Summary: Marie thought she needed a cure. Logan thought he needed answers. Turns out fulfilling a need is a lot less satisfying than accepting a want – but no less achingly complicated.
First part in the
Use Somebody series. Post-X3, the architects of Marie's cure and Logan's amnesia conspire within the government. Only together can Marie and Logan break their cycles of self-destruction and stop a war they were never meant to start.
Categories: X1,
X2,
X3,
X-Men Origins Wolverine Characters: None
Genres: Action, Angst, Drama, Shipper
Tags: None
Warnings: None
Challenges: Series: Use Somebody
Chapters: 13
Completed: No
Word count: 24694
Read: 77240
Published: 12/16/2010
Updated: 08/15/2011
Story Notes:
This was supposed to be a series of standalone stories, but that flimsy charade has been toppled by the merciless all-mighty Plot Bunny. Heil, Plot Bunny. May he live for a thousand years. And may this fic take me considerably less time to finish.
ETA: With real plot comes the need for better clarity. Flashbacks are now in past tense and current events in present tense. Please excuse my attempt at artsiness.
1. Scream: I by thatcraftykid
2. Scream: II by thatcraftykid
3. Scream: III by thatcraftykid
4. Brain Stew: I by thatcraftykid
5. Brain Stew: II by thatcraftykid
6. Brain Stew: III by thatcraftykid
7. Wish I Was the Moon: I by thatcraftykid
8. Wish I Was the Moon: II by thatcraftykid
9. Wish I Was the Moon: III by thatcraftykid
10. Trust Me: I by thatcraftykid
11. Trust Me: II by thatcraftykid
12. Trust Me: III by thatcraftykid
13. King of Anything: I by thatcraftykid
Scream: I by thatcraftykid
Author's Notes:
Lots of time jumps, just as a heads up. And here's the song in case you're not familiar: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P4A1K4lXDo].
track 1 // “SCREAM”
Peek into the shadow, I come into the light
You tell me I'm wrong, then you better prove you're right
Janet Jackson
Fall 2010
White noise drones above her tilted head. Inside it crackles.
Marie’s skin, already pale from two sunless summers, is bleached under fluorescent exposure. She is translucent where a nurse smears antiseptic over her pulsing vein. The nurse is brisk and efficient, like her slicked, black hair. She is overly cautious. Her skin is separated from Marie’s by latex, metal prongs, and a cotton swab. The other nurse, the one seated with her face in her hands, thinks evolution should have color-coded Marie neon orange or black and yellow striped. Nature’s own warning.
What Nurse Kim doesn’t think is anything nefarious. In two weeks of administering the cure, she hasn’t seen so much as an allergic reaction. Marie’s last logical misgiving seems to check out.
So she is left with white noise, the voiceless static of an eighteen-panel jury. One life for each year of her own. Eleven mutants, five not. Four strangers and an equal number of enemies to friends. More are afraid of her than would admit it. Three love her to the point of ultimatums. Two are dead but not silent.
Never silent. When ignored they are earworm jingles. Show weakness and suddenly they are shattered mirrors of quicksilver memories that vibrate so loud her teeth ache.
Their persistent thrum. A seizure-wracked boy asks the Lord why. A mother prays that her daughter be absolved of someone else’s sins. A sinner’s hands on her face, the first mutation forced on her. She gives her her gods and devils to see. The survivor of horrors sees in a mirror one God, one Devil. He would change her ignorance to sainthood, weakness to martyrdom. Gods and insects, us and them. She has taken the air from a traitor’s lungs, but what he hates her for is why. His is glorious vengeance on the Hallmark family who doesn’t exist even for golden boys. The infuriatingly noble. So sure she won’t hurt him until she does. He pretends he doesn’t suspect that the girl who has everything but him plays an image of them kissing on loop.
Who is alone and who is not. She doesn’t mean to intrude on the fractured mourning of the desolate changed, but in him deathless energy rises before her time. The man who limits omniscience on principle lends her a whisper of his power to set her right. But it doesn’t and he’s gone and the whole world might very well burn with her. Drone, crackle, thrum.
“Are you ready?” A blast of detachment. Exactly what Marie needs out of this.
Her friend comes to her, his presence such a comfort she must be stronger than she wants to be to get by in his absence. Be sure. Her mutation has been his death and his salvation, but he has learned at what cost when he rocked her through his nightmares. It has to be what she wants.
The touch of the needle cools her skin.
“I said, ‘Are you ready?’”
Yes. For so many logical – cowardly, selfish – understandable reasons. She nods her tilted head. If she unclenches her jaw, they won’t quit screaming until it’s over.
It was called “The Freak Out” on the cover of
Time. Six million mutants had cried out in front of six billion humans, who’d writhed in turn. Forty-three seconds. A whole planet strangled. Heart attacks, car crashes – the unlucky few who died had equal odds. Mutants lost the numbers game but won an opportunity.
Anna Marie D’Ancanto, composed and contained under the stiff black leather uniform of X-Man Rogue, watched President McKenna fold his hands and address the nation: “An alarm has sounded. We are awake.”
Wideawake. The government’s contingency plan leaked by Mystique, who staged Senator Kelly’s assassination. The public clicked its tongue at internment camps and hundred-foot sentinels. Strangelove conspiracies and Cold War death rays had no place in a world that demanded the preservation of normalcy. The second president to resign from the highest office of these United States did so dodging accusations of paranoia. His successor put together a Department of Mutant Affairs the same day he called up the National Guard.
All across America, they took a breath as one and hold it. Days, weeks, months. They told themselves to forget.
For forty-three seconds, Marie had existed solely on a genetic level. Her side bruised as she pushed her body against the hard floor of the jet. Her clenched fingers nearly snapped under the strain of unfathomable agony. She had been electrocuted from the inside.
The current changed her polarity. Her thoughts sparked synapse to synapse on a negative charge. Static electricity bristled the hairs on her arms. Her gloves fit tighter. Four months later, her mutation had consumed her life.
No, she could not forget. She remained freaked out.
When it came right down to it, the universe had a twisted way of making her choices for her. Circumstantial freewill was all Marie believed she had.
She’d run away from home and then the clinic because she couldn’t take being treated like a leaper or an experiment. Good for her, except she hadn’t actually wanted to live out on the streets. Where did she have to go? Who did she have to trust? Rah, rah, civil rights and all that, but she was as segregated from other mutants as she was from normal people.
Study hall was where she saw the news. Warren Worthington of Worthington Labs lifted a clear vial in just the right way that sunlight glinted off it like a beacon. “We have cure.” Gasps and murmurs. Fifteen mutants in the room, they all turned to stare at the one they knew only as Rogue.
A year and a half before, had the doctors at Meridian Regional offered Marie a magic shot, she wouldn’t have wasted the time to dry her eyes before she said yes. Even ten months later, when she found herself enrolled in the Charles Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters almost before she knew it, she’d barely hesitated to ask, “And the Professor, he can cure me?”
“I don’t think it quite works that way,” Storm said then, apologetically. Defeats and victories have made her emphatic. “No,” she told Marie. “They can’t cure us, because there’s nothing to cure. Nothing’s wrong with you.”
To Logan, Marie gave a look like, “Is she serious?” She was either fooling herself or blinded by her own privilege. Logan gave away nothing of his opinion, except that he was unsurprised to hear her asking.
Marie knew there was something wrong with her. At the very least, something would be wrong if she didn’t get some control. Her sessions with Professor Xavier may have been the only barrier between her sense of self and a full blown case of multiple personality disorder. And the only hope she had that she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life separate.
The Professor didn’t begrudge her the temptation.
Marie reminded herself of that when she stood up at his funeral to place a single yellow rose on the monument that bore his likeness.
Storm’s eulogy had been moving as only the sad truth can be. Still, the Professor died for a beloved student not for the cause. What separated Charles Xavier from Erik Lehnsherr wasn’t ideology. It was compassion. He treated mutants like the individuals they are.
His death made her decision. Marie didn’t blame him any more than he would’ve her, although there was something missing in her resolve, something he’d instilled in her himself. Conviction.
End Notes:
1) For the purposes of this fic, Rogue has so far touched eighteen people since the manifestation of her mutation:
Home – David Cody-Robbins, Carrie D’Ancanto
Clinic – Paige Guthrie/Husk, Eugene Macomb, Lora Gibbons/Sinner, Jeffery Garrett/Ghost
Streets – Neena Thurman/Domino, Doug Ramsey/Cypher, Gordon Neville
X1 – James Logan Howlett/Wolverine, Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto
X2 – John Allerdyce/Pyro, Bobby Drake/Iceman
X3 – Kitty Pryde/Shadowcat, Pete Rasputin/Colossus, Scott Summers/Cyclops, Charles Xavier/Professor X, Kim Li
2) I list the worldwide mutant population as six million, which seems like a lot until you think that means there are fewer mutants than there are people in real life with Down’s Syndrome. Plus, the majority of mutants have to be in the lower classifications or else there would be a lot more general panic.
3) Project Wideawake was one of the files on Stryker’s computer in X2, all of which Mystique exposed to the press before ending her Senator Kelly charade in a most beneficial and devious way.
4) The line, “And the Professor, he can cure me?” comes from a deleted scene between Rogue and Storm in X1. In that scene Rogue also exposits that she’s been on her own for eight months. In this fic’s timeline, it takes two months for Marie’s normal life to come crashing down hard enough that she has to run away from home for good – her powers manifest in June 2009, she runs away in August 2009, and she meets Logan eight months later in April of 2010.
Scream: II by thatcraftykid
track 1 // “SCREAM”
Peek into the shadow, I come into the light
You tell me I'm wrong, then you better prove you're right
Janet Jackson
Fall 2010
In the hanger, Xavier’s gifted filed out of the wounded Blackbird, staggered and exposed. They had never had cause to see the lower levels. The X-Men had been a school secret, a badge of honor. Until black-op soldiers had stolen away starry-eyed notions of superheroism in the night. Two mornings later, the helicopters that circled their sanctuary belonged to TV stations. Police held distraught parents and concerned citizens behind barricades just outside the grounds. The rest of the students were in the safe house nearby, watched over by Pete and Kitty as life as they know it gave way.
Marie had seen the lower levels before. One month prior, she’d been carried through to the med lab, body shudder-wracked and mind crackling, soaked in blood spilled for her. She learned then what Erik always kept in mind: even Charles saw his X-Men as a necessary evil.
She’d become well-acquainted with the concept. She’d curled back her toes from the corpses left in the wake of Logan’s rage. She’d bedded down a tent away from the madman who tried to kill her. She’d kept her mouth shut as they let lost, angry John live with his choice. She’d survived through Jean Grey’s ultimate sacrifice.
Now she took a moment of the chaos for herself. She knelt in front of the exhausted Professor. She didn’t have to say anything; he’d chosen her to pilot the Blackbird to the rescue, he’d taught her to use her curse responsibly. She may not have been eighteen just yet, but if someone didn’t start letting her have half a say in which evils were necessary and why, she'd burst.
The uniform was supposed to elevate her out of victimhood, not be an exercise in frustration. They were the superheroes who didn’t do anything. She felt like she was living in an extended training montage. Learn to not crash the jet, check. Learn to borrow her teammates’ powers without knocking them flat, double check. Kick harder. Duck faster.
“The whole world’s goin’ to hell. You just gonna sit there?”
No matter how many hours she’d logged in the Danger Room since the last time she saw him, it was never enough for Logan. He pushed her because he didn’t think she should have to be a soldier. His protection felt like a punishment.
Kitty, Pete, Bobby – they were having a good time developing their powers. As Marie’s got stronger, she got weaker.
A Danger Room session in Logan’s absence. Magneto had stood with an army in front of him and raised his hands like he was performing Shakespeare. They were supposed to be practicing recon. What’s the point? She couldn’t stand listening to his lies. The program works by tapping into minds, so his presence seemed all the more real for Marie.
“I have made sacrifices,” he boomed, and that was more bullshit than she could handle. She took the presence at her back to be Bobby and reached behind her to squeeze a little power from his wrist.
Even before red light blasted Magneto into airwaves, she knew she had made a terrible mistake. She had no control over the boundless energy pouring out of her.
Cyclops put his arms out to steady them as they sank to the metal floor. Everyone else was yelling. He was calm. “Close your eyes, Rogue.”
The pressure of the light was too much, her eyelids too thin. “I can’t!”
“Yes you can. You have to close your eyes and hold them tight.”
She did what he said. Cyclops took her hands away from her face and guided her forehead to the floor. While the others scrambled to get his spare glasses, she tried to think past the red.
But Scott Summers’ mind was a cracking compression gage. He was not the only one in there. Whispers in Jean’s voice. She was on fire, everything burned.
“Make her stop,” Marie choked out. “Scott, please!”
His grip got tighter, but there was nothing he could do. Only hate this persecution, love this obsession.
She isn’t real. You’re safe.
She blindly lifted her face toward the Professor and he slid Scott’s glasses over her eyes, brushing the pad of this thumb across her forehead as he did. Instantly, the flames became smoke.
She was disquieted.
Her head was too crowded. Her skin was a livewire. She was scared. She lashed out.
Bobby stood back and took her attitude. Logan called her on it.
“Rogue. Front and center.”
She shared a split-second frown with Scott as he hit the door. Neither of them had been the same since Alkali Lake, and they seemed to be the only ones who didn’t think they should have to be.
Logan waited, hands on his hips, for Marie to stroll over. She mirrored his stance and nailed an impression of his sardonic eyebrow. “Sir, yes, sir?”
“Knock it off. You know you were sloppy in there today. You need to quit starin’ at your boyfriend and start focusing on keepin’ your ass in one piece.”
That struck her as funny enough to snort at. She was a dozen pieces. She couldn’t help it.
He made an effort to soften. “Kid, tell me what’s buggin’ you, and I’ll fix it.”
“’Fix it’?” Having Logan in her head didn’t stop him from astonishing her at times. “I’m not your motorcycle.”
“Look, if Bobby is messin’ around behind your back – “
She put up a gloved hand. This was far too humiliating a topic to get into with Logan. Especially when he was bound and determined to play the role of the overprotective daddy. She could almost hear him rehearsing his speech: Treat her right, Iceprick, or I’ll use your frozen balls to cool my drinks. Paternal was low on the list of things she wanted Logan to feel toward her.
Not to mention, the cheaters-should-pay routine was a bit rich coming from him. A little of Scott’s hostility bubbled up.
“No offense, daddy – “ the word dripped from her mouth like a honey-covered expletive – “but you’re the last person I’d go to for relationship advice. See you next time you’re ‘just passin’ through.’”
That wasn’t not exactly fair of her. He was out there working, running down leads for the Professor and picking up other kids whose parents made them run. But she told herself she didn’t care about fair. She’d gotten Logan’s attention by making him think she didn’t want it. Now he had to stick around until she forgave him.
Seemed like obligation was the only hold Marie had on anyone anymore.
From Bobby’s bedroom window, she watched him skate around the fountain. They’d done that. They’d tripped and fallen into each other and laughed. They’d held hands.
Bobby reached out to Kitty. They touched, skin to skin.
Marie was plenty stung and pissed off, but it was her righteous indignation she nursed. He did a good job of pretending away her deficiencies and his desires – “Have I ever put any pressure on you?” – but after this, he’d have to admit he wasn’t that perfect. In his grief, he’d sought out the comfort of relative normalcy. Meaning Kitty, with her understanding parents and plucky optimism and kissable lips.
Finally, Marie got to be the wronged party. She never would have seen this if for once she hadn’t tried do the right thing. She could have just taken off, but she’d thought she owed Bobby an explanation. She hadn’t wanted him to worry.
Screw him. She turned on her heel and strode down the hall. He could find out she was gone from her empty room.
She shoved clothes into a bag. Maybe she’d need them, maybe they’d just make it look like she’d left for good. Bobby would wonder. He’d feel doubly awful and appreciate her all the more when she came back. Hopefully. Or not. Whatever.
Her gloves got tangled in the static cling of her laundry. Marie shook her arm with increasing violence until she gave up and ripped the glove right off, tearing the seam.
How could she be this upset? She’d known what was coming. She’d known from Bobby’s self-denial. She’d known from Kitty’s hyper-friendliness and guilty conscience. She’d even known from Pete, who was better at reading people than he let on. Those stupid cartoons he drew, like Bobby was a mutant Archie.
With her bare hand, Marie chafed at her face and neck. She hated feeling like this, like she was seconds from a psychotic breakdown. Like she’d end up peeling off her own skin or something equally horrific.
Deep breath. Put on a coat. Pick up the bag. It’d all be over soon.
End Notes:
1) Pete and Kitty must’ve been the ones to take care of the students after the X2 raid, earning themselves a spot on the X-Men in the process.
2) In X2, Scott remarks on how fast Jean’s powers have grown in the past month, which indicates that about that amount of time has passed since X1.
3) Poor Scotty. He’s clearly going batshit with Jean/The Phoenix in his head, but not even the Professor believes she’s a real, physical entity. One of the many mistakes Charles tries to make up for with martyrdom.
Scream: III by thatcraftykid
track 1 // “SCREAM”
Peek into the shadow, I come into the light
You tell me I'm wrong, then you better prove you're right
Janet Jackson
Fall 2010
Bacon grease dripped from her fork to the flyer for DC area cure clinic locations. Her gloves were beside her on the table. The waitress who filled her coffee cup had put two and two together. “Good for you,” in a tone like Marie took bronze in the Special Olympics.
Marie stared over her shoulder, to the clock hanging by the muted TV. It was too late to call this brunch. She’d been moving around since she got off the bus early that morning. She’d stolen a nap in the Library of Congress. She’d watched dueling protests at the National Mall devolve into fistfights that ended in handcuffs. She’d convinced herself she needed a sign, something definitive to offset the disharmonic buzz in her brain.
There was a cure clinic just five blocks from the diner. It was the main one, and the enthusiastic guy who handed Marie the flyer told her it had the quickest staff.
Flyer, sign. Good enough.
Pounding on the door at her back made her about jump out of her skin. She whipped around to see John Allerdyce streaking the glass with his sweaty palms. She suddenly realized why she was compelled to stop in this dingy place. It’d been a frequent hangout of his before Xavier’s.
John looked younger with his bleached hair, like a suburban kid trying too hard to be punk. A cigarette dangled from his lips. He pointed emphatically toward the TV. It was a stunned moment before Marie could look away from him.
The words “live” “cure clinic” and “mutant attack” jumped out from the news report. The building behind the reporter was smoking.
John wasn’t there when she looked back.
She got up from the stool so fast she about knocked herself over. “I’ll be back,” she assured the waitress, pointing at her bag.
Say one thing for grueling, daily training, Marie was faster than she had ever been. She chased John Frogger-style across lanes of traffic and into a dead-end alley.
John spun around and shot a fireball toward her as a warning. She took a step back with her palms thrown up.
Disgusted, she stared him down. “So this is what you left your friends for. To become a terrorist? They’re mutants, John.”
“Fuck those traitors.” He took a panting breath. His cigarette was little more than ash, so he flicked it away. “Fuck you, too.” John looked pointedly at her bare hands. “How’s it feel to be just like them?” That smirk spread across his face, and he advanced toward her. “Powerless.”
Marie edged away as he circled her. She didn’t correct his assumption to keep the upper hand. “You think you’re so smart, but you let Magneto brainwash you. He’s no a messiah, he doesn’t care. He’s too sociopathic think of people and what their lives are worth. Even other mutants. I should know.”
John’s shit-eating grin didn’t fade. “You afraid of me?” He backed her toward the wall.
“I feel sorry for you,” she countered, tucking her hands between her and the cement. She sure didn’t need to augment his crazy.
Blue eyes smiled into hers. Their friendship had always been a strange mix of appreciation and animosity. He’d liked watching her play with his fire, and she hadn’t minded hurting him to do it. John dipped his head, like he was going to kiss her, but just laughed when she flinched.
“I saw your boyfriend today.” He pressed the lower half of his body into hers.
“No wonder you’re so hot and bothered.”
Surprise and anger showed through his mask. Marie had never let on that she knew. John took her elbow and twisted until she acknowledged the pain with a noise.
“Poor little ‘Rogue,’ running off, taking the cure like a whiney bitch. Your mutation was epic. You just weren’t strong enough to handle it.”
Best defense was a good offense.
Marie rocketed her knee between John’s legs. She followed that up with a kick to the stomach well-placed enough to make him drop. While he was sputtering profanities on the pavement, she was stomping the heavy tread of her shoe on the ignition line up his sleeve. Her fighting style may’ve been sloppy, but it was effective.
She did feel sorry for John. What’s more, she empathized. But she got where he was coming from far too well to cut him very much slack.
“You have no concept of how much bigger than your stupid ego all of this is.” A cheap shot to the side was her parting gift. “That’s for the clinic, asshole.”
She jogged back to the diner. There, she threw down some money, took her bag, and told the waitress to give the police John’s description.
Without so much as a backward glance, she boarded a bus rerouting cure seekers.
John’s recrimination followed Marie to the uptown clinic. Mutants held back by uniformed soldiers chanted, “We don’t need a cure!” and hurled insults as she stepped into line behind a long row of people who knew firsthand that mutations were defined not by powers but by limits.
The needle sinks into her skin.
Shattered pieces of her mind swirl in dissent and hope. Intensely personal politics. Circumstantial freewill. Conviction or lack thereof. Her uniform will hang, untried, next to Jean Grey’s and Scott Summers’. No, shut up. She won’t be counted among the dead. She will be alive to live a life she can recognize. She will reclaim mind, body, soul. She won’t be them. She won’t be us. She’ll be something else. Different. Outcast.
Shut up, shut up, shut up. Stop screaming at me!
The cure spreads through her like it’s changing her blood into a gel.
Pressure peaks against her eardrums, uniting drone, crackle, thrum into one note of piercing clarity.
Marie. She’s Marie.
Pale lips mouth, “Congratulations,” through a fog. A cotton swab covers the syringe as it slips out of her vein.
The world outside catches up to speed. Light hums and flickers. Her skin is goose pimpled and raw red under the fluorescence. A butterfly bandage covers a single dot of blood.
Cool skin grips her naked forearm with clinical assurance. She has to look to know who it is. Nurse Kim is guiding Marie to her feet. Her touch is brisk. Efficient. “You’re cured,” she states, and directs her to the door.
Marie stares at the place where their skin meets. Her body is trembling. Her mind is mute. She has been granted detachment.
End Notes:
1) I’m running with the idea that The Freak Out in X2 causes lots of mutants to manifest or their powers to expand – i.e. Beast getting blue fur (or re-getting blue fur, if the trailers for the First Class film are any indication), and Rogue’s mutation becoming more of a physical and mental strain.
Brain Stew: I by thatcraftykid
Author's Notes:
This one cuts between Logan's face-off with The Phoenix (out of order) and Logan's first few days back at the school (in order). The song is here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8krdLDuEx3U].
track 2 // “BRAIN STEW”
As time ticks by and still I try, no rest for crosstops
In my mind – on my own, here we go
Green Day
Fall 2010
Head back, veins corded to snap, esophagus raw with the acidic taste of bile, the Wolverine howled. Senseless. A godforsaken animal. No future, no past. The present burned, blistered like the skin of his arms. Cradling a dying body on fire from the inside.
She begged him. For days, she had begged him. Always, always that voice echoing in his head: “Kill me.” Jean’s voice. Begging. The Phoenix didn’t beg, she taunted. “Kill me.”
Animal, animal, animal – the howl of the Wolverine.
Familiar? She showed him how he was now – soaked eyes clamped shut, bared teeth open wide – and how he would look again. Kneeling in a forest, another woman in his arms. Long brown hair, youthful bare skin. He thought this was his future. Howling, because if there was a next time he wouldn’t be able to cheat her death. But no. No, this was the past. His past? Who…Scarless brown hair. Wide-set, compelling features. Who was she? He was howling, was howling again. Guilt suffocated him. Burned his nostrils. He’d done that, and he’d done this.
Why?
There was reason, but it was infuriatingly beyond him. Above him. He opened his eyes to gray ash swirling against a black sky. Swirling and plummeting, compacting. Bodies remade and dropped to the ground.
He saw the Professor, his deliberate smile. Jean’s in the face of tragedy.
When he looked down, the curve was still over her lips but there was no emotion in her stare. Her chest fell and collapsed in on her last breath.
Jean became a puff of dust so fine he couldn’t even feel remnants on his bloody, empty hands. Lightening threw them into harsh relief. Thunder growled under the Blackbird’s muted engines. In the distance, helicopter blades beat against the rapidly cooling sky.
He had been struck silent.
Rushing blood beats in Logan’s ears, amplifying the soundlessness of unified sleep. One long, unwinding breath for every two and half of his.
The wood paneled halls of the Professor’s broken refuge are warm and dim. His children are tucked into their beds, sleeping soundly. Logan passes their closed doors with an ear toward trouble, the way he didn’t bother doing the night Stryker came after them. Fact that it wouldn’t have done much good is no excuse for shitty security. Place has gotten bells and whistles since. Wasn’t around much before or after, but Logan made time to see to that personal.
A whiff of lingering smoke has him flaring his nostrils as he rounds the corner. He approaches a window, remembering the butt of a gun cracking his nose and, right above him, glass shattering underneath Marie’s scream. His fingers find the loose seam letting in stagnant air. He stares past the reflection of his darkening scowl and out onto scorched grass along the tree-line. Where not two hours ago a burning cross dripped fire and ash, a blunt shorthand for all the pissant, coward-fuck violence that never happened here on the Professor’s watch.
Logan scratches at the too-new skin under his shirt, just thirty hours old. Bastards would’ve had the guts to claim their threat, he’d have given them six razor-pointed reasons to show some goddamn respect.
For now, all he’s got is an impotent note to self to have Storm upgrade the windows once she makes it through her first hell-week as Dean Munroe. Grade A security is all in the details. There’s got to be thicker glass than this flimsy crap out there. Get that guy Forge back in here, and he can amp up the Danger Room again while he’s at it. Tyke squad held their own, but next time they got to do better than survive. Candy-ass bigots setting fire to plywood is proof enough that nothing’s over. Alcatraz was just the last stand before the all-out war. Whether the law will fall on their side or the X-Men’s is fucking politics. Nothing for Logan to do about it.
His blood keeps pounding anyway, down his legs, forcing him to keep circling. He takes his prowling to the second floor. The steadying sound of breathing drops off abruptly. No surprise, Xavier’s soldiers ain’t sleeping.
Emptiness sucks him in like a vacuum. All the doors are open, all the rooms are blank. Same off-white walls, same upscale hotel furniture. Only difference is the scent. Jean’s and Scott’s, faint but still all wrapped up in each other. Two pictures on the nightstand – teenagers mimicking adults dressed up fancy, adults smiling like teenagers with their whole lives to live – are the only hint that this was home to somebody. The kid’s room is like Logan’s, nothing more personal than clothes in a drawer. People don’t live in these rooms. They’re where they stay because the world outside told them they got no place else to go.
He sets his weight a little against her doorframe. She packed a bag. Didn’t think to ask her when she’s coming back.
A beeping sound slants his eyes down toward her desk. He’s annoyed Marie left her phone, until he slides it open and sees that it’s the one the Professor outfitted him with. The one he wasn’t too broken up about losing a couple months ago. Without it, whenever Xavier succeeded in getting a hold of Logan they both knew he was the only man for the job.
So he either left the phone here or the kid swiped it. Either way, she set it out collect dust where he should’ve noticed it a long time ago. Another one of her tests he didn’t even know he failed.
Third button on the right takes him to her message: ‘i’m sorry’ – two little words sent at seven p.m., right about the time the National Guard closed the search and rescue to let reporters in to vulture-pick the scene.
Annoyed, he punches out, ‘nothin you couldve done’ and hits send before he realizes how much of a repetitive dick he’s become. It’s what he said to Kitty when she broke down in grief-guilty tears after the tyke squad took a skip down what-if lane. It’s how he responded when McCoy confessed he felt like he’d disappointed Xavier.
The sound of sneakers on the stairs, and a light flips on in the hallway. Colossus – Pete Rasputin, Logan never bothered catching his name until today – nods his way. Bobby’s got a phone to his ear, saying, “Me again. I just want you to know that Dr. McCoy got the government to issue a warning after what happened tonight. Try to stay away from any of the International Mutant Rights Initiative offices or Department of Mutant Affairs outposts…and definitely stay away from cure clinics. They’re especially not safe, not even from mutants. Okay? Take care of yourself, and please, please call me tomorrow. First thing. I – ” He closes his door behind him before he finishes, “I love you.” Kitty passes with her forehead parallel to the carpet.
Storm watches her squad into their rooms before turning to Logan. “Nobody’s heard from Rogue.”
He holds out his phone to let her see the mail icon marked, ‘Kid.’
“You told Charles you lost that phone.”
“Found it.”
“Is she…” Storm massages the deep circles under her eyes. “Where is she? Is she somewhere safe?”
“’Course she is,” he says, though he’s wary of her asking where, exactly, since he doesn’t have the first clue.
“I don’t suppose you would’ve let her go if you didn’t think she’d be safer out there. You never wanted Rogue on the team. You didn’t hide that from her.” Said like an accusation. Like he should feel guilty for driving her to the cure or something.
“Hey, I don’t make anybody’s choices for ’em.”
“You really believe that?”
New adrenaline kicks in, raring for a confrontation. “Weren’t you the one all worked up I wouldn’t be ready to do what had to be done?”
Her expression hardens and softens at the same time, though her gaze remains steady. “The truth is, I was worried about myself. And I was right to be.”
“Nothin’ you could’ve done,” remains Logan’s knee-jerk, jerk-ass mantra.
“That used to be the case,” is her proud response. She sizes him up and down, not without sympathy. “You look…restless. Hank offered to have National Guardsmen posted here, but I’m calling in a few of the Professor’s favors instead. When you need to take some time, it’s not a problem.”
She leaves him with a pat on the arm and no outlet for the nameless ache that’s burning him up inside.
Logan stands at Marie’s door. He stares at the phone in his hand, sleek black-gray and so thin and light he can’t hold it naturally. He almost drops it when it buzzes and starts beeping again.
Her message is a clarification: ‘i’m sorry it had to be you.’
The box springs on Marie’s bed creak under his weight as he sits for what he thinks is the first time since the flight from San Francisco. The pulse in his ears winds down, threatens to unravel something coiled heavy inside of him. His hand goes up to cover his mouth. He hasn’t slept, he remembers now. Not in days.
No voice to call, he types, ‘comin back?’ Shouldn’t matter that he leaves off the ‘when are you’ part. She knows how much he hates the damn keypad.
Logan expects an instant response, so he waits. He drops onto his back, the heels of his boots still on the floor. Minutes, hours stretch out like the colored lights his strained eyes stain the ceiling with. The waiting makes him feel that he’s reaching out. That he’s trying to grasp tight onto nothing.
End Notes:
1) In case there’s any confusion, the woman Logan momentarily confuses for Marie is Kayla. I’ve done a lot of wielding to make this fic Origins compliant, and have subsequently found that I can now enjoy the movie as a dedicated Wolverine fan not just as a gal ogling a hot piece of man.
2) The movie doesn’t show Jean’s body becoming ash, but I like that imagery for Phoenix lore. The movie also doesn’t show the people she dematerialized magically rematerialized after she died, but I like to think they did and most of them survived it (like a teleporter would). It makes the sunny ending of X3 a little less heinous. Plus, the Omegas have a lot of potential. Why kill them off so quickly?
Brain Stew: II by thatcraftykid
track 2 // “BRAIN STEW”
As time ticks by and still I try, no rest for crosstops
In my mind – on my own, here we go
Green Day
Fall 2010
“I’m the only one who can stop her.”
He believed that when he said it. The Phoenix had shown him, one by one, how she would’ve destroy the others’ half-cocked plans and weak-willed intentions. How she would’ve savaged their minds. How she’d have goddamn loved to crumble Jean Grey’s friends, her students, into dust.
Storm nodded, the alarm in her eyes telling him she had an idea of how much the demon inside Jean hated.
The Phoenix and the Wolverine, the last two standing. He could stop her. Time was all he needed. In the med lab, in the house, in the forest – he’d failed then, but now he just needed more time to get through. He wouldn’t attack Jean and the Phoenix wouldn’t attack him. Impasse. The Professor told him it’d work.
“It’s over,” Logan yelled, speaking to Jean.
Then the soldiers came. Timing, timing, timing – But no. He watched the soldiers go up in dust, horrified more for himself than he was for them. Bloodless deaths they may have been, but Jean wouldn’t be able to live with them on her hands.
The Wolverine was not the instrument of her redemption. The Phoenix was chaos and he was death, the only one her equal.
That was what he always thought, and, goddamn it all, the sadistic bitch torturing Jean had used it against him. Phoenix, Jean, Charles – they knew death was what he was good for. That was why it had to be him. Anybody else might have had a chance in hell at setting things right.
The itch is inside his chest, crawling beneath skin and muscle fifty hours old. He flexes his fingers against the mattress. No sense scratching at wounds long since healed over, but his flesh is raw where he hasn’t taken his own advice. There are strands of hair stuck under his fingernails.
He rolls over. The shift in position gives the itch a new path. From where his gut meets his sternum, along his ribcage.
The itch is heaviest on the left side of his chest, where it digs. Seeps into three precision puncture wounds. Adamantium through adamantium. Took the concentration of a yogi learning to levitate, a near-religious fervor. The blinders came off his rage when his claws punched through his back. He was free.
Up, the itch spreads to the base of his throat. Below the spongy tissue of his Adam’s apple is a notch. Rough and a quarter-inch deep. Like trying to hack down a redwood with a handsaw, took for goddamn ever. But if he thought suicide would be quick and painless, he wouldn’t have tried it so many times.
Watched a show once, one of those late night b-horror deals. Crypt Keeper or the like. Guy wants to be a lumberjack, only he’s lost his sight. He gets in with some sadistic types. As revenge for what-have-you, they tie up the guy’s girl and a couple other people inside tall, hollow stumps. Blind bastard takes a chainsaw to them none the wiser. First victim’s his girl and, thing is, yeah she’s gagged, but she doesn’t yell or struggle or nothing. She just puts her head back and closes her eyes as blood starts flying. Like she isn’t surprised. Like she always knew it would come to this, with him. Sick story.
Sicker still that it’s stuck with him. His fucking memory.
He raises his hand up to check the phone he tossed onto his pillow hours ago. When he collapsed onto his bed, convinced that an entire day’s worth of the Danger Room’s most ball-busting simulations would be enough to send him into blessed unconsciousness. No reply from the kid.
Squinting against the stark white backlight, he types out, ‘i asked when youre comin back.’ He thinks about her moods and her tests, about the night she left and how he made her smile, how he felt like he finally passed one.
He rests the phone on his chest, over precision puncture wounds. It shouldn’t have been such a stretch, calling them friends. It shouldn’t be so fucking difficult for her to acknowledge that he gives a damn.
“You would die for them?”
The Phoenix’s righteous indignation brought harsh tears to his eyes, because it belonged to Jean as much as it did her demon.
He would die for them. The Wolverine because a fight to the finish was the only thing he’d ever wanted more than solitude. Logan because who the hell was he to be the one who forever walked away from what’s worth dying for. Death was the only expectation of peace he’d ever harbored.
His willingness to die wasn’t some great hero complex the Professor “tamed” him into, and that provoked the Phoenix’s spiteful vengeance. It evoked Jean’s high-minded pity, her most tender regard for the man who’d proved he’d stop at nothing to make sure a lost girl he’d barely known had a home she could count on and a big, bright future free of the fear and loneliness he thought only he could stand.
Logan swallowed hard. Searched the Phoenix’s blackened eyes for the woman he felt yearning on his behalf for something better. “No. Not for them,” he told Jean. “For you.” It was his thanks, his apology.
His stab at a heroism he’d never aspired to. A heroism so twisted the Phoenix withdrew to let him gallantly become the executioner of his own retribution.
The woods around the Mansion are emptied out of things the Professor wouldn’t have approved. Took out the bridge access from the road. Ran out a pack of wild dogs. Confiscated a damn impressive stockpile of booze, smokes, and condoms that has Marie’s old pal Pyro’s name all over it. That and a ripped-up piece of lightweight fabric Logan leaves out of sight, out of mind.
Bag slung over his shoulder, he comes out of the trees with a mostly empty bottle of Black Bush pressed to his mouth. Earns him a glower from old man Cassidy, the first to show up to settle whatever debt he owed Xavier.
“Already cleared it,” Logan tells him, tossing him the Irish whiskey.
Cassidy catches the bottle by the neck and pushes it back into Logan’s chest. “I’ll be takin’ a look myself, it’s all the same. I got a daughter in there.”
Logan stares him down. Him and his own green-tinted reflection in the night vision shades. With the square of his shoulders, the press of his lips, Cassidy says, This is personal for me. This is about my family, about people I’ve known for decades. You’re just hired muscle.
“Whatever you say,” Logan replies and swipes back the whiskey.
He heads up the hill, toward the greenhouse. Blurred light shines out from behind glass drenched by rain from the inside.
Caught up with Storm this afternoon. She was at the Professor’s desk, going through paperwork. “What about Magneto?” Logan asked her. Figured tracking him down is the job Xavier would’ve wanted him for.
“Charles has – had – a network of informers, which I’ve tapped.” The intercom buzzed, and Storm leaned forward to answer, “Yes, Kitty?”
“Uh, you have a call from someone apparently named, ‘Go on and put me through, sweetheart.’ It’s collect. Do you want me to explain to him that the millennium turned ten years ago, or should I accept the charges?”
Wisp of a smile. “Put him through,” Storm replied. To Logan she said, “Another favor. If anyone can find Magneto, Charles’ notes promises it will be this man.”
“Right,” Logan said and left her to it.
When he met Ororo Munroe six months ago, Jean, Scott, and Xavier were her life. Now who does she got? McCoy’s permanent in DC. Students she can’t confide in. Logan she can’t count on. Fair enough, because he’s never stayed when it doesn’t suit him and right now he can’t even try to shake the itch. All that and the world on her shoulders.
Logan tilts the bottle toward her greenhouse and takes a long swig. The Professor left her in charge. Whether by default or by right is something Logan has no doubt Storm’ll spend a lifetime trying to prove.
Taking the long way around avoids the courtyard turned graveyard. Inside, the Mansion is dark and still.
Even the boy who claims he doesn’t sleep is resting his eyes on the couch in the rec room. Narration from the TV forecasts clear skies for the week ahead. His head droops forward, his glasses sliding off his nose, and the channel changes to footage of the smoking ruins of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Alcatraz. A battle barely won broken down by the numbers: sixty-one dead – twenty-seven mutants, twenty-one soldiers, twelve civilians; fifty-six wounded – seven mutants, fifteen soldiers, thirty-six civilians. Eighteen cured mutants in custody. Magneto, cured, but still at large.
Three days ago Logan was there. Seventeen straight hours on his feet, rubbed-raw eyes searching for bodies under the rubble. He can’t recall noticing too much who was alive and who wasn’t when he pulled them out. Somebody must have counted.
One of the soldiers, as shaky as the camera, clutches himself and moans, “She ripped me apart. She ripped me apart.”
Another eye twitch, and there’s Hank McCoy. X-Men leather traded for a bureaucrat’s suit. Logan can’t say if McCoy knows it, but he’s reassuring the public in the language of the Phoenix: “The fires of our hatred have been put out. We pray that from the ashes a new peace will rise.” His cautionary words don’t stop the talking heads from calling Operation: Alcatraz the first strike in the war on mutant terror.
Another blink, and the station changes to a nostalgic tights-and-cape cartoon. “Thank you, Superman, you’ve saved us all! You’re our hero!” Bull and shit. Death makes heroes, and there’s no getting away from that.
Logan pushes himself back into the hallway. Christ, he’s exhausted. Didn’t sleep last night. Can’t see managing it tonight, either.
Bobby, Kitty, and Pete have taken over the kitchen, but Logan goes in anyway. No reason to let good beer stay warm. Tyke squad stops their conversation to watch him pack the refrigerator.
“One sip of this goes missin’, I’ll find out who took it,” he warns, speaking directly to Kitty.
She goes pink. “I swear, that was all Rogue’s idea. Jubes and I had no idea how expensive that bottle was.”
“Yeah? Least Rogue had the common decency not to mix it with Coke.” Insult to injury.
Bobby looks somber. “Has she gotten in touch with you again?”
Logan turns back the fridge, nose puckered on the stink of jealous-guilt frustration. “Can’t say she has.”
Bobby’s phone spins against the counter tiles. “I think we should leave another voicemail.”
“I think nineteen is pushing pathetic, man,” is Pete’s advice. “Rogue does her own thing. If Wolverine’s not worried about her, I’m not.”
“I should look for her again. The cure’s only offered in four cities…” Bobby squeezes his neck between his elbows. “Logan, please. If you know where is she is – ”
“Told you straight the first fifty times you asked: I don’t.” He’s getting real sick of everybody acting like he’s aiding and abetting Marie in committing some felony.
“Bobby,” Kitty says in a placating tone, “If you took the cure – ”
“We don’t know that she went through with it, or that she even will.”
“Okay, granted. Still, say she did or that you would. Where would you go?”
“I’d see my parents,” he admits slowly. “Do you think that’s where Rogue is?”
When Kitty doesn’t answer, Logan figures he’s asking him again. “No,” he says. Marie doesn’t talk about Mississippi much, but when she does there’s ash in her tone. Needing a cure isn’t the same as regretting burned bridges. “She wouldn’t have gone there. She’s comin’ back.”
“This is a school for mutants. She might not think she has anything to come back to. Which isn’t true,” Kitty says very distinctly, before Bobby or anybody else can get riled. “So you have to tell her that.” She nudges his phone toward him.
“Rogue knows this is still her home.” Bobby’s emphatic, but he gets up and takes the phone anyway.
“Go ahead,” says Pete. “Make it an even twenty.” When Bobby’s gone, he says to Kitty, “Kind of harsh, Katja.”
“’Harsh’ is Rogue ‘doing her own thing.’ I thought we were practically family. A team, at the very least, and she walked out on us when we needed her. Of course I want her to come back, but I can’t trust that she will on her own.” Kitty’s voice cracks. “Everybody’s different now, and I hate it.”
Logan hangs on the door to the fridge, his dry, bloodshot eyes unfocused. She wrote, ‘i'm sorry.’ Could mean a lot of things. Everybody’s different now. The kid, Storm, McCoy. Tyke squad. And different is something Logan’s having a real hard time seeing include him.
End Notes:
1) Guess there’s some controversy about whether or not adamantium can pierce adamantium, but conceivably, with enough sharpness and pressure, it can. So when Logan claws himself to get out of the restraints in X1, he’s grunting because he’s deliberately pushing his claws through his chest plate, leaving three precision puncture wounds over his heart (aw).
2) Sean Cassidy/Banshee is the father of Theresa Cassidy/Siryn, the girl who screams in X2. Banshee’s also supposed to show up in X-Men: First Class, so that’ll give a nice back-story to his friendship with Xavier.
3) Re: the mutant tracker Storm hires. Note that, since this is Marvel, death is beyond cheap.
Brain Stew: III by thatcraftykid
track 2 // “BRAIN STEW”
As time ticks by and still I try, no rest for crosstops
In my mind – on my own, here we go
Green Day
Fall 2010
Skin, muscle, ligaments seared away. His blood evaporated. Adamantium was exposed and dangerously pliant. Every excruciating push forward he made is a testament. In the hottest, cruelest pit of agonizing hell, the Phoenix was holding court on the nature of sacrifice. Jean Grey and Charles Xavier were on trial. Logan, he was the evidence. Or the hostage. He couldn’t know which, because the telepaths battled on a plane far beyond his five howling senses. He was no more than a body. A weapon.
If you know that much, why keep secrets?
The Phoenix tore open his mind with the same calculated ferocity she tore apart his body. Her torture had deliberate design. Near-boiling metal burning away layers of bone, his airless yells of suffering beyond reason – He was in their tank, under their control, and they were celebrating the fact that he wouldn’t ever know why.
She knew why. It was the goddamn reason that demon inside Jean, with her past-present-future all-knowing mind fuckery, had chosen this moment in time to come back. Chaos was her vengeance on control.
On Jean. That was who the Phoenix hated. Not Charles, not Scott. Herself. Jean. Jean and the Phoenix. Logan and the Wolverine. The Phoenix wanted him separate, as at odds with himself as she had always been.
She was giving him what he’d demanded from the Professor with less and less insistence since that forty-eight hour ultimatum – the truth about his past. The vicious, violent truth.
Not truth, the Professor cut in.
Memory never exists in absolutes. He held Logan together on a moment. His mind was filled with Jean, with a scene that was bright and static. Hers. She and the Professor holding their own court about Logan. Jean sincerely drawn – “He has such a sense of honor about him” – not by danger, not by duality. Or chaos to her control. Honor.
Another step forward. Another testament to sacrifice. To who was worth it why. To the ones who could see the part of a man he never thought showed through.
Fucking nightmares. Waking nightmares at that, so he can’t even call them sleep. He’s running purely on adrenaline, and it aches. Four straight nights he’s been doing nothing but scratching and biting and licking his wounds.
He picks up his phone and sends, ‘cant wait no more kid headin out.’ No response as he packs up. No questions from Kitty or Pete, though they stop their conversation as he passes her open door. Scott’s bike is in the garage. Storm saw him tune it up today and didn’t say much about it. Why would she? Nothing less than anybody would expect out of him.
Logan grits his teeth. He ditches the front door to hit the back garden. A commemorative cemetery with three new headstones over three vacant coffins.
Silence hangs over him, closer and darker than the heavy clouds over his shoulder. Logan stands on the Professor’s empty grave, waiting one final time. Thinking, what’s next, old man? Speak up.
He’s been following Xavier’s plan since the day he let the Phoenix blast his body into nothing. His voice has guided him like an explanation. The truth of it dropped square in his gut, weighing him down in a way that kept him centered. Variations on a theme: X-Men stand together. Sometimes the beast needs caging. Yeah, Logan swallowed the damn mea culpa the Professor thought he owed him whole, and now he’s having a hell of a time digesting it.
Old man, speak up. Sure as shit know death ain’t the end, not for telepaths.
Any second the silence could break. Except Xavier’s a hell of a teacher. Up there in the clouds Storm’s keeping all her anger, all her grief hemmed in. It’s one a.m. and Charles Xavier’s students – her students – are sleeping. She won’t disturb them for a moment of release. Even if she needs one as much as Logan does.
So here he is, about to leave the house that Charles built once more, asking his tombstone, What you do expect me to do now?
Nothing seems to be his only answer.
To say to hell with him and leave, Logan has to turn his head. He has to look at her name etched in marble. He feels the guilt and the loss of what he needs to have been between them. Familiar regrets, months old, only piled on top is the sickening lurch of what she had him prove to her.
A chill creeps into his metal bones as his breath becomes visible. Bobby is coming up toward the bushes at Logan’s back, his inaudible mutterings turning clear and sharp. “You took off without saying anything – no note, nothing. Now you don’t have the decency to call me back when you know I’m worried sick about you? It’s been days, Rogue. I don’t know where you are or if you’re gone for good – ” The sound of his righteous stomping halts. Somewhere in the dark silence, Bobby breathes hard. “You’re cutting me out of your life, and you won’t even tell me why. How can you do that to me?”
Jesus, that’s a lot of hard shit packed into one angry line. Lot of accusation. Aren’t you the person I thought you were? Can’t I make you feel guilty? Why don’t you think I deserve better?
Charles Xavier’s etched profile, somber and shadowed in the half-light, is back in focus.
“I love you,” Bobby spits at Marie’s voicemail.
Logan said those words before he ended Jean’s life. He meant them as a shield, but that isn’t what they are. Those words are a weapon.
He throws his leg over Scott’s bike. He’s left the Mansion countless times and didn’t always say goodbye. But he did always have a reason for going and an idea of when he was coming back. And what for.
He made lists of security upgrades to oversee. He made sure the new Danger Room could handle his worst. He made deals with Xavier. He made a promise to the kid. He made Jean believe it when he said his heart belonged to her. He made himself believe it after she died.
The roar of an engine turned over in disgust almost covers a low ring, but it vibrates against the metal in his chest. He cuts the bike before he pulls the phone out of his inside jacket pocket. He stares at it like he doesn’t remember what to do with it, before he presses a button and hears her breathe his name.
The bike’s shocks creak under him. “Kid.” He scrubs at his eyes, heavy with remembered exhaustion. “You safe?”
“I am. Where – ”
Logan talks over her. “Where are you?”
He can hear her teeth chattering through her irritated pause. “DC.”
“You on the streets?”
“No, I’m at hostel for mutants who took the cure. Where are you?”
Just like that, she tells him she went through with it. He reminds himself what he knew when she left: Not his place to have an opinion.
Gruffly, he replies, “’Bout to leave.”
“Why’re you leaving now? You’re tired.”
Hearing her say it makes him want to put his head down on the handlebars. He listens to her shiver for a minute or two instead.
“I know you – you deserve a break. But I – ” She cuts herself off, her voice miserably small. “How’re you doing?”
“Kid – “ His eyes itch something fierce as film of moisture settles into his dried sockets. “I am. I am tired.” Without meaning to, he makes it a confession.
A beat too long. Then, “Okay.” She’s definitely crying now.
“You get my message about comin’ back?”
“I-I want to…”
“Then you should.”
Marie turns a hiccup into a sound of agreement. “Whenever you decide to come back, I will. I can’t be there alone.”
“What’d you say?” Logan chokes on the question.
Through an angry clot of snot, Marie replies, “I said, I’m a selfish coward and I can’t stand the thought of facing them if you’re not around to…just to be there. For me.”
Logan presses the phone against his forehead, making the metal there thrum. His muscles ache with the sting of uncoiling tension. He clears his throat.
“Gimme directions, Marie. Pick you up tonight, and we’ll get you home.”
End Notes:
1) Jean’s honor quote is from a deleted scene from X1, wherein Xavier notes that she likes Logan and she explains it’s not just because he’s Hugh Jackman.
2) I have a lot of issues with X3. One way of making me hate it less is to say that Xavier left his body so that his power could be stronger. He’s around the whole time, guiding Logan, and waging a telepathic battle with the Phoenix, which also helps explain why that bringer of chaos is so passive. This, of course, leads to the moral dilemma – in the end, was Xavier lending Logan strength or manipulating the Wolverine? Or a bit of both, as it usually is with Xavier.
Wish I Was the Moon: I by thatcraftykid
Author's Notes:
I had to change some things in the last two chapters to make this work. So now Marie takes the cure in DC instead of NYC and Logan sounds more like Logan.
This chapter is on the long side because I've been wanting to vid this song for ages, so I had a lot of ideas. Even if you know the song, I recommend watching this video. Neko Case is ridiculously good live: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fhur6g8_BM].
The chapter spans the time in X3 between when we see Marie get off the bus at the cure clinic and when we see her back at school with Bobby. Everything is chronological, except the first scene from her childhood and a scene set at Southaven Mutant Treatment Center pre-Laughlin City (here, the clinic is a more neutral place than it is in "Dark Side of the Moon").
track 3 // “WISH I WAS THE MOON”
Chimney falls as lovers blaze – Thought that I was young
Now I've freezin' hands and bloodless veins, as numb as I've become
Neko Case
Fall 2010
Each gentle rock forward brought Marie’s heavy-lidded gaze closer to the covered moon peeking out under the sloping roof. Each sway backward was a release of muggy breath against the blanket, damp with sticky tears, nestled on her momma’s lap. The porch swing creaked along with momma’s airy tune, so soothing even what was left of Marie’s gasping hiccups had fallen into time. Momma hummed and stroked her thumb along the side of Marie’s grimacing face. Back and forth. Constant rhythms designed to lull her into forgetting.
When the moon slid fully out of the clouds, she let out a yowl in Soldier’s memory and kicked the armrest so hard she stubbed her toes. Momma grabbed at her legs – “Shush now, Anna Marie, you’ll hurt yourself” – but Marie didn’t stop flailing until, from inside the house, her daddy plunged them into darkness.
Loud as she got, her daddy never yelled. He switched off lights and locked doors and hid from her in the grocery store until she was frantic that he’d left her. Marie, ten years old and sweaty and spiteful, clung to her momma but glared at the clouds chasing the moon.
“I hate him.” She’d learned to associate that word with her daddy three states ago – “Don’t you walk out that door, Dale. This is my life, too! You can’t make all the decisions.” “If you were capable of talking to me like an adult, maybe I wouldn’t have to.” “I hate you sometimes.” “You’ve got no right. Not after all I did for you” – and the woman who’d taught her to do it let out a deep sigh.
“He’s a good provider. He can’t pass up this promotion, he’s been with Shaw Industries too long. And he found Soldier a beautiful new home, didn’t he? A farm is perfect for a dog. Virginia to Georgia was bad enough, he’s just too rowdy to take all the way to Texas. And Houston’s a big city. A dog like that needs room to run.”
“Soldier’s mine. Anything that ain’t his he just makes go away. He don’t care.” In her broken heart she added, Bet I’m next, but kept it to herself. She didn’t need that lecture again.
“‘Isn’t,’” was her momma’s only correction.
Marie kept on watching the moon running fast away. She squirmed when her momma tried to pull her closer. “It’s too hot.” It was always too hot, every place they moved to. And too crowded. There wouldn’t be another house for miles, but the humidity itself would pin her in. The moon broke free again, and Marie sat forward to catch a cooling breeze.
Momma put her hand over her daughter’s eyes. “Don’t stare at the moon like that, baby girl. Or someday you’ll get up to follow it and you won’t ever get to stop.”
Gloves flung into the nearest garbage, coat bunched up in her bag, shirt sleeves pushed high, Marie surges forward counter the flow of pedestrian traffic. She donates a twenty she shouldn’t spare to shake hands with a non-mutant IMRI activist. On the metro at rush hour, she stands with her arms high, flush against a hipster who plays along by steadying himself on her bared waist. A middle-aged mom in a cluster of hippies on their way to a protest lets Marie hug her toddler to her cheek. In Malcolm X Park, she links arms with demonstrators against mutant-on-mutant violence. She dares to strip down to her underwear for a guerrilla theatre production of
Hair. An electric blue-skinned actor spins her around and around, singing that he’ll lay his mutated head at her feet. They kiss, her eyes open, her hands at her side. When the police break up the show, she runs her bundle of clothes in the opposite direction.
Every touch feels the same – the thrill of anticipation let down by dull sensation. Still, she wears a smile ready to happen. Maybe next touch, maybe in another hour. Give the cure time to settle. Be grateful no one’s dead, no one’s talking.
The crush of undisturbed humanity thins out under moonrise. Through a taxi’s open door, a woman mashes her face against a figure swallowed inside. Marie wants to be at school right now. Like that. With her boyfriend. Both of them all saliva and tears and ineloquent declarations. She wants to quit agreeing that they’re in love and start actually feeling it. With her foot, she activates a car alarm, jarring the happy couple. She keeps on walking.
As tall as the park walls are, they do nothing to insulate her from the sickening anger she has come to feel toward this city and the people in it. She’s touched them all, but none of them touched her. She expected warmth and giddiness and freedom and – and joy. She expected to be bursting with it. But here she stands. Trapped inside flesh that doesn’t even hurt right when she pinches it. Her fingers are stiff and blue, but she doesn’t remember feeling cold.
“Can – ”
Marie whips around at the first syllable, dread forcing her to realize her surroundings. Malcolm X Park after dark and more alone than she’s ever been. And afraid and off-guard. As if the Logan in her head has merged with her sense of self-preservation and with him she’s silenced all the fight-or-flight of X-Man Rogue. Leaving her dumbstruck and vulnerable.
But no more so than the person who startled her. He has his hands up like she’s pointing a gun. “No, uh…” He gestures at himself. “Talk. To you.”
Marie hugs her elbows in annoyed relief, recognizing the flyers and the small, bony guy holding them.
“I already picked a clinic,” Marie says, her voice hoarse with disuse.
“Don’t worry. It’s taking him a while to get used to it, too.”
She rubs her forearms. “’Him’ who?”
His face squishes in confusion. “Um, no him. Me. Cal.” He sticks out his hand.
Marie shakes it slowly, surprised at his skin’s newborn baby softness and reassured that she can feel the difference. “Anna.” A reboot from the beginning name. A don’t-find-me-until-I’m-ready name.
She stares without meaning to. Cal is less a cured mutant and more an alien not quite morphed to human. She can see the shape of his skull under his bald head. He lets go of her, and she searches for a way to ease the offense. But he just hands her a Polaroid of a hunched figure with bone-white skin and a skeletal face. In the picture, his teeth are bared. Marie glances back at Cal, sees that he meant it as a grin.
“Me, before. Better looking faster every day. Stick around. Might end up handsome.”
She tries to return his optimism with a smile. “Congratulations.”
Cal takes back his picture with one hand and threads his fingers through hers with the other. “You, too,” he says, rubbing her palm with his smooth thumb.
“How do you know – “
“A guess. Used to know. Could sense any mutant and track their powers, and teach other mutants to sense it, too. That was the nice part. Never feeling alone.”
Marie squeezes his hand, wanting a little of his good-natured assurance to flow into her –
She lets her fingers fall out of his abruptly, disgusted by her own screwed up notions of touch and intimacy. She’s gotten so used to using people, always wanting to take, take, take and clearly not hating herself enough for it.
Marie tilts back her aching, empty head. “Do you know some place I can lie down?” The sliver of the moon has hidden itself completely, and she wants to do the same.
Sliding her cell phone open and shut is an outlet for the agitation gripping her by the throat. The other cured mutants in the hostel common room have moved on. They’re no longer talking about the grainy video of the Phoenix laying waste to Alcatraz beside stock footage of Dr. Jean Grey addressing Congress. They aren’t debating the ethics of cure guns or cost-benefit of the mutant paramilitary contractors code named X-Men. They never even wondered about that lone soldier, the one reported to have “put an end to the violence” singlehandedly.
No, they’re back to talking about what texture their foreheads used to be or how many hours straight they once hiccupped bubbles. And Marie is lounging out in the open in shorts and a tank top, so how the hell is she any better?
Worse. She’s so much worse. Doesn’t take a master strategist to work out how a wham-bam combo of healing factor, metal plating, phasing – teleportation or super speed, if either were handy – and maybe a half-dozen cure shots could’ve saved Jean Grey’s life. Not that Marie harbors any delusions that she would have been strong enough, brave enough to take on the Phoenix by herself. But, God, how she’d like to think she could have been for Logan’s sake.
Marie flees the overheated common room in favor of the relative privacy of the fire escape. She can feel temperature again, almost too well. She imagines moonlight cooling her neck as she hangs her head over the rail.
Last night, while she was crying herself to sleep over the cruel irony of touchable skin gone numb, the X-Men were making good on the pledge she herself made once upon a time. They saved the world. Kitty and Pete and Bobby. And John, listed among the captured. On the wrong side, but in a way still more heroic than Marie.
Maybe she wouldn’t have made a difference. But at least she could have been there. Then she’d be with Logan now. If he’d let her.
Her cell phone buzzes, making her nearly drop it several stories. Another voicemail from Bobby. Reassuring but unnecessary. CNN would have said if one of the X-Men had been injured.
Bobby. She dreamed about him last night. In the dream, he called her Marie for the first time, and when he touched her he loved her enough for both of them. Only the cure didn’t last. He kept on kissing her as his veins turned black, and she couldn’t move at all except for her gasping eyes. Spectators judged her from over his shoulder. “She did that to me, too. Isn’t she awful?” David commented. Kitty said, “I think she could stop it, if she really wanted to.” John draped his arms around the two of them. “Nah. She likes it too much. She really does.” Then Bobby, on his dying breath, “Rogue!”
She woke up alone and trembling. Agonizing over close calls and prophetic words. Feeling sorry for herself over a stupid, obvious dream. Thinking she was the only one so afraid of the darker consequences of her powers, so controlled by them.
Not knowing she was wrong again. Not knowing that Logan already lived her nightmare.
Marie is clutching the phone so tightly her whole hand vibrates with it. The text she sent Logan has paid off. He finally found where she, in lieu of a tantrum, stashed his forgotten phone in plain sight.
His message is clipped and unsentimental enough to be the God’s honest truth. Nothing she could have done. Not for the team, not for him. Not then, not now. What she meant to write is that she’s sorry it had to be him who stopped the Phoenix. Sorry it had to be her to take the cure. Sorry there wasn’t a better way for either of them.
A few minutes later, Logan asks if she’s coming back. She turns off her phone.
Her breathing evens out under the moon’s impartial halo. The burden of regret doesn’t feel as heavy knowing that no one can see it. Inevitably, they – the ones who fought – will ask her – the one who ran – why she took the cure and whether it was worth it. There’s no going back until she can look them in the eye when she answers.
End Notes:
1) From what I’ve gleaned from Wikipedia, Rogue is raised by her Aunt Carrie – here, Carrie D’Ancanto – after her biological parents, Pricilla and Owen die. A lot of the time, she’s also raised by Irene Adler/Destiny, who'll be important later. Shaw Industries is mentioned because Sebastian Shaw is the villain of the First Class movie and this fic is all about allusions tying the together the movieverse.
2) The song from the musical Hair that Marie’s random mutant hook-up sings is “Donna,” which is a fairly Marie song if you squint.
3) Cal is Caliban, a Morlock who has a tendency to talk about himself in the third person.
Here’s what he looks like in the comics: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliban_%28comics%29].
Here’s how I imagine him looking once he’s re-grown all his skin and hair:
[http://www.popentertainment.com/meyerpaquin02.jpg].
Wish I Was the Moon: II by thatcraftykid
track 3 // “WISH I WAS THE MOON”
Chimney falls as lovers blaze – Thought that I was young
Now I've freezin' hands and bloodless veins, as numb as I've become
Neko Case
Fall 2010
“I hope you’re not doing this for some boy,” Logan said once, and damn him for jumping straight to the lowest common denominator. He knew she was going crazy, but still he made it about them instead of her. Damn him for being right.
It’s always been about some boy.
He was the baseline drumbeat to the cacophony in her mind. “You did this! It’s your fault!” – “It’s not my fault, I just touched him. I-I didn’t mean to.”
David Cody-Robbins. Son of a preacher man, the only boy who could ever reach her – that had been their song, and she was going to tell him so right after they graduated from handholding. Her best friend Natalie used to snark, “For an all-state hitter, he’s sure slow to start rounding your bases.” Last time Marie’d seen her, Natalie was sliding into David’s third base head first. Window facing Marie’s open, because, true, Natalie had called dibs on David to begin with and, probably, ostracism just seemed too subtle a torture.
That night it finally occurred to Marie that normal wasn’t a place she could go back to. She left home and followed the moon as far as her Uncle Nuts’ bar at the edge of Meridian, where Aunt Shirley gave her his old army duffle and told her if she ever needed a place to stay to bring her stuff on over.
Later, when she ran away from home for good because of the clinic, then again and again from the clinic, David was in her head. Telling her there was no help for something as nasty and vampiric as her.
And sitting on that bench with the new boy, the one who made her remember normal, who told her, “It’ll be easier on your own,” David was back, crowing louder than ever. The clinic and the streets should’ve taught her already, but now she had it from the benevolent privileged – she was a freak among freaks. It wasn’t a mutant gene that made her such a disgusting human leech.
He told her so often and so certainly that even after a cure exorcised his throbbing accusations, her soul-sucking powers – when she rakes fingernails across her flat, lifeless skin and says to a mirror, “There’s still something wrong with me,” she hears some boy saying it with her.
“We both know you don’t have to be here.”
Marie, slouched down in the hard leather chair across from Dr. Hines’ desk, glanced up from the thread on her glove she’d been tugging on. The self-satisfaction on her lips was as telling a response as therapy had yet to elicit from her. She’d been a patient at the Southaven Mutant Treatment Clinic off and on going on four months. It was a point of pride that the only words Marie had ever spoken on Dr. Hines’ tape recorder were, “I really have to pee.”
Unfortunately, Dr. Hines enjoyed the sound of her own voice, so this mockery of a treatment had persisted.
“What do you do on your weekly excursions, Anna Marie? Sneak into movies. ‘Dine and dash.’ Steal.”
Dr. Hines indicated the things she’d confiscated when Marie strolled into the cafeteria for breakfast after just missing bed check. A carton of cigarettes, though she didn’t smoke, and a camera just like the present from her uncle that had been the only one she got on her seventeenth birthday from hell. She’d had to forfeit it last month for squatter’s rights.
“Some of our younger patients like to say that Southaven is no better than a juvenile detention center, but you don’t think so. You had three choices after you were arrested in New Orleans.” Dr. Hines ticked them off on her wrinkled, steady fingers: “One, give evidence against the criminal element you fell in with. Two, allow yourself to be incarcerated for breaking and entering and attempted burglary. Three, accept the mercy of Sister Irene, who dropped the charges on behalf of the church when you agreed to return to our clinic. You’ve chosen to be here time and again. Why?”
Marie stared blankly through the good doctor just to piss her off.
Thin lips compressed as tightly as her fists, Dr. Hines leaned forward. “Because you’ve no place else to go. You want to be cured as much as we want to cure you.” She pushed a thick stack of papers toward Marie, who was fighting to keep her face from falling. “Your parents have faxed their consent to an experimental psychosomatic treatment for your illness. During the trial, it is imperative that you remain at the clinic. We’ll begin tomorrow.”
“And what if tomorrow I’m not here?” Marie countered, but breaking her no-talking rule was enough for Dr. Hines to know that she would be.
The treatment was amped-up mescaline, and it flooded Marie’s mind to the saturation point of delirium. Voices whispered in the dark. David accusing, Momma agonizing. Paige Guthrie, blackmailing.
Bring me stuff from outside or I’ll tell them what really happened when we fought. I’ll tell them you stole my powers – Oh, no, baby girl, don’t draw attention. Keep your head down ‘til you can come home where you belong – You don’t belong anywhere. You should to be dissected –Marie, on her back in the psych ward, was loaded up with pills, wracked with silent spasms. Naked hands came down to stop her face. Lora Gibbons, the clinic’s failed poster patient for the almost-cured, bore down on Marie, shrieking, “You’ve got them demons!” as her power drowned them both deeper. Light filled the room, infrared and ultraviolet, swirling and pulsating, tangible even after Lora was sedated. Dr. Rao saw the light, strongest around Marie. Marie saw the scheming critique in Dr. Rao.
I’m a sinner, I’m a sinner, I’m a sin…When her mind was part her own again, it was daytime and days later. Dr. Hines and Dr. Rao conferred in low voices. “You know how I feel about military scientists,” the older said, and the younger suggested, “Worthington Labs is just as eager to give us funding. They see her as the universal test subject.” The doctors turned when a gurney wheeled in. A nurse explained, “Another suicide attempt.”
The slow beep of Jeffery Garrett’s heart monitor rang in Marie’s ears as she feigned unconsciousness. She was desperate for it to get stronger.
As soon as her paralysis subsided, she took from him regardless.
His hand, his mind was weightless in hers. The alarm sounded when Jeffery’s heart rate dipped, calling in nurses who only hesitated a moment before plunging through Marie’s spectral outline to start resuscitation. Her actual body was in the building adjacent, scrambling around for her clothes, her coat, and her duffle. Paige was on one of the beds, smeared eyeliner ringing her red-rimmed eyes. Rigid with horror, Paige didn’t have a chance to say anything before Marie had teleported herself to a bus stop blocks away. But to her fading outline, Paige hissed, “Swear to God, Rogue, if you killed him – ” I didn’t mean to hurt you, Marie pleaded with the boy sighing inside her head, his faint impression too much like a ghost.
The criminal uncertainty of the open road took her away from the clinic’s cure-at-any-cost guarantee. Neither was anything like freedom.
Marie hugs her shivering arms around herself, her teeth chattering between airy giggles. Beside her, Cal is laughing full-bodied at his own misadventures living homeless in the Manhattan underground with a ragtag bunch of mutants called the Morlocks. Marie tips him toward her so she can rearrange the thin blanket he brought out to the fire escape. Underneath it, their arms are intertwined.
They’ve bonded in the past few days over their shared fascination with their own skin. Like little kids on a playground, they pinched and poked. They traded Indian burns and blew raspberries. Some of the others took up a collection so the two of them could get a room at a bed and breakfast by the park, but Cal passed it on to another pair before the words, “It’s not like that,” even left Marie’s mouth.
And it isn’t like that. They aren’t flirting, they’re remembering.
Marie licks her thumb and smoothes down Cal’s newly-grown eyebrows.
“Gross,” he complains, half-heartedly pushing her away.
“’Gross’ is this pedo ‘stache,” she says, tugging the wispy light brown hair on his upper lip.
He strokes it luxuriously. “Been waiting six years for this to come in.”
Cal’s mutation manifested at thirteen, Marie realizes, looking away. Six years to her sixteen months. Warmth leaves her freezing hands and bloodless veins.
Following her gaze, Cal fakes a shudder. “Half-moon creeps me out. Looks too much like my bony butt cheek used to.”
Marie puts her mouth against her knee so she doesn’t wake the hostel with her half-groaned laughter. “Why can’t you just let me be sad?”
“Because you don’t need to be.” Cal fishes her phone out of her jeans and starts scrolling through the texts she’s avoided. “Bobby: ‘Please call me,’ Bobby: ‘I love you,’ times infinity. Logan: ‘I asked when you’re comin’ back.’ Jubilee: ‘Copasetic, chica? Kitty says Bobby thinks you’re here in DC. My dorm’s small but we can cuddle now?’ That’s with three question marks, an exclamation point, and a wink. Kitty: ‘Maybe you don’t want to hear this from me, but the Professor made this our home and we’re still your family.’ Pete: ‘Iceman’s cracking. At least put him out of his misery.’ Logan: ‘Can’t wait no more, kid. Headin’ out.’ That was fifteen minutes ago.”
Holding back her tears burns, but Marie can’t cry in front of Cal. Not without coming off a spoiled, ungrateful bitch. Which she is. But she’s scared, too. Never in her whole life has she been able to move forward by going back.
If Logan leaves, she knows she won’t be brave enough to even try.
Marie accepts her phone from Cal. His lips are soft and light against hers. She thinks it’s his first kiss, and she’s glad to be part of one where nobody got hurt. “It’s been nice getting to know you, Anna,” he says as goodbye.
Getting to know Anna has been nice for her, too. And a lot easier than facing the fact that she was wrong in thinking that killer skin had drawn a clear line between innocent Marie and mercenary Rogue.
She hates the tears in her voice when she makes the call to Logan. She doesn’t deserve them.
End Notes:
1) Dr. Carol Hines is the real name of Dr. Carol “Frost,” the blonde woman working on Weapon X in Origins. Dr. Kavita Rao is the black-haired woman who administers the cure to Angel in X3.
2) Paige Guthrie/Husk in this fic is Jeffrey Garrett/Ghost's girlfriend. Since Marie didn’t inherit Ghost’s powers permanently, I think it’s clear that she didn’t actually kill him. But the possibility that she could have haunts her plenty.
3) To address why Jubilee didn’t join the Jr. X-Men (apart from the cost of casting another actress), I’ve sent her off to George Washington. In her brief deleted scene in X2, she appears thoughtful about the implications of her mutation, so, while she remains her gum-popping self, I’ve given her law school ambitions and an internship with IMRI, the International Mutant Rights Initiative.
Wish I Was the Moon: III by thatcraftykid
track 3 // “WISH I WAS THE MOON”
Chimney falls as lovers blaze – Thought that I was young
Now I've freezin' hands and bloodless veins, as numb as I've become
Neko Case
Fall 2010
The clock above the TV reads five-thirty-three. The clock on her phone reads five-forty-eight. Logan has to have reached the city limits by now. She clicks off Fox News. Its repeat coverage of the Alcatraz memorial service is not helping her mood any.
She crawls across the long length of the bed to reach her glass of tap water on the night stand. The lady at the front desk didn’t give her the key to the mini-fridge, probably because her crumpled bills and out-of-date Mississippi driver’s license looked pretty suspect. Beady eyes darted between sixteen-year-old Marie’s beauty pageant perm and eighteen year-old Rogue’s punk rock streaks in disapproval. Quaintly narrow-minded given the bed and breakfast’s proximity to DC’s mutant-hippie Mecca. Marie drains her water, longing for something stronger. Anticipation has her by the skin and it’s pulling up goose bumps.
A motorcycle buzz sends Marie to the door, no gloves to blame for how she fumbles with the locks. Outside, she leans over the top of the stairs to watch Logan get off his bike. Anyone would credit the long drive for the stiffness of his legs, but Marie knows better. She backs into the room as he comes upstairs to meet her. His palm is on the rail. His spine is dipped.
In the doorway, Logan’s bloodshot eyes take in Marie from the top of her bare foot to the curve of her naked shoulder. Her fingers grip the door she’s half-hidden herself behind.
“Did it work?”
Her voice, like Logan’s, is pitched barely above a whisper. “I’m still getting used to it.” She steps back with the door, eyes on beige carpeting as she invites him in.
Logan takes off his leather jacket, his elbow brushing the TV on one side and his knee the mattress on the other. Marie, redoing the locks, is suddenly very aware that the room is hardly bigger than its furniture and that her spandex tank top has ridden up her back. She presses her shoulder blades into the door, turning toward Logan.
He’s laying his jacket a little too carefully across the chair she threw her clothes on. “Thought you said you were stayin’ at a hostel.”
“I was, but it was crowded.” Marie runs her hands down her side and curls her fingers around the bottom of her cotton shorts. “No…privacy.” She watches his face for his nervous tell. She isn’t disappointed. He even shifts his weight to his back leg.
Biting down on a derisive smirk, she locks her eyes on the carpet again. He did. He put ‘the kid’ together with ‘hotel’ and came up with the wrong idea. And, yes, it’s galling that he obviously wouldn’t go for it, but it’s gratifying that his mind went there at all.
Logan’s thoughts, downright at home in the gutter, as a rule are sweepingly lofty in regard to Marie. Of course, as another rule, Logan doesn’t give a damn about rules. How is she supposed to come to terms with mixed signals? Frankly, it had been easier to accept her mutation. No doctor ever vowed her case was hopeless, then turned around and left her with his dog tag, a promise, and really sensational suggestions to get herself off.
And people wonder how Marie could have confused what Logan is supposed to be to her.
Still. The only reason she got the room is because him being tired, let alone admitting it, is no small thing. She rubs her toes together, explaining, “I thought you could use some rest. Plus, I kind like the name of this place. Meridian Hill. It’s what the park used to be called.” She swallows. “I could go back there now. To Meridian. I’d be welcome.”
Off her bitter tone, Logan responds, “Ain’t worth the price of gas, kid.”
Marie pushes away from the door to drop down on the mattress, heart in her lap. “How mad is everybody?”
Logan’s boots come into her line of sight as he says, “You gotta keep in mind, they fought at Alcatraz for a lot of reasons. One of ‘em was so mutants could go on havin’ a choice.”
Logan reaches out to stroke back her hair, like he’s done dozens of times before. Marie draws in a breath. She slides her fingers over the skin between his knuckles, pulling his palm down to cradle her face. Her eyelashes close against his ring finger as his pinky brushes her bottom lip. It could almost be an accident, except he does it again. Back and forth. When her mouth curves up, he drops his palm so they’re holding hands against her neck.
He hunkers down in front of her. The burnout remoteness is gone from his face, erased by sharp tenderness. “Don’t let anyone take this away from you, Marie. Not if it’s what you wanted.”
God, it aches, how much she wishes he was talking about his touch. About them. What he means is the cure.
For Logan, Marie finds the will to blind her regret with a smile. She touches the answering crinkles beside his eyes, echoing, “I won’t let anyone take this.”
Like Momma always used to say, sometimes the only way to make it is to fake it.
Simple advice to follow with Logan at her back. In the bustling entranceway of the Mansion, Marie meets Storm’s eye and holds out her hand. Storm looks at Logan first, like she’s just remembered he’s a good man, then pulls Marie into a hug that’s too much like forgiveness. “Nobody here will judge you.”
Kind words that couldn’t be more wrong. The school’s official reopen means the halls are packed with students just getting in on the gossip. Whispers of, “Rogue’s cured,” beat her to the second floor. A cluster of junior high kids huddle at the far end, near her door. Artie, whose blue forked tongue makes it hard for him to speak, gestures something to his buddies. Streak adjusts his glasses solemnly. “That’s what the government wants you to think.” Flea shakes his spiky blond head. “Cautionary tale, dude. Making out with Syryn is so not worth your life. Rogue – ” Logan scatters the gossips with a barked, “Move it.”
Even Kitty, her torso sticking out of a wall, pulls back her hesitant wave. Marie stares, expressionless, until Kitty slides away.
“What’re you gonna do about that?” Logan asks, depositing Marie’s duffle on her bed. She scratches absently at the edge of her desk. Shrugs, because it depends on how Bobby makes her feel. Logan joins her in the doorway. “Maybe go easy on him. He’s young.”
“He’s five months older than me.”
“Wouldn’t know it,” he tells her, pressing her forehead against his mouth and leaving her chafing at the yearning rushing to her skin.
She thinks about Logan as she waits for Bobby on the edge of his bed. Their reunion is a mastery of emotional maturity. She doesn’t even flinch when he tells her, “This isn’t what I wanted.” Just states, “It’s what I wanted,” in such a steady way she’s starting to believe it. Bobby’s hand is cooler against her skin than it felt against her glove. His pale eyes are lighter now that she’s not pushing him away.
They owe each other a kiss that doesn’t hurt. When they break apart, their roles are reversed. She’s breathless and he’s guilty. It’s not her mutation between them anymore, it’s his doubt. It’s Kitty and the fact that Marie didn’t call. It’s Logan, but Marie never lets Bobby get far enough to bring him into it.
Starting over is Bobby’s suggestion. He makes an ice rose bloom on her palm. “I’m Bobby.”
“Rogue,” she replies, knowing it will freeze the smile on his face.
It stays frozen while he falls back into loving her out of obligation, as a penance. Her punishment for that is so passive it looks like virtue. Overhearing Pete giving Bobby shit for still not getting any feels like justice. Kitty, suffering with him in silence, keeps her distance. Marie tells herself she was better friends with Jubilee anyway.
A week passes. The whispers don’t die. Every day she’s reminded of what she isn’t. Not a mutant. Not an X-Men. Not Rogue. Not Marie. Not even “kid” feels right, but she bears it like a cross because it lightens Logan’s load.
She’s living for his closeness. Their arms stacked on a pool cue to line up a trick shot. His hands around her ankles, widening her defensive stance. Her lips on his bicep as she nods off during a movie.
But there’s distance, too. There’s Logan locking his doors at night so she can’t wake him from his nightmares. There’s Logan snapping, “Save it,” when she tries to bring up Jean Grey. There’s Logan and Storm exiting the med lab, back to doing up each other’s buttons.
Marie almost has sex with Bobby, but it’s not enough that she can make him want her a little more than someone else.
Well-adjusted is simple to fake to Logan’s face. It’s when he’s not looking that she can’t quite make it.
Where the hell is her liquor? Marie kicks at the brown, crinkly leaves that have fallen into her hidey-hole. John was too busy playing evil minion to have come back for his half. Marie searches the base of the oaks lining the small clearing, lighted cell phone in one hand and a recently emptied fifth of Jameson in the other.
The sound of liquid splashing inside glass alerts her to Logan’s presence. So he’s the one who found her stash. Makes her wonder what he thought of the precautions for safe sex. Or if he even registered that they were for her.
Logan lets out a satisfied, “Ah.” The night is clear and bright enough that she can make out the smirk he’s giving her over the lip of the Wild Turkey bottle.
“You could tell me when you’re tailing me.” She drops the fifth to hold out her hand. “And you could share.”
“Can’t do that, kid.” Logan takes another swig as he clears himself a spot on the ground. “You’re underage.”
Marie stands over him, hands on her hips. “It’s mine.”
“You stole it.”
“I had to. I’m underage.” She plucks the bottle out of his hand and starts downing it.
He cocks an eyebrow at her. He knows she’s inherited his taste for alcohol, but this is the first time he’s actually seen her drink. “What’s the problem, Marie? I thought you were doin’ good.” She shrugs, not minding as much as she should that the jig is up. At her non-response, he tugs her down next to him and tosses away the bottle before she drains it.
Marie drops to her back. Her frown turns into a deep glare as she stares at the full moon. When she started out on her own all those months ago, traveling by moonlight had lent romance to her adventure. Truth is, the more picturesque the moon, the more horribly it treated her. The night she was cornered by Gordon Neville – a pathetically warped excuse for a man who wouldn’t have let her skin stop him had she not reclaimed consciousness – the moon was this same blood-gold.
Logan lays back, head propped on his hands. “This about the boyfriend? Where is he?”
“Passed out with a hard-on.” She snickers at the distaste that response merits. That’s right, she’s got a mouth on her. Deal with it. While she’s being honest, she might as well tell him, “Before Bobby was ‘the boyfriend,’ I used to come out here to get high and fool around with John. Don’t worry. I didn’t let him screw me, either.” Logan doesn’t react to that. Fuck. She should have said fuck.
Or, better yet, nothing at all. Embarrassed, she turns into his side, breathing in his flannel shirt. She’s just so damn tired of pretending for him. For her pride.
Logan surprises her with an honest question. “Why not?”
Why hasn’t she had sex yet? Even with her face hidden, Marie can’t answer that. She evades by saying, “I was almost seventeen when I had my first kiss. I was always scared I’d end up like my mother.” She rolls onto her elbow, eyes skyward. “Pricilla Leigh. She dropped out of high school for some circus cowboy who never wanted her. Or me. She died when I was three. Got mixed up in drugs or something. Her sister raised me. Momma said that’s where I get my itch to ‘chase the moon.’” Marie leans her derisive smile into her shoulder. “If you can imagine a thing like that.”
Logan closes his eyes. “Take it from me, kid. The moon only makes you think you want it. It’s a trickster – ”
Marie, head soaked in liquor, chooses that moment to kiss the curve of Logan’s mouth. She keeps her lips pressed firmly against his, unwilling to start the drunken apologies until he pushes her away. Only he doesn’t.
She tilts a little forward, and his lips part. For the most exhilarating seconds of her life, Marie is kissing Logan and he’s kissing her back.
Then, just as suddenly, he’s not. His hands are locked behind his head, his body flat on the ground. His mouth stays open for her, but it’s obvious. Nothing’s different between them. He stuck around to play bodyguard to her delicate feelings. This is more of the same.
Wobbling to her feet, she shakes off Logan’s grasp. “Marie – ” She walks away, her posture very straight, steps very deliberate. He helps her patch up her dignity by not trying to stop her.
What a friend.
She wants to bolt. She wants to crumple in a heap. She wants, for once, to start over and have it actually mean something. She wants to be the one controlling the tides of her life. She wants to run so far and so long that she stops chasing the moon and starts becoming it.
A defiant, thoughtless wish that has mocked her since she was young.
End Notes:
1) Artie Maddicks is the one who sticks his tongue out at Stryker when Logan leaves him to die. Streak is the boy in glasses playing basketball in the montage in X1, and Flea is the kid Colossus shows his drawing of Bobby and Rogue to in X2.
2) It breaks my ‘shipper heart to notice, but Logan and Storm so slept together before X3. At least there doesn’t seem to be any love lost between them, beyond some apparent hurt pride and bruised egos.
3) Would you look at that? A Rogan kiss in the third chapter. That’s a personal record. More to come, promise.
Trust Me: I by thatcraftykid
Author's Notes:
Sorry for the wait! Long chapter with lots of action to hopefully make up for it. Chapter is set a few months after the last one, but it begins with a post-X2 flashback.
track 4 // “TRUST ME”
We're only taking turns holding this world
It's how it's always been, when you're older you will understand
The Fray
Winter 2010
Blocked from view by a statue of a golden dragon, Logan kept to where the red light of paper lanterns was softest. He looked down on the open lobby from an alcove. “He’s here,” Logan said into his cell phone, and the Professor asked him if he was sure. “Yeah. It’s gotta be him.”
Though his face was shadowed by a shit-kicker hat, the five-foot-ten black male matched the description of one John Wraith, a teleport soldier-for-hire operating under the name Kestrel. Listed in the dossier on Stryker as deceased, but very much alive according to Xavier’s contact in the Department of Mutant Affairs.
Who’d made it clear that mutant soldiers, while “against the official recruiting policies of the United States Armed Forces,” since World War II had been the military’s worst-kept secret. And the hypocrites acted like the Professor invented the idea.
“He’s got a briefcase cuffed to his wrist.” Just begging for Logan to slice it off and run. “Did your guy McCoy say what Wraith is getting in exchange for Stryker’s mind control what-have-you?”
“Serum-143 is not exactly mind control.” There went the teacher tone. “What Wraith has is a prototype, a less stable hallucinogenic influencer. Stryker may well have used it on you.”
Logan grunted, dismissing that as more of Xavier’s misguided reassurances. The black lines redacting the Stryker dossier might as well have been drawn in blood. And the fact that the only hint of himself was a 1989 mission to acquire an ‘indestructible metal’ in Nigeria only reinforced his gut feeling that he hadn’t been one of Stryker’s victims. He’d been, at best, a volunteer. At worst, a partner.
Even over the phone, the Professor knew where Logan’s thoughts were. “Perhaps Wraith could tell you about the serum. It is possible that the two of you worked together in some capacity.”
Possible. Not likely. Though his date of birth wasn’t listed in the dossier, fifteen years ago Wraith couldn’t have been more than twenty. And besides. No good thinking Wraith might have a better version of Stryker’s answers or anymore reason not to lie. It threatened the shaky ground Logan had gained since he’d left his past at Alkali Lake two months before.
“The Japanese are here,” Logan said, grabbing at the distraction. Two bruisers stuffed in suits and a smaller guy with a burning sun tattooed on his neck. Must be Sunfire. He didn’t have a briefcase, just a bulge in his jacket pocket. Whatever he was trading Wraith traveled well. The Japanese followed a hostess into a conference room walled by frosted glass. “I’ll give ‘em time to get their guards down, then I’ll break up the party.”
“Be careful, Logan. Serum-143 is extremely sought-after on the black market. As arrogant in the superiority of their mutant foot soldiers as they are, I needn’t remind you how well Clan Yashida guards its interests.”
Logan closed his eyes as he slid the phone shut. His earliest intact memories were of Japan, and they washed over him like a dream of another man’s life. Moments of what felt like virtue, cut by shame sharper than a samurai sword –
The imagined scent of dogwood was replaced by cigarette smoke, as cloying as the predatory gaze of the woman across the way. She was outfitted like a geisha, though she looked to be black or Latina. Her smile was an advertisement for a john if he’d ever seen one.
His phone went off, making him realize he’d let a minute go by. “Yeah, kid?” He turned his back on the geisha, toward the shadows seated in the conference room and the sweet sound of worry.
“Have you decided if you’re goin’ meet with him?” Marie asked, drawl soft. It was a lot later in Westchester than it was in San Francisco. The only noise on her end was her bare feet on the carpet runners. Knowing that she was pacing for him did something to ease the knot in his gut. “You’re watching him right now, aren’t you? Well, go over there.”
Logan sighed. Marie hadn’t been able to pry the details of the mission out of him, but she’d been relentless until he’d explained about Wraith. “Trust me. Odds are, talkin’ to this guy isn’t gonna change a thing.” Deepen the wound, more like.
“Why’s it so hard for you to believe that Stryker was lying?” Marie asked, over-enunciating, “He wasn’t a good person.”
“And I am?”
“Oh, shut up,” she returned, her exasperation pulling a low rumble of satisfaction out of his chest. The sound of which made Marie hitch a breath in a real appealing way.
Logan whipped around to find the geisha slithering into touching distance, smelling like she’d been dipped in sex. Which had to justify the – Forget it. “Kid, call you back,” he told her, pocketing his phone and demanding of the geisha, “Who the fuck are you?”
She purred, “My name is ‘X.’ As in whatever you want it to be.”
“How about, ‘Get Lost,’” he suggested, doing his best to breathe out of his mouth. The geisha was emitting pheromones like a his old truck leaked gas. She was leering as if she’d never heard the word no, and the way he couldn’t take his eyes off her told him she probably hadn’t.
She reached for him. Logan twisted her arm, pinning her to the dragon statue from behind. “All right, it’s Stacy!” she said, suddenly sounding a lot younger than her painted lady persona.
Easing up a fraction of an inch, he guessed, “Somebody send you up here to play diversion?” He gave Stacy X’s elbow a yank to get her talking. When she admitted to working for Sunfire, Logan asked her what he was trading.
“Your people really don’t tell you anything – Ow! A microchip, stolen from the Chinese government.” Her voice went thick, like she was swallowing her pride. “He’ll kill me. Please let me go,” she said so convincingly that he did.
The girl turned in his arms, the top of her head resting on his chest. His nose fell into her dark brown hair, dizzy with the honeyed vanilla of it. His hands were at her hips, feeling the heat of her skin even through silk. Skin he couldn’t touch, shouldn’t want to.
Phone vibrating in his pocket, he jerked his chin up. Stacy X looked at him, eyes big and brown and shining with trust. “Is that your ‘kid’ again? What’s she like?” Her smile unfurled. Mocking.
Rage cleared his head of pheromones, and he slammed Stacy X against the rail, holding her by the wrists.
With a glib, “You should grow a thicker skin,” she did just that. Scales swelled and loosened Logan’s grip. She flipped him over the rail just as a blast of yellow-orange sent Wrath flying out of the conference room in an explosion of glass.
Hanging by his fingertips, Logan watched the quiet of the lobby erupt into shrieks and clear out. Sunfire stepped toward Wraith, still on the ground.
“Your cue, hero,” Stacy X hissed, digging her nails into the back of Logan’s hand so hard that he dropped.
Sunfire, who was hoisting in triumph a metal box that must’ve held the microchip, stopped to stare at Logan brushing glass off his jeans. “Pardon me, we’re in the middle of conducting a business meeting. Who might you be?”
“Interested third party.” He shot out his claws. “I’m lookin’ to make an offer.”
Sunfire tipped his head. “Wolverine. Welcome.” His lackeys murmured something to each other. Together, they placed their guns on the table and backed away. “As you can see, your reputation proceeds you. If you’re after the Master Mold, I’m happy to come to new terms. Either way, Serum-143 will return with me to Tokyo.”
Wraith took the opportunity to teleport into the conference room and grab the briefcase. Sunfire wheeled around in apparent surprise, two balls of light forming in his hands. Logan dodged one, while Wraith used the briefcase to shield himself from the other. Sunfire busy testing the melting point of stainless steel, Logan attacked. Only to get shot back by a pulse of energy that sent him sliding in one direction and the microchip in the other.
Stacy X stopped the spinning box with one scaly toe.
“She’ll destroy it!” Sunfire bluffed, returning his hair and suit to order.
Wraith appeared behind Stacy X, who curled herself around him. Sunfire was still trying to grasp the double-cross when Wraith popped over to Logan and added him to his escape, making it look like a conspiracy.
It took about twenty teleports before Logan could feel his skeleton again. He sunk down, waiting for his organs to catch up. They were in an alley, still in Chinatown.
“You a’right, partner?” Wraith wanted to know, keeping himself and Stacy X at a healthy distance.
Logan got up, shaky. “You know me?”
“Yeah,” Wraith said, and Logan put his hands back on his knees. “You’re one of those ‘X-Men’ all the military up and ups are worried over.”
He hesitated before asking a better question. “I know you?”
Wraith chuckled, fixing the hat that somehow stayed on his head through the fight. Stacy X answered for him, purring again. “Why? Do you wanna?”
Logan, finding no worthwhile recognition in either of them, said, “Pass. But you can be real friendly and hand over that briefcase.”
Wraith placed it in Stacy X’s arms, unlocking the hinges and displaying the three long tubes of clear liquid inside. He took out one and smashed it. Then the second. And the third. “Enough of that bullshit, am I right?” His anger, his accusation was clear, but not clearly directed. At Stryker, no doubt. At Logan, it was possible
“Do you know me?” he asked again. This time he held his breath.
Wraith, leaning on his woman, was gone without another word.
Logan spat on a grimy newspaper in something like disappointment but much more like relief.
Storm stands on the other side of the Professor’s desk as the tyke squad files in, her fingertips steepled together. “There’s been a…complication with the mutant tracker I hired to find Magneto.”
Everyone remains neutral. The incident at the Thanksgiving parade a couple weeks ago is still making her tetchy. Don’t know why. Nobody got hurt. And Logan’s the one who was thrown from a building into that big white dog float, and he thinks popping it to round up those three little Omega harpies was a riot.
He shoots the kid a smirk that isn’t returned. Of course. Marie went through this same routine before the cure came out. Now she just looks pissed off half-naked.
With a deep frown, Marie prompts, “What ‘complication’?” She’s always taken Magneto’s escapes personal, and why shouldn’t she? “He’s cured and he’s eighty.”
“Right?” Kitty backs her up. “He’s totally in a park somewhere rallying pigeons against their human oppressors.”
Pete laughs. Bobby doesn’t. He lost both his girlfriend and his girl-on-the-side when Marie let him go and patched things up with Kitty. Serves the little iceprick right.
Only sign of annoyance the way she’s got her fingers clasped, Storm replies, “He found Magneto. Unfortunately, he’s now planning to sell him to the highest bidder.” She has to wait for the tyke squad to settle down before she can explain, “I’ve arranged a meeting. Logan, I haven’t been able to get through to him, so I’d like you to talk him into telling us where Magneto is.”
Sure. He pops his knuckles against the desk. Talk.
“Kitty, you’ll go along to fix Logan up with a wire. The last thing we need is Homeland Security thinking Kestrel is one of ours.”
Logan sees Marie’s spine go straight, but he keeps his slouch casual. “Kestrel?”
“John Wraith, a teleport. The Professor’s notes led me to believe they had a relationship we could trust.” As usual, Storm stops short of actually admitting she was mistaken.
She used the same tone when she cited professionalism as the reason to end things between them. Again. Logan’s reason was better: All that sneaking around, holding back demanded far too much thinking and not damn near enough oblivion.
“Here’s all the information we have on Kestrel, Kitty.”
Marie snatches the file folder. “I can run surveillance.”
Kitty agrees, knowing how Marie’s spectator role on the X-Men grates on her. Storm looks at Logan, leaving it up to him. “No difference to me.”
Wrong answer. When the meeting is over, Marie stalks him to the garage, where she starts in. “’No difference’?” Logan’s ready to make amends for sounding like he doesn’t have a preference between her and Kitty, but Marie blows past that to catch him off kilter. “It’s Wraith. He knows you.”
Logan grabs the first key he recognizes. “There won’t be time for a heart-to-heart, kid.”
“Make time.”
Over the roof of Scott’s Mazda RX-8, Marie levels a stare that Logan responds to by shoving himself into the driver’s seat. She gets in with even less grace, throwing in the file folder and the surveillance computer and then her backpack so they hit his elbow. She slams the passenger door.
Logan’s hands grip the impressions he left in the steering wheel the last time he and Marie were in this car together. Trading glances in the dark that didn’t needn’t to be examined or explained.
He looks at the kid now. At the sour curl of her lip.
“Listen. Phoenix opened up goddamn Pandora’s box up here.” He jabs his temple with the key then slides it into the ignition. “I don’t need names and dates to match all the blood I seen.”
“That’s not what I’m talkin’ about,” she says, sympathy bringing out her drawl. “You may not be rentin’ a room anymore, but I know – “
“There’s nothin’ to know.” He means it to sound final. It comes out bitter. “There never was.”
End Notes:
1) There’s no way John Wraith/Kestrel could’ve survived his death in Origins, you say? Ta-da! Healing factor. Why not? If Stryker can make Wade Wilson into Deadpool, he can upgrade his favorite soldiers. And if that doesn’t convince you, just think about how cool Wraith’s hat is. That’s right. He totally deserves to live. And have a hot girlfriend into threesomes.
2) Clan Yashida is Kenuichio Harada/Silver Samurai’s crime syndicate. We know Logan went to Japan to try to remember his life at the end of Origins, and, supposedly, the sequel will feature Silver Samurai. I’m keeping that history vague and crossing my fingers that it doesn’t completely screw over the timeline. Shiro Yoshida/Sunfire is Silver Samurai’s number two.
3) I played with Stacy X’s powers a little, giving her control over her scales and letting her use her pheromones without tactile contact. Also, for some reason Stacy X/Miranda Leevald is Rosario Dawson from Rent to me: [http://rawcd.blogspot.com/2010/06/rosario-dawson.html].
4) Master Mold in the comics is a giant, sentient robot, which is a little far-fetched for movieverse. This Master Mold is just the beginning of a mutant-hunting supercomputer, pre-Boliver Trask, the Director of Homeland Security in X3, getting a hold of it.
5) The “three little Omega harpies” are Philippa Strong/Arclight, Betsy Braddock/Psylocke, and Callista Miller/Callisto. Arclight and Psylocke were disintegrated by the Phoenix in X3, but in this fic most of them survived. Callisto was electrocuted by Storm, but, hey, if her body can handle super-speeds, it can probably handle some lightening.
Trust Me: II by thatcraftykid
track 4 // “TRUST ME”
We're only taking turns holding this world
It's how it's always been, when you're older you will understand
The Fray
Winter 2010
The night he met his maker. Logan held tight on the wheel to keep in check the resentment he should’ve felt at getting torn away from that holy grail of his past. From the answers at his fingertips, cold and solid as ice.
“Here,” Marie said, his tag dangling from her hand like an apology. Like a guarantee. “This is yours.” The air in the car was thick with how much more she wanted to say, but the space between them was scrutinized from the back. The one who wasn’t the boyfriend shouldered his way in. “I don’t like uncomfortable silences.”
Well into early morning, Logan searched his slivers of memory for the answer to the only question he’d been asked: “Don’t you remember me?” A man with a name he somehow knew hung over him, bathed in sterile green light, with a split in half a tag stamped ‘Wolverine.’ The same one that cut deep lines into the meat of Logan’s palm. In her sleep, Marie shifted her forearm closer to him, skin luminous in the blue-gray light. He had to pull away.
Stopped on a wooded dirt road so the boys could take a leak, Logan came around Marie’s side to stretch his legs and snap at her to keep her bare feet in the car. The ground was littered with broken bottles. Sighing, she turned toward him, knees settling against the fabric of his jeans as he stood at her open door.
“I was sure they’d kill you,” she said, and, leaning on the roof, he countered, “I don’t go down that easy.” Marie looked up at him, not so sure. “That man was talkin’ like he was God and you were listenin’…“ Her hair fell forward as she nudged herself into the arc of his stomach.
The dam he was holding up inside – the one that bore the weight of fifteen years of being stranger to himself – got another crack. He put his arms around her head. For a moment that felt like freefall, he let her be scared for him.
“Just don’t, okay? Don’t listen,” she whispered, and he replied, “I’ll make it through this,” knowing he would because somebody needed him to.
The meeting happens in Times Square. They spot each other at the same moment, Wraith looking down at Logan from an otherwise empty double-decker tour bus.
“Ororo, damn, baby,” Wraith says, putting down his bundle of long-stem roses as Logan comes to sit in the row across. “Your phone voice doesn’t do you justice.”
“If you wanted her to keep your little date, you shouldn’t have double-crossed her. Where’d you stash Magneto?”
“That information doesn’t belong to you ‘til I get paid. Tonight starting after ten I’ll be accepting bids in this fine establishment.” From the band of his hat, he takes a business card and sticks it to the damp seat in front of Logan. “They take care of me there. Oh, and, I’ve got to warn you, there’s a mutant supremacist name of Elijah Cross who’s promised to double y’all’s offer.”
Logan springs forward, pressing three blades to Wraith’s stomach. “How ‘bout I triple it?” When Wraith teleports away, Logan’s claws tip through the plastic seat.
At the stairs of the bus, Wraith says, “Color me surprised, Logan. I thought you’d given up the assassin trade. That’s why they didn’t bring you in official for the Yashida deal. You were a ‘changed man,’ Charles said.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Tell you what. You get the goddess to get you some of Charles’ cash, and you bring it to me without any of your usual violent bullshit, and we’ll talk.” Wraith teleports again, disappearing into a crowd of umbrellas.
Logan walks five blocks to the car, the fine rain doing nothing to cool him off. He’s stewing over what that bitch Stacy X had said – “Your people really don’t tell you anything.”
Through the Mazda’s back window, Logan can see Marie inside with her head buried in the textbooks she’s never without. Her finals are coming up. If she does good, she graduates a semester behind instead of a year. So she’s stopped slacking, toeing the line like she’s up for parole and Storm’s her warden.
Except for the attitude, she’s been a model student. Logan hasn’t caught a whiff of alcohol on her, not since that night in the woods when things got all sideways between them. But he knows every Friday when she goes to DC to stay with her firecracker friend that she’s coming back Sunday on the wrong side of a bender.
The way she’s hurting, last thing she needs is for him to unload on her. She’s been listening over the wire, so it’s going to be a hell of a job keeping her off the subject.
Minute he gets inside the Mazda, Logan starts sweating. Marie’s got the heat turned up to broiling. He reaches under her tall, black boots to turn it off, eyes definitely not her short skirt and the crotch-shot he’d be getting. “Kid, it’s winter. Put some goddamn clothes on.”
She pretends to contemplate that before saying, “Pass,” like she always does.
“Christ, you’re gonna get me pulled over for pickin’ up a teenage hooker,” he mutters, backing out of the lot.
“I’m not a prostitute.” She turns a page. “Anymore.”
Logan shoves her legs off the dash with the hand that’s not on the wheel. “I’m gettin’ real sick of the way you run your mouth.”
Marie shrugs. “I did get fifty bucks once for letting a truck driver hold my hand over his lap and move it around for a while. And this diner cook bought the underwear I’d been wearing for a week and a half. I don’t know which was grosser.”
He doesn’t dignify that charmer of a story with a response, just takes out a cigar to gnaw on while he navigates them through side streets. Isn’t she tired of the grudge she’s carrying? Yeah, okay, she’s embarrassed and maybe offended, but he shouldn’t have to justify not taking advantage of a drunk high schooler with a Mack truckload of baggage about sex.
Logan looks at Marie. Really looks at her. Watches her skirt ride up as she puts her textbooks into her backpack. The way she brushes her white bangs out of her mouth when she sits up with the surveillance computer.
“I don’t trust Wraith,” she says. “I don’t even trust that he’s not somewhat trustworthy.”
Logan pinches his eyelids. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. “What asshole taught you to be so suspicious, kid?”
“That wasn’t you, Logan. That was life.”
With the things about her past she’s oh-so-causally dropped on him of late, he believes it.
She brings up the recording to send to Storm. “I don’t think Wraith would sell Magneto to that Cross guy. Listen to how he said, ‘mutant supremacist,’” She starts the recording too late, right on “assassin,” and Logan has to tap the brake to avoid the car in front of him. She lets it play from there, frowning. “What’s the Yashida deal? You said the Professor asked Wraith to meet you about Stryker, but Wraith changed his mind.”
“He was sellin’ Stryker’s mind control serum on the black market for a microchip. I was s’posed to stop him, ‘cept turns out he wanted both. He had another mutant playin’ double-agent, and she got the microchip and Wraith got the serum and hell if I know what I was even doin’ there.”
Marie’s not hiding her annoyance at only getting the full story now. “And did you talk to him?”
“Not much. He said he knew me. I must’ve known him, because when he dumped the serum he was lookin’ at me like it was mine much as Stryker’s. ‘The work we did together,’” Logan echoes darkly. Marie punches him in the arm, and it’s so unexpected he almost veers into a van in the next lane. “Jesus! You know I don’t do city drivin’ – ”
“Who cares? My God, Logan. You’re blaming yourself for all of Stryker’s sins based on a look! You only pretended to walk away,” she accuses. “You’re still listening to him.”
“I’m not listening to anybody. I got my blinders on. World’s a mess, and you’re livin’ in it. I gotta take care of that for you.” It’s an attempt to soften her up, to get her off his back.
“Just admit you’ve stopped asking questions because you’re scared of the answers.” Marie glares out the window, at the traffic pinning her in with him. “Stop putting that on me.”
End Notes:
1) Elijah Cross is the leader of a group called X-Cell, who believes mutants losing their powers is a government conspiracy. He’ll be back later.
2) The film kinda makes it seem like Logan’s first(ish) mission is Nigeria, right after Vietnam, and that the climax is the 1979 Three Mile Island accident. If this is the case, then the writers can do two things for the sequel(s): a. Make it so “the not-so-distant future” in X1 is 1994 (ignoring pop culture references); b. Have the sequels cover a lot of years (ignoring Cyclops’s cameo) and then give Logan amnesia again. Neither of these make sense, so I hope they keep it vague. In this fic, the Three Mile Island incident (an ahistorical repeat meltdown) happened in 1995. So Logan worked for Stryker from the Vietnam War, 1974, until 1989, when he walked away in Nigeria. More explanation for all of this to come, but suffice to say that Serum-143 is a hell of a drug.
Trust Me: III by thatcraftykid
track 4 // “TRUST ME”
We're only taking turns holding this world
It's how it's always been, when you're older you will understand
The Fray
Winter 2010
Logan takes the chair Wraith, seated at a small table, kicks out for him. As they leave, the two Marines who led him in shut the door on the bass echoing in from the packed bar. Wraith nudges a Stout toward Logan, picking up his own to drink.
“Little bold, wouldn’t you say? Sellin’ America’s most wanted mutant right under the noses of a bunch of drunk patriots.” Logan props his forearms on the edge of the table. “I make a fuss, how many of your friends out there would turn on you?”
Marie was actually the one to point out this was a military bar, on the phone to Storm. The kid refused to speak to him for the entire five-hour stakeout. It’s been a long damn time since being alone with his thoughts hasn’t left Logan irritable. He even tried to pick a fight with her, but she didn’t bite, content to stay in the car to hang on every word over surveillance.
Wraith puts down his beer as Logan picks up his. “Nothin’ drains the red, white, and blue out of a man faster than a whole lot of green. How much did the goddess authorize?”
“A whole lot. But you’re not gettin’ a cent. Now, you agreed to do a job out of gratitude to a dead man it sounds like you respected. That money sees to it that a lot of mutant kids don’t grow up to be like us. Assassins.”
“Naw, just X-Men.” Wraith props his feet up. “Is it the black leather that turns you into a hero? Or was it Charles pattin’ you on the head, tellin’ you, ‘Good boy’? Didn’t it piss you off, what I said about the Yashida mission? He told me you were gonna be there. You had to be there. You’re the only person on this continent the Yashida Clan would’ve let walk away from that kind of insult. He lied to you.”
Logan takes a long gulp of beer, waiting for Wraith to get around to telling him why.
Seeing that he’s not going to get a rise out of him, Wraith laughs. “So it’s trust, then. You trusted Charles. Logan. Big, bad rogue mercenary. Trustin’ somebody.” He toasts him with a dip of his bottle. “I have truly lived to see everything.”
“You said somebody wanted to bring me in, and Xavier wouldn’t let ‘em. Same people who’ve got you wearin’ that wire?” He can see the end of it sticking out of the lapel of Wraith’s sheepskin jacket.
Half-teleporting, he lunges at Logan over the table. The two of them go down as the chair splinters under their weight. Logan’s claws shoot out, impaling Wraith’s shoulder.
Shouting in pain, Wraith teleports off him, leaving Logan with a sliced wire wrapped around one claw and not a clue. “What happened to no violent bullshit?”
In the corner of the room, Wraith groans as he eases his jacket off his shoulder. “Saw an opportunity to get that wire off without them gettin’ suspicious.”
“Won’t they come bargin’ in any second now it’s dead?”
“If you were that high on their priority list, you wouldn’t be talkin’ to me right now.”
Logan kicks aside the broken chair and takes Wraith’s. “’Their,’ ’them,’ ‘they’ – The Man from fuckin’ UNCLE?”
“You’re not far off. Try SHIELD,” Wraith says. He pokes three fingers through the holes in his jacket. “Ah, hell. Stacy’s never gonna let me hear the end of this.”
There’s blood on the lining, but not nearly what there should be. “You ain’t just a teleport.”
Wraith winces as he rolls his shoulder. “Give it five minutes, and it’ll better than new. A lot of us got ‘upgraded’ with your healing factor. Brought me back from the brink of death once. I’d thank you, but it was sorta your fault I got killed in the first place. Victor Creed. You’re downright fortunate to have no memory of that sick son-of-bitch.”
‘Victor Creed’ wasn’t in the dossier, but there’s something loathsome about the name. Something like the metallic stink of sweat, blood, and fear. Logan has to slam down on a rush of garbled memories that normally only torment him in his sleep.
He chooses a different line of questioning. “SHIELD. I take it it’s a military thing?”
“Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division, these days. Stood for somethin’-somethin’-Espionage back when you used to loan yourself out to ‘em.”
“You tellin’ me I was a spy, too?”
“No. I’m tellin’ you were their favorite spy. And when you walked, come to find out after you disappeared you gave them my name.” Wraith salutes him, his middle finger coming off the brim of his hat. “Thank you, Cpt. Logan, sir, for eighteen motherfuckin’ years of bein’ Fury’s bitch. No sick leave, neither.”
“If you hate me so damn much, why aren’t you still wearin’ that wire?”
“’Cause I did respect Charles Xavier. He couldn’t do much for me, in the end, but he was a good man. He vouched for you, and he kept SHIELD from knockin’ at his door after you showed up at the White House. Now he’s dead, figure you at least got the right to know who’s comin’ for ya.”
Logan grimaces. “I’ll tell ‘em to take a hike. What’s the big fat deal?”
“Oh.” Wraith laughs. “Oh, you’ll just tell Col. Nick Fury to ‘take a hike’ and go on your merry way. I see. And when SHIELD goes after the goddess you been fuckin’ or maybe that sweet little thing follows you around, are you gonna stay to see that? ‘Cause the old you would’ve walked away without a look back. You always had women. Easy enough to trade ‘em out.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Logan snarls, too well aware Marie must’ve heard that.
“All right. So you’ll watch ‘em suffer. What d’you think this Magneto thing is? It’s a trap. SHIELD wants dirt on the X-Men. They already tried to catch y’all with your pants down at Thanksgiving, lettin’ some two-bit terrorists think they’d escaped, but you won out. Now the plan’s Magneto. Few false allegations, threaten to shut down the school, bam. They own you and the X-Men.”
“Fantastic.” The very last two things Logan can stomach more of – bullshit political maneuvers and people who knew him when. “Thanks for tellin’ me. Now what do we do about it?”
“We don’t do a damn thing. You keep Charles’ name clean by goin’ quiet to Fury, and I walk free. If that ain’t good enough for you…” Wraith motions that he’s open for Logan to say so.
By the end of their brawl, Logan’s eyes are stinging, his nose throbbing because he just slammed it into a wall. Not the one he and Wraith wrestled through on a teleport. This wall is air made solid by the overpowering scent of lust. And Marie.
With Stacy X. On top of the bar. All but holding Marie up as the two of them grind to the stereo’s thudding beat, hands on each other’s thighs. Stacy gathers Marie’s hair into an old man knit cap, the better to lick salt off her neck for her shot. Marie’s head goes limp, eyes closed, mouth open for more. Stacy X smiles that Cheshire leer, no reason in the world not to swoop in and take what she wants where it’s offered.
No good damn deed goes unpunished.
Heightened senses more dazed with pheromones than the wolf-whistling jackasses pushing closer to the bar, minutes from whipping their dicks out – Logan has to watch.
He barely notices getting to his feet, or Wraith teleporting to the front. Ringing ears make it hard to concentrate on anything but the little noises Marie’s making as she licks her way across Stacy X’s collarbone. Wraith remarks something about the heat being way too thick in here. The reply he hears plain enough: “I was celebratin’ our release, baby. I thought you’d like her, too.”
Surging forward, hands splayed wide to keep in the instinct to gouge some eyes out, Logan shoves past the slack-jawed sacks of testosterone standing between him and Marie.
“Ease up on her,” Wraith is saying. “She’ll OD.”
Stacy X grabs a handful of ass, making Marie shriek a laugh and Logan about chip a molar. “Who says no to a Southern belle?” She cradles Marie’s face against her shoulder, listening to whatever Marie is slurring. Stacy X finds him in crowd. Laughs at his face. “Oh, that’s just sad.”
The pressure in the bar thins out, and Logan can almost breathe again. “The hell you mean OD?” he growls at Wraith, knocking aside a tank of a guy swaying on his feet. “You all right, kid?”
“She’ll be fine, just get her some fresh air.” Wraith wisely turns his back on Marie shimmying up his woman. “Maybe hose her down.”
Logan smacks the bar, too on edge to break her out of Stacy X’s trance gentle. “Rogue!”
Marie turns with her fingers locked above Stacy X’s head and stamps her heel. “Wolverine!” A stoned-looking grin spreads across her face. “I don’t know why you’re yellin’. I feel great.”
“Your ‘kid’ can handle it.” Stacy X’s hand, growing scales, snakes down Marie’s midriff, into the band of her skirt. “It’s you who can’t, hero.”
Logan yanks Marie over his shoulder and grabs Wraith by the collar in the same motion. “SHIELD can stick Magneto in a hole and let him rot, I don’t give two shits. But they try to sabotage the X-Men again, tell ‘em they better not expect me to play nice.”
Wraith tips his hat. “There’s the old Logan.” To Marie he says, “Take care, sweetheart,” his voice chalk full of pity.
Logan resists the urge to ram his fist in Wraith’s face, striding toward the exit instead.
“’Bye, Stacy,” Marie calls out, squirming down his torso until she’s got her knees locked around his waist. “Hi, Logan.”
When she kisses him, Logan clamps a hand on the back of her head and mashes their faces together so hard their teeth click. It’s supposed to be too rough. Shock her. Marie digs her fingers into his hair and makes a sound like she’ll never let go.
Logan drops her to her feet and uses her elbow to march her the rest of the way to the door. The disgust on the bouncer’s face makes Logan see red, but it has Marie in stitches.
“Guarantee what he thinks ain’t flatterin’ to you either, little girl, so quit laughin’,” he barks. He hauls her out the door and around to the open alley beside the building, following the awning to keep her out of the freezing rain.
Marie leans into his vice-grip. “’Little girl,’ my sweet ass. I told the bouncer I was twenty-three and he believed me, but he wouldn’t let me in without ID.” She lays her accent on real thick. “So I s’plained how you was my brother just back from I-raq, and our momma, bless her cancer-stricken soul, sent me out to bring you home ‘fore you did somethin’ you’d regret.” He thinks that’s even less funny, but that doesn’t stop her from yucking it up.
“You were supposed to stay in the car, not make a damn spectacle of yourself.” He refuses look back at her as he drags her along, until her reply knocks him for a loop.
“I saw a girl I liked.” She mimics Stacy X’s leer. “Surprised? Do you know how I used to stare at Dr. Grey, mortified by all the things I couldn’t help wanting to do to my science teacher? You can pretend to be a back-achin’ Puritan, but in my head you and sex were never far apart.”
Logan stops. Listens to pure rainwater rushing through the gutter. To Marie, her heart rate still jacked up on pheromones, shuddering and panting. “Jesus Christ.” As if giving her his nightmares wasn’t punishment enough. How many more ways does the girl he swore he’d take care of have to pay for letting him be her half-assed savior? “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry!” She plasters herself to his back, her hands stroking down his chest to skim the tight front of his jeans.
Her need meets his tension, and he snaps.
Two choices. Take her against the wall or throw her on the pavement. He does the second, but he has to see the shock of hurt go off behind her eyes anyway.
She lays on her side, blood from her elbow mixing with dirty water in a pothole. Curling in on herself, her hair falls with the cap and hides her face. Rain beats on her bowed head.
He steps out from under the awning, waiting until the cold water has soaked him down, washed her scent, before he speaks. “I don’t know what you’re looking to prove. But I won’t use you like that.”
She puts her chin on one of her skinned knees, her pale legs reflecting the red and blue from a neon sign. “You use me, Logan. All that adoration.” She lifts her bitter smile. “You needed it, so I’m glad it helped you. But I can’t…act for you. I-I tried, but can’t. I’ve been through what I’ve been through, and I feel – ” Her wet eyes slant down. “The way everybody always knew I felt.” Suddenly, she’s all but glaring, straight at him. “So maybe I am trying to prove something. Like how it’s not fair that you use me, but I’m not allowed to use you right back.”
Marie’s crying, and Logan wants to put his claws through his chest again. He looks at her, and she’s so young, hugging her shivering body. On her still face he sees something of the woman he’ll be damn lucky to know, if he doesn’t fuck her up too much in the mean time.
But the passing of years is a slow build and it weighs on him. He’s only known her eight months.
It takes two tries before he opens his mouth and finds his voice. “What the hell can I do?”
“You could trust me.”
“What d’you mean? I trust you. Kid, I trust you.”
She shuts her eyes on her tears and swallows them hard. When she opens her eyes again, there’s nothing but determination in her expression.
“Then give me the benefit of the doubt.” Marie holds out her hand and lets him help her to her feet, picking up the cap as she does. “This is Magneto’s.” She shows him where ‘EL’ is stitched in the lining. “I saw Stacy with it, so I followed her inside since you weren’t getting anywhere with Wraith. I didn’t know…” Her fingers slide against Logan’s palm as she steps back. “What she’d do to me.” Not a minute ago, Marie was burning a hole through him with eyes that now she can’t lift higher than her feet.
“Hey. Her mutation is powerful. Don’t go blaming yourself.” What he really means is, Don’t go blaming me.
Marie accepts that copout with a shrug. “While Stacy was working the bartender for free shots, I took this from her purse.” Out of her bra comes a damp piece of paper ripped from a day planner. On it is an address and a Magneto-sized list of demands written in runny cursive.
“This is good work kid,” he says, hating that he has to disappoint her. “Real good. But it’s the government that’s got Magneto. If we take him, they’re gonna trump up some conspiracy.”
“It might not matter to you if Erik never sees the inside of a courtroom, but it matters to me. The last time they brushed him under the rug, he made himself a martyr. Mutants need to know that he’s anything but. I say we hand him over to IMRI and let them tar and feather him like they’ve been wanting to since that poor girl died up on the Statue of Liberty.”
That’s all Logan needs to hear. “Okay.” Storm probably won’t like the risk, but to hell with it. This is the only thing Marie’s asked of him in weeks he has the slightest chance of not fucking up. He clings to it, a man drowning in the rain. “I’ll call McCoy, have him set it up. I’ll make it happen tonight.”
“Thank you,” Marie says.
Wrapping her into his jacket, Logan is struck by how much ground she’s willing to give just to keep him from losing any.
End Notes:
1) Col. Nick Fury, ladies and gentlemen: [http://www.bamkapow.com/post.phtml?pk=2303]. Badass motherfucker extraordinaire. In the comics, Logan moonlights for SHIELD quite a bit.
2) The “back-achin’ Puritan” bit comes from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the classic Southern girl’s guide to seducing a man who claims not to want you. Paul Newman. Liz Taylor. Rowr.
3) The very public way Magneto kidnapped Marie from the train station means someone must’ve asked about the girl. Bringing Marie into it would’ve brought Xavier into it and outted the school and the X-Men, something that Magneto only did under Stryker’s mind control in X2. So Magneto probably let the authorities believe the girl died and played dumb about who she was, keeping Marie and the X-Men anonymous.
King of Anything: I by thatcraftykid
Author's Notes:
Yay, I'm back. *crickets* Okay, deserved. But, in my defense, I didn't have internet at my site for a long, long time. Also, I lost my muse, but then I found her again, and she told me to break the story down into bite-sized pieces for better updating/reading/reviewing (Please!) So I did. She also told me to ease up on the dark brooding and move into...light brooding. If that's a thing. So, yeah. Here it goes.
track 5 // “KING OF ANYTHING”
I’m not one who’s lost with no direction, oh, but you’ll never see
You’re so busy makin’ plans with my name on them in all caps
Sara Barielles
Winter 2010
Marie adjusts Erik’s worn cap over her wet hair, her thoughts along the lines of the once mighty fallen and poetic justice. From a multi-million dollar custom-made maximum security prison to a rundown rusted warehouse in Queens. How maddening it must be for him to be incapacitated by so much flimsy metal.
Logan makes short work of slicing through the hinges Wraith welded shut. Marie taps the door and it crashes inward, millimeters from the leg Erik has crossed to hold up the hardback he’s reading in the flickering light.
Both of his bushy gray brows raise, spreading the deep blue crevices etched in his face. He takes in Logan’s ready claws, Marie’s bare hands. Smiles at him scowling around a cigar, her glaring under his cap.
“My saviors. How…unlikely.”
Oh, yes. The irony is thick. The girl he would have sacrificed for the cause he has lost the right to champion and the man there to stop him at every turn. Marie wishes, not for the first time, that she had been the one to stab three cure shots straight into Erik’s morally bankrupt heart.
“This ain’t a rescue, old man, it’s a change of jailor.” Logan points his claws from Erik to the hall. “Get a move on.”
Hunched over a cane as he passes, Erik’s dull eyes lock on Marie’s. “Did they cure you, my dear?” he asks, and lifts the hand that tried to kill her to cup her cheek.
“Don’t touch me,” she spits, skittering back even as Logan grabs his arms.
“They stripped you of your birthright,” Erik says. “You are not healed.”
Marie slaps him across his haggard face. Tells herself the feeling swelling in her is satisfaction.
Sheryl Maxwell, IMRI’s public relations director, asks Dr. McCoy for one hour to pull together a legal team and a press conference. Logan says if he has to babysit, he’s not going to do it with a bunch of boys in blue breathing down his neck. They settle for a diner near the police station.
Magneto and Wolverine and Rogue sharing a plastic booth, a pot of thick black coffee, and a forced silence. The two of them are staring Marie down across the table. Logan, fingers as white as his mug, is watching a trickle of blood stain the piece of napkin covering the gash on her elbow. Erik, blotchy cheek in his hand, is trying to get a rise out of her by fixating on the stripes in her hair. Marie slants her chin toward the dark window, unable to see past the three discolored reflections. One face is hard. One is old. One pale.
Marie tucks her scars behind her ears. Drops her injuries off the table. Sinks her teeth into her bottom lip, because she doesn’t know how to make them believe that she is so much stronger than the sum of what they think they’ve done to her.
News vans roll up the street. Any minute now. Just get through this.
The waitress comes with their orders. Marie sits back to make room for her ice water. Logan digs into the lake of grease on his plate, while Erik picks up an apple from his fruit platter. He makes two cuts with a butter knife before his hand is shaking too much to continue.
She has never seen anybody on the right side of a coffin as decrepit as Erik looks to her now. The theory is, whatever evolutionary leap activated the X-gene made the whole human race age slower and live longer. But, since the cure, Erik seems to have gained twenty years. Makes Marie wonder how many decades off her life she’s traded. How many last-minute brink-of-death reprieves.
With noise of disgust, Marie seizes the apple and the knife. Her hands are steady as she carves the pattern Erik used to watch his mother make. But when Marie goes to open the halves, she ends up with a pulpy mess instead of two flower blossoms.
She lets the apple clang back on his plate, not sure what she was expecting. The memories she stole, never perfect, get more distorted every time she tries to remember having them.
“It is a shame. You could have been the most powerful of us all,” Erik remarks, and suddenly she’s back in that cavernous cell. Freezing cold, too drugged to lift her arms to warm herself. Before he’d said those words, she’d been scared of being hurt. Hearing them had made her afraid for her life.
Marie sneers, “You know, repeating yourself is a sign of senility.”
“Kid, ignore him,” Logan says through a forkful of hash browns. “Gramps, shut your trap.”
Marie hugs her elbows. “I can take it.”
“I admire the brave face you’ve put on. But is it for me or your regret?” Erik clenches his trembling fingers. “We’ve been lobotomized, you and I. And a half-life is hardly worth living.”
“Cheer up, Erik. Maybe the state of New York will bring back lethal injection just for you. That is, if the mutants you exploited don’t string you up in the courtyard of Hiram Prison first.”
Logan grunts his approval of that retort.
“How the sweet has soured.” Erik flashes yellowed teeth. “Could this be your influence, Wolverine?”
The waitress bustles her middle-age spread over to their booth. The tune she was whistling dips low when she catches onto the tension. “You all want me to switch you to decaf?” she asks through her nose, hoisting a new pot.
“Thank you, Gladys, that won’t be necessary,” Erik responds.
His gentility makes the waitress beam at him as she refills his cup. “These your…grandkids?” she inquires, obviously stretching to make the three of them make sense together.
“No,” Logan says and takes the pot to drop on the table.
She’s about to huff off when Erik puts on an air of tragedy. “Am I not supposed to have an opinion, Gladys? When I see this beautiful young girl throwing away her vast potential to become the lover of the man who fashioned himself her guardian – ”
Marie is flooded with all the abject humiliation of her second stomach-turning rejection. Over an outraged growl, she yelps, “I didn’t do it for – ” Her voice falters when her eyes slant Logan’s way. ‘Sex’ is what she almost said. ‘Him’ wouldn’t have been much better.
With a tsk-tsk noise, Glady’s replies, “Oh, sweetie, men – ”
“How ‘bout another side of bacon and everybody minds their own damn business?” Logan shoves his plate forward, and the force of his scowl makes Gladys lose the booth-side psychologist act and hustle to put in his order. As soon as she’s gone, Marie sees Logan’s fist come to rest in the general direction of Erik’s spleen. Under his breath, Logan menaces, “The hell did I say? Don’t talk to her, don’t talk about her. Or I’ll put you outta your misery right here.”
A long drink of ice water is the only thing Marie can do to get back her cool. She spills it on herself when Logan’s phone buzzes against the table.
“What do you mean, they can’t find it? It’s right behind the – All right. Fine. I’ll flag ‘em down.” Logan bunches up a napkin and tosses it on his plate. “Should I take him?”
“What’s he gonna do? Outrun me?”
“Thirty seconds,” Logan says, striding out the door in half that time.
“Quick.” Marie nudges the butter knife toward Erik. “Last chance to take me hostage and go out in a blaze of glory.”
“If you’re expecting theatrics, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint. I’ve never been one for idle threats. In my place, you might try to prove yourself with foolhardy attacks. When I see no way forward, I wait. Patience is the mark of a survivor. You, dear girl, are the perpetual victim. Long after you have given in, I will remain.”
Marie straightens her spine to deflect a flinch. “You’ll be alone. Haven’t you been watching? All the alienated mutants you just love to take advantage of – Fear isn’t the message they’re hearing anymore. It’s choice.”
“Let’s go, old man,” Logan says, leaning in from outside. “Your public’s waitin’.”
Erik uses the edge of the table to lift himself up from the booth. “There will be further consequences to this ‘cure.’ When they come to light, I look forward to an entirely different sort of conversation.”
“Please say you’ll hold your breath until then.” Marie gives him her best butter-wouldn’t-melt smile and gestures to his cap laying next to her, on top of Logan’s coat.
He reclaims the cap that survived a World War and all the ones he’s tried to start since. Trades it for a well-thumbed copy of Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children. “I hope you’ll keep this. After all, who are you without your trophies?”
It takes several seconds too long, but the way he has to support himself with a cane as he hobbles out the door gives her a great exit line: “I’m still me. You’re the one who’s been crippled.” Marie sits back, feeling so good about getting the last word that she flags down Gladys. “Pancakes.” She motions with her hands. “Big stack.”
Logan slides in across from her. “He say anythin’ else, kid?”
“Just his usual load of crap.”
“You wanna go watch the conference?”
“Don’t need to.” Erik is off to be burned in effigy by a jury of his peers, and Marie is officially washed clean of his crimes. Free to move on.
Free to enjoy her pancakes. When they’re set in front of her she drowns them in syrup and digs in, not having to stop to decide if it’s worth taking her gloves off because she doesn’t have to wear them anymore. And she never will.
Logan crosses his arms over his chest. “You gonna tell me what’s the matter?”
Marie puts up a polite hand as she chews. “I think you forgot what happy looks like on me.”
“After a night like tonight, you’re happy?”
Actually, Marie has never been brought down as low as she was, looking up at Logan through tears and realizing just how fragile the bond between them really is. So she’s made a choice, for both their sakes.
“Well, okay, maybe it’s a future happiness. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, but all this made up my mind.” She swallows a bite of pancake that coats her mouth in syrup. Semi-liquid courage.
Logan doesn’t seem too convinced. “And?”
“And I’m leaving.”
End Notes:
1) I included the age theory as a way to suspend some disbelief that non-mutant characters like William Stryker and Moira MacTaggart were adults decades before the X-trilogy. Plus, it seems only fair that there would be something about this leap forward beneficial to everybody.
2) While Marie doesn’t have the personalities in her head anymore, she would keep the memory of having their memories. I imagine that’d be like thinking of a movie you watched as a kid. Images remain, but the context is just beyond your grasp.
3) Hiram is what I’m calling the place that housed Magneto’s plastic prison. So Sebastian Shaw named the prison after his ancestor, Hiram Shaw, and it’s specially designed for mutant criminals.
4) Erik giving Marie a book is in reference to X2, wherein both Erik and Charles are reading The Once and Future King. Midnight’s Children is about a lot of X-Men related themes – magical realism, revolution, identity, etc.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.