, when he would fuck her and she’d take him in. He shoots her a look for a moment, arching a brow in the darkness, before waiting a few more moments and finally turning the corner into the lit hallway.
Just as he’s stepped into the light though, he can hear the door opening.
Fuck.
He yanks Rogue back around the corner again, and they both breathe silently as he hears the footsteps disappear down the hall.
“Now,” he whispers, and once more they enter the hallway flooded with fluorescent light. He’s at the first door on the left in an instant, and once more with a slow slide of one claw, he easily pops the lock open. He’s waiting for a fuckin’ alarm or something to buzz, unsure of how savvy the Army’s tech is down here, but nothing happens. What they find is a small surgical room sloppily littered with medical supplied and a small body of an unconscious boy, hooked up to an IV, although the pump doesn’t seem to be on. As they approach, Logan quickly realizes the kid’s missing a leg and an arm that are bandaged at the knee and elbow, obviously having been freshly amputated.
“Oh G od ,” Rogue murmurs, her hand flying over her mouth.
“ Jesus ,” Logan mutters under his breath as Rogue carefully walks over to the boy.
“What...happened to him?” she asks, her hand hovering just over the boy’s brown locks sweatily pasted to his forehead, the boy’s brows furrowed in distress.
“Looks like they were experimenting on more than just their genes…” Logan growls. Rogue shoots him a sharp, suspicious look.
“What do you mean their genes?” she hisses, and as Logan stalks about the room, looking for any clue, any fuckin’ sign of anything, Rogue touches the boy’s forehead gently, and that’s when everything changes.
The boy’s eyes shoot open. And he starts screaming. It’s a pained scream, one that tells Logan immediately that whenever these fuckers sliced him up they didn’t bother using any kind of painkiller.
“Rogue! Shut him up!” Logan hisses, but when he turns to her she’s white as a sheet, staring at the boy helplessly a few feet away from him as he sobs.
“Rogue!!”
Just then though, hurried footsteps coming toward them, somebody shouting orders and then, an alarm wails. The room is suddenly drenched in black apart from an emergency light that illuminates everything in red every few seconds.
“Fuck!” he curses. Logan can barely hear anything apart from the boy’s sobs and the sirens, but he knows they’re out of time.
“Behind me, Rogue!” Logan commands, as he plants his feet on the floor, putting himself in between the door and the boy, in what will be the direct line of fire in mere moments.
“ No,” she says, and suddenly she is springing forward to get in front of him, just as the door is being thrown open.
“Rogue, BEHIND ME,” he shouts. “What the fuck are ya-”
And then there’s an onslaught of bullets. He grits his teeth as he catches one in the shoulder, and another in his right thigh as, meanwhile, most of the bullets pour off Rogue’s body, falling uselessly to the floor.
Jesus fucking Christ, is all he has time to think, before he roars, quickly shoving his claws into the chest of the first guard, pulling them out only to effectively slice the throat of the second guard. The two men he must have heard earlier behind the dead men at his feet simply gawk at the scene before him, unarmed and soft, one with a greasy comb over in a lab coat and the other in scrubs. He shoots a glance at Rogue, and she nods fiercely, already throwing one in scrubs across the room, as Logan springs for the other. As the man in scrubs struggles to get up, Rogue’s mangled the handle to the door, inhibiting anyone else to pass through, at least temporarily.
Smart fucking woman.
The kid’s still sobbing behind them, and Logan fleetingly hopes he ain’t shot as well, as he pins the labcoat fucker up against the wall, easily shoving his claws through the guy’s arm where it’s connected to his chest. The man lets out a choked scream, and meanwhile, Rogue’s picked the man in scrubs off the floor and has a hand around his throat easily pinning him to the wall as well, waiting for Logan’s next move.
“Where is he?!” Logan barely grinds out, but the man is muttering nonsense under his breath that makes no goddamn sense.
“We are the one species. The one race. We shall inherit the earth. And mutilate the abominable.” Logan growls loudly at all the bullshit he’s hearing, and shoves his claws deeper through the man’s arm and into the plywood and drywall. He knows he’s severed the fucker’s arm by now. All he has to do is rip the claws out and this creep’s halfway to being like the kid he’s probably tortured and maimed crying on the bed still behind them both.
“Goddamnit, shut the fuck up and tell me and maybe you won’t lose a leg. Where the fuck is he? The kingpin, the motherfucking man in charge? Where’s the General?!”
“We see the future, we are the past. The one species. The one race,” he keeps blubbering on through tears. It’s then Logan loses his patience, yanking his claws out of the wall, effectively severing the man’s arm from his body, before using the other set of claws to quickly detach the man’s left leg at the fucking knee.
“Logan!” he hears Rogue’s shout of protest at his method of torture, but he isn’t listening. The man will bleed out in minutes, and he needs more information.
“We are all the general. We are one,” the man’s still muttering.
“The fuck?” Logan snarls, just as he hears the telltale crunch and sizzle of acid. Fucking cyanide pill
“God DAMN IT,” he roars, and quickly he rounds on Rogue and the other fucker squirming against the wall. Rogue is giving him enough air to breathe, but Logan can see the bruises forming on his throat regardless. Meanwhile, the boy is still screaming. The alarm is still sounding. Outside the door, pounding, gunfire. The man is trying to say something through wheezes and gasps.
“Let ‘em talk,” Logans snarls, and Rogue loosens her grip slightly.
“Oh god. Please...please. I can’t tell ya, I can’t tell ya where. Besides, you’re wrong, man. There ain’t no General. It’s a myth, a mindset. A way to distract crazy fucks like you. Jesus. I’m new ok, just recruited me into this. They’re a fucking cult. They’re crazy. Let me go and-”
“Move, Rogue,” Logan growls insidiously, while inside his mind a white, hot rage begins blurring his vision.
“... Logan, ” she breathes, looking at him sharply.
“Move. Now,” he’s barely able to speak, and just as she steps aside he effectively drives his claws through the man’s forehead and pulls them out again, spraying them both in a fresh spatter of red, and the man slumps to the floor, lifeless.
Rogue stares down at the body in disbelief, and then jerks her eyes up to him. He stares at her for one moment, then another, seething all the while, as the last human thing he does is force out a nod. And he hopes she understands.
Everyone in this place dies, but the kids.
Rogue
In the weeks she had briefly known Logan, she had experienced an intense, all-consuming relationship with him. She had witnessed him feral and bloodstained after the Estevan job. She’d seen the sweat pour off him in the ring, knocking teeth out of drunk, sorry excuses for men. She remembered his eyes go dark and savage with lust as he claimed her over and over again amidst the dying light of the fireplace in the cabin they’d shared for two fleeting weeks. She’d even seen his claws, remembered the blood dripping from his hands that one fateful night when he had extended them for her when she had asked.
But she had never, not once, seem him murder. Slaughter. Maim. Tear apart.
As she stares down at the dead man who pled for his life but Logan did not feel enough mercy to spare, she feels Logan’s humanity run out the drain. The news of the General, if it was true, had done it to him. She watches as he carves down the door in an instant and takes a round of bullets to the chest, and she can hear his roar intensify as he easily plunges his claws into guard after guard. Through the open doorway, she watches, frozen to the spot, as he bucks and weaves, intimately ripping out jugulars, ending life after life, his body painted in blood. She stands transfixed for long moments until he disappears down the hall, and she hears the muffled cry of the boy again. She wipes the blood out of her eyes and stumbles over to him, delicately yanking the IV out of his hand and lifting him up into her arms.
She’s not a mother. She has no idea what to say. He can’t be more than six years old, and the nagging question of - how did they know he was a mutant- gets shoved down as she murmurs the only thing she can say over and over again in his ear. It’s ok. It’s ok. You’re safe. You’re safe.
As she carries the crying boy into the hall, it’s a bloodbath. It’s dark except for the red flashing lights, but the corridor is drenched in entrails and severed limbs. She hears gunfire ahead of her, Logan’s wild snarl. She wants to help, wants to go to him, but she realizes very quickly that the animal, the man, whoever he was, had deftly carved a path through the narrow hall, pushing guards back and clearing it for her to get into the rooms. She swallows her own bloodthirst and holds the boy close to her for a moment before setting him down gingerly.
“I’ll be back. Let me save the others,” she says quickly, and he only nods at her through tears. As she throws her weight against the next door with her shoulder, it easily gives way she wildly hopes more of these kids can walk than not and that most of them are awake, and she finds that they are. Door after door, room after room, she finds children strapped to hospital beds or huddled in cages, children will gills and tails and paws, all severely mutated. They seem to understand though, or somehow know, and it’s only after a couple of desperate pleas on her part as she smashes locks and rips the straps off hospital beds, they follow her. She can’t see Logan anymore, turned down another hall as he is, but once all the children are free, ten in all, she intuitively snags the sat phone from her utility belt with shaking, bloodstained hands. It’s a one-button call, and it connects immediately.
“Cyclops,” she breathes, as the leader of the X-Men answers the emergency line.
“Rogue, where the fuck are you? And why the hell did you turn your GPS locator off?! The whole fucking place is up in arms-”
“The Eerie base. We...stormed the facility. We’ve got the children.”
For a moment, he doesn’t answer, and she can feel the intense, burning disappointment at her breaking ranks, overlaid with the relief that the children are safe, in his silence.
“ Scott!” she yells desperately into the phone.
“The Bird will be there in ten minutes. Get them above ground if you can. And Rogue?”
“Yes?”
“Are they all dead? The Army combatants at the Eerie base? The scientists?”
She stares again down the drenched corridor, but she can’t see anything but the faces of the children huddled around her and the dozens of dead bodies that fill the hall. She can no longer hear shouts or gunfire, but the alarms are still wailing.
“I...I think so. Scott, hurry. Most of them need medical attention.”
“Hank will go with me. We’re leaving now.”
She hangs up, clutching the phone in her hand, as she stares wildly at the children staring back at her in fear. Two are missing limbs Some are sporting acid burns. One’s been blinded. But enough of them can walk and they’ll be able to manage the freight elevator. She stares back down the corridor wildly, and that’s when she sees him. He’s still snarling, limping his way back, tramping over dead bodies as he does so. She can see the bullet holes in his chest still healing, his eyes completely dark, and as he sees them he stops, keeping his distance, swaying slightly from the spot he’s planted himself in.
“Logan…” she says clearly, trying to understand if he’s come back to himself, but the first little boy who’s been amputated and had witnessed Logan gut the guards begins to cry wildly again, and this seems to shake Logan out of his fog.
He clenches his jaw, finally sheathing the claws, his eyes clearing as they begin to dart back and forth, assessing the situation before throwing a glance over his shoulder.
“We needta...move. Here...they’re dead. But...they’ll...send back-up,” he mutters, then finally moves forward to the children, some of whom cower in fear at the sight of him.
“Who can’t walk?” he growls, and Rogue nods at the first boy who’s silently crying, while she gathers a little girl who’s more catlike that human who’s also missing a leg into her arms.
The boy cries a bit as Logan approaches, and Logan, almost as if he was approaching the wild animal he himself had just embodied, holds out a steady hand, inching closer.
“Hey bub. S’ok,” Logan mutters, but the little boy still whimpers in fear. Still, Logan closes the space between them. “You gotta name?”
“T-Todd,” he barely manages through tears.
“Alright, Todd. Look...name’s Logan. I’m like you, alright? And I ain’t gonna hurt ya. But this place, we needta get out of here, yeah?” Finally, the boy nods meekly, and Logan easily collects him in his arms. The boy clutches the man then, resting his tear-stained cheek on Logan’s broad, bloodstained shoulder.
---
The jet ride back is almost entirely silent. Hank is on board, attending to those with the most dire medical needs, but he’s administered shots of morphine to any child who appears to need it. Rogue sits across from Logan in the back of the plane with the kids, exhaustion biting at her heels as she stares at the man who has single-handedly succeeded at what the X-Men could not accomplish only a week before, but by the look of utter defeat on the man’s face, you wouldn’t know it. The boy who Logan slowly carried onto the jet has not let go of Logan, but the morphine has made him sleepy, and now he dozes in the older mutant’s arms. Logan cradles the back of the child’s head with a heavy hand, but there’s a dead, blank look in Logan’s eyes.
It’s only a handful of minutes until the jet has safely arrived in the black of night under the mansion, and Jean, Hisako and a couple others are there with gurneys ready to meet them. Still though, the boy won’t let go of Logan, and the older mutant tiredly stands, stalking off the jet with the kid still in his arms.
“Logan…” Rogue hears herself murmur, but he mutters a “not now” as he slowys treads forward, following Jean and the others to the medbay.
Rogue helps where she can, but all the children need some form of medical attention and most of the med staff takes over. Every muscle in her body aches and seems in desperate need of sleep and a shower, but she can’t seem to leave the hallway right outside the medbay, and she realizes she desperately wants for Logan to reemerge.
Finally, after what feels like an hour, the sliding doors of the mess bay open, and the man, clothes in tatters from what seems like a hundred bullet holes and still painted in dried red, stalks through into the hall. She can tell he’s also dead on his feet. He simply stares at for a moment, maybe confused why she’s still here, before letting a grunt of acknowledgement and turning left down one of the empty hallways that sprawl underneath the X-mansion.
“Logan, wait,” is all she can manage to say.
He stops, sighs deeply, and turns once more to face her. A few feet and ten years apart stand between them.
“I’m sorry….about the General. I know you’re...disappointed,” she manages to murmur, wringing her hands with a sudden swell of anxiety. Somehow, she wants to soothe his pain, undo the news. Right what’s been made wrong.
“ Disappointed ,” he mutters under his breath, shaking his head warily. She frowns deeply, before she takes a step closer to him.
“You have to understand though. News like this was probably inevitable. Even if the General was real, the Army is like a hydra. You cut off a head and two grow its place. Killing him won’t kill the collective. But what you did tonight, how you took down, god, more than fifty of them, that’s how we advance mutant rights--”
“-- Shut up ,” he hisses through a snarl, his body instantly laced with tension. She’s shocked by this interruption, but tries to clarify.
“But you need to know-”
“I mean it, kid. Shut it,” he growls again. She’s quiet for a moment, trying to stifle her hurt demeanor along with her anger, and again tries to double-down on her courage.
“But...sugar,” she murmurs as she walks a step closer to him, lifting a steady hand to touch his shoulder in understanding, but as soon as she does he grabs her wrist roughly, pulling her close to his face.
“You needta quit talkin’ about things you don’t understand, Rogue. Don’t you get it? I don’t fuckin’ care about the collective or about ‘advancing mutant rights’. I don’t even give a fuck about all those miserable, sorry children. That wasn’t what this was about,” he snarls, finally dropping her wrist in apparent disgust, taking a couple of steps back to pace the tight space in front of her. She can’t believe it when it happens, but, for some reason unknown to her, a hot tear falls down her face. And she hasn’t cried in years.
“Then what is it about?” she asks blindly. He ignores her, still pacing wildly about like the caged animal he is.
“Logan...then what was it about?” she demands of him again. He stops in an instant, and then all the anger is suddenly gone from his face. Instead, what she sees in his eyes, what she’s never seen before is profound guilt. Crippling sorrow. All-consuming grief.
“My wife,” he whispers harshly. She stares at him wildly, blinking back tears as her mind tries to apply these foreign words to the man she thought she knew. But she’s lost her will to speak, and he takes to pacing again.
“Those Sinopec fuckers were tracking me for years. I can’t set a fuckin’ foot in Canada, Rogue. I hid all over the fuckin’ world. Changed names, came up with aliases, but they found me, eventually,” he growls, turning to look at her once more.
“We were tryin’ to get to Japan, especially after all that anti human-mutant marriage shit was passed. She had family there.”
“She... was human?” Rogue asks gently, but at that comment her viciously rounds on her, once more inches from her face.
“There a problem with that?”
“What? No. No. I just…”
“Just what? Didn’t think I was capable of somethin’ like that? Or that I just didn’t deserve it?”
She bites her tongue, and says nothing. The truth is, most of the past ten years, she probably thought both, as embittered with her past as she was. But that was before, and this is now. Whoever is standing in front of her, whoever had saved those children tonight, is different than the man she knew before. When she says nothing, though, he lets out a bitter laugh and begins to pace once more.
“And you know what the real joke is? You’d be right. I’m not. I don’t. ‘Cause I got greedy. That was it, wasn’t it? Wanted too much outta my fucked up, miserable life. I knew, I knew I was putting her in jeopardy by...by stayin’ but I just had to keep gettin’ my fill, insisted on keepin’ her with me, makin’ empty promises about how we’d be safe. Thinkin’ I was owed a home, a family….”
Rogues uncomfortably clutches one arm, tears now drying on her cheeks as she tries to understand what he wants from her, what he needs. Right now, she’s simply trying, for the first time in a long time, to listen.
“I was was at the fucking bank ,” he spits, running a shaking hand through his mussed hair. “Emptying our accounts, gettin’ passports forged, and while I was gone, s-she….she took eleven bullets. Eleven fucking bullets cause of me.”
He stops again, and she can tell the fight’s left him. He’s breathing hard, tearless, but full of more misery than she’s ever seen in one man. She wants to apologize for asking, at the very least, but there is still so much animosity she harbors for him, and she doesn’t know how.
“Sugar…” she finally manages, but he isn’t listening.
“I gotta get out of this shithole. I gotta...gotta…. “ he stammers, looking this way and that along the cold, desolate hallways, before she instinctively whips out a hand and stops him.
“Just…. wait,” she whispers, and everything changes as he pulls her toward his tall, warm frame, in one moment savagely taking her mouth in his in a fervent, all-encompassing kiss. Her brain barely has time to process what’s happening as he backs her to the wall, hand gripping the back of her head, threading his fingers through her hair, as his tongue slides across her own before he bites down on her bottom lip.. She’s stunned, then gives into the fucking savergy of it all for a moment, as her neurons fire and ignite, all cylinders alit, before she truly realizes what he’s doing, who he’s replacing her with, all the pain he’s caused. Coming to, she snakes a hand between them and gently presses it to his chest to break the kiss. He stumbles back a step, and both of them breathe heavily for a moment, as something in his face falls. As he realizes what he’s just done.
“ Jesus . I’m- I’m sorry,” he mutters, and his eyes dart wildly once more back and forth down the hall before he begins to stalk off once more to the elevator.
Wait, she thinks. She’s sure she’s said out loud, but then realizes she hasn’t found her voice yet, and she tries once again: “Wait!” she says hoarsely. He pauses once more, throwing her an annoyed, hurt look over one shoulder.
“Don’t...leave,” she mutters. “You need to get out of the mansion? Fine, but don’t leave. Not yet.”
“I don’t take orders from anyone anymore,” he spits bitterly at her. She frowns through the hurt, trying to keep her own anger at bay, as she tries to explain.
“I’m not ordering you. I’m asking,” she whispers. And, at that, something in his eyes goes cold. What he says next is barely more than a whisper.
“Once... I recall askin’ you for the very same thing,” he mutters. The sting of his words has her closing her eyes momentarily in defense, before she breathes in sharply, unable to respond and still waiting for his answer. He stares at her for a moment more, and then offers her a brief, resolved nod.
“There’s a shitty motel two miles north of here. Find me there until the end of the week. But Rogue?”
“Yes?” she asks blankly.
“I ain’t stepping another foot in this fuckin’ place ever again,” he breathes vehemently, before stalking off again down the hall.
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Chapter End Notes:
Whew! Ok! I caught up with this website! Three more chapters, folks!