Making a fresh start looks a lot different in the movies. A lot easier, for one thing. A lot more fun. A lot more freeing. A lot more like an adventure. Maybe the difference is that the people in the movies choose to make a fresh start. Maybe it's more exciting when it isn't your only option. And maybe it's easier when you know who you are.
Logan knows very little about who he is, except that he's short-tempered and prone to cruelty when provoked. He knows that he likes beer and cigars and women with pretty smiles. He thinks his favorite color is blue, and that he was trained to fight and kill a long time ago, before the metal. He tells himself that he fears responsibility, and that he looks out for himself first. He wishes it didn't feel so strange to smile, and to laugh. He wonders, sometimes, if he's crazy.
Sometimes his blood thickens with anger, and he is sure that the pain will never get better. The injustices inflicted on him run wide and deep through his very being, and the ache only grows sharper with time.
He wants more than revenge--he wants answers. Before he runs out of time.
How long before it doesn't matter anymore? How long before he has to admit that anyone who remembers him is long gone? He has not aged one bit in the years he's been free. Not one gray hair on his head, not one extra crease in his face. Maybe he'd already outlived everyone in his old life before it was lost to him. Maybe they'd asked for volunteers, and he'd stepped up, because there was no one to care if he went away. If that was the case, he wishes he'd thought to leave himself a note to that effect.
He keeps moving, crossing the continent again and again. He's been as far north as he can go without a team of sled dogs, and much further south than was necessary. Something in his body tells him he did not come from a place where it's hot and dry, or hot and humid. Where snow is a rarity, or where scrub brush is more common than trees. He knows where he is from. In the broadest sense, anyway.
So he moves, restless, searching. Because he can't help thinking that somewhere along the way, someone will recognize him. Someone will know him. Someone will walk up to him and call him by a name he does not remember, refer to a shared past he cannot recall. Maybe he won't recognize them, maybe he won't remember, but it will be something, someone. A person, a past, a life, a link. That's all he needs. Just one person.
The years go by, and it never happens. Not once. No one, it seems, has ever seen him before. No one knows who he is. He is just as nameless as he feels.
He stares at his face in an endless parade of hotel mirrors, looking at a stranger who can tell him nothing. If he looks at himself too long, he sometimes forgets that it's him in the glass. His own features begin to look strange and unfamiliar to him, as if he's never seen himself before. Maybe that's what will happen, eventually. Maybe even he will cease to recognize the man who calls himself Logan.
But he never gives up. He is perpetual motion, perpetual fury, perpetual hope.
And beneath it all, perpetual nothingness.
The constant motion is a familiar pattern, a comfortable habit, and he doesn't try to break it because he doesn't have a clue what else to do. Starting a new life feels like giving up on the old one, and that looks a little too much like defeat to him. Like he didn't fight for it, didn't try to salvage what they took from him. It's as much a matter of pride as anything, and that he does not deny.
So he resists all ties, refuses to settle in one place. Which is simple, and a relief. Because then he doesn't have to tell anyone that he doesn't really exist, that he has nothing to share. That he doesn't matter to anyone but himself, and even that's hit or miss, some days. It's easier to keep searching. Easier, and safer.
Then he does one thing that changes his life forever.
He walks into a bar in Laughlin City.
And so does a girl.
Two mutants walk into a bar. It's like the first line of a bad joke.
A coincidence, maybe, that she is stumbling her way through her own fresh start when he finds her. He has a truckload of experience with that concept. He knows the harsh reality of a life without limits, and the emptiness that comes from being so damn unconcerned all the time. He doesn't want that for her. He doesn't want that for himself anymore, either.
Things get better and worse after that. Incredibly complicated, yet insanely simple. Everything he knows, everything he thought he was, collapses around him, and from then on he can no longer deny how flimsy it all was to begin with.
It unsettles him, how familiar it feels, how much it reminds him that he's been in this place before. The place where he starts over from scratch, where he has to figure out who he is all over again.
Without even trying, she shakes him to his reinforced bones, scatters the pieces of his jerry-rigged life far and wide. Sweeps it away, and uncovers the truth of what lies behind the false front he created. She sees right into the hollow heart of him, and she doesn't care that he doesn't matter to anyone else, because he matters to her.
That could be why he keeps doing things he didn't know he could do. Or didn't know he wanted to do, maybe. It's shocking, to discover new things about himself, after so many years of the same thing, day after day. He hasn't learned anything new about the man who calls himself Logan in a very long time, and now it feels like he can't stop.
He starts to think that maybe it's not a long-lost past that he needs. All he needs is a yesterday. As long as the girl remembers it, as long as it is as important to her as it is to him, it's enough. He can take it and let it flow into the dark space inside him, into the nothingness he's been brooding over for so long, and it won't feel like defeat. It will feel like surrender. The soldier in him knows that those are two very different things.
For a few horrible hours, it looks like he's driven her away. That she's seen how dangerous he is, how unstable, and she's deserted him. Left him behind. He has no choice, really, but to follow, and try to change her mind. The second she sees him, he knows everything is okay between them. She doesn't know he feels that way, but that's easily fixed.
It doesn't really matter if he convinces her to go back to the school or not, because he's got everything he owns right here on his body, and if she won't stay, he won't either. But he knows that the school is the best place for her, at least for now, and his desire to have her all to himself is overwhelmed by the urge to give her a place to be safe and happy.
Then he makes a promise, which is a first for him. When she looks up at him, he can tell the importance of his words is not lost on her. And for a few precious seconds, everything in his life is so very perfect.
And then it isn't.
And when he sees her up in that machine, he wants to roar and slash and kill and gouge, because no one can possibly understand what will happen to him without her, what he stands to lose. But for once, he does not let the rage run loose. He focuses it, narrows it down into a needle-sharp clarity that is new to him when he's in this state, because everything is different now, right down to this. She has changed everything about him, though she does not know it yet. But he knows, and he also knows that he needs her to live.
The decision to risk his own life to save hers isn't even a decision. It's an instinct of self-preservation, one that runs strong within him, and moves him to action without thought. The two of them have become intertwined in his mind; they exist together. That's when he realizes that she hasn't really changed him: she's found him.
For a moment, when he touches her skin without pain, without consequence, he wishes he could die. And then it feels like he does.
It doesn't fail to amuse him, the timing of it all. He should have known that as soon as he decided that he didn't want to follow this road, someone would hand him a map. He sits on the bed in his room--and the fact that he thinks of it as his speaks volumes--and stares at the floor and thinks.
He has more yesterday right here in this one room than he's had in all his years of wandering, and he can't ignore that fact. The girl has only been in this room once, but it was an indelible experience for both of them, and he is reluctant to leave such a place.
As he sits on the bed, he senses the potential in this room, hints of things to come, and he wants that, wants all the changes he knows will keep coming. Because he wants to be a man worth finding.
He's not quite there yet, but he thinks she will understand. She'll be doing some changing, too. She's young, and now she's trying to make sense of the things she's absorbed from others. It will take time, but that's okay. He wants to watch her become what she will, and maybe they'll influence each other a little. Maybe they'll change together.
And maybe, when she's a little older, they can leave this place together, and create something else. Something just for them. He's probably getting a little ahead of himself, but he can't deny how much the idea appeals to him.
Because now he knows. He knows that in order to really live in this world, you need something to bind you to it. And they have that now. His life force flows in her veins, and he's never been so proud, or so grateful, in his entire life. His healing, the thing that made him a victim, has made him a hero. Her skin, the thing that made her an outcast, has bound him to her. An unlikely result, but they are an unlikely match. He doesn't care. They have each other now, and neither will wander like this again.
And yet.
He flips on the light in the bathroom and stares at the stranger in the mirror. He already knows what the stranger thinks. The stranger thinks that not going feels more like running than any of the aimless wandering he's done ever has. He can't just turn his back on this chance at a past, and he's a little afraid that if he does, it will come back to haunt him at the most inconvenient time. This has to be dealt with.
His unknown past, always the unattainable dream, has become a burden he's anxious to be rid of. It's changed from something he's longed for to something he never wants to think about again. For the first time that he can remember, instead of recovering the man he was, he wants to discover the man he can be.
He really, really doesn't want to leave.
But he has no choice.
He knows the stranger in the mirror is right. He also knows that he won't be seeing him around much longer. He's looking forward to meeting his replacement.
He is annoyed to find the girl with the other students. The thought of walking into that room and talking to her in front of all of them horrifies him, and is obviously out of the question. Even the thought of stopping in the doorway and crooking a finger at her seems too crass and obvious, and he can't stand the thought of everyone knowing he's saying goodbye to her. This is something just for the two of them.
So he takes a chance, betting that she's still got his enhanced senses, betting that she will be brave enough to do what he cannot: acknowledge what has occurred between them. He simply walks past the room, hoping she will notice.
He has to stand with his hand on the doorknob for a few seconds longer than he'd like to before he hears her coming up behind him, but it's worth it.
When she tells him that she does not want him to go, he thinks he might slide to his knees in front of her, because it's exactly what he wants to hear. She somehow knows that this is what he needs. He needs to know that all of this is not a product of his overeager imagination, of his desire for a place in the world. He needs to know that she is as connected to him as he is to her. He needs to know that she sees the yesterday.
She doesn't want him to go. It is not a request to stay, not really. But it is a question, nonetheless, and one he has been waiting to answer.
That she lets him go, and trusts him to return, tells him that she understands the value of time, and that perhaps she is thinking ahead to what it may bring them. Somewhere in the future waits a grown woman and a whole man, and when they finally come together, they will no longer be two runaways. And they will find each other all over again.
With an entirely new breed of hope in his heart, the man who calls himself Logan steps into the late afternoon sunshine. His search for the man he was is almost over, but his search for the man he will be has just begun.
The End
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Author's Chapter Notes:
I finished this story a while ago, but it took me a little bit to work up the nerve to post it.