Scanning both sides of the path before her, Rogue cautiously trotted the last few steps to find Logan on the ground at one side of the grove, hands and shirt soaked in blood, muscles convulsing, and seemingly unconscious or nearly so. Scanning their surroundings to make sure no one else was near, she stepped closer, calling his name softly, trying to rouse a coherent response of any kind from him. The tremors were softening, and he lay on his right side, half rolled into fetal position, hands still pumping blood and clutched against his chest.
“Oh my god, Logan, what happened?” Rogue approached the semi-conscious man cautiously, half afraid that the claws would come out at her, and half afraid by his appearance that they’d somehow been ripped out of him, leaving the gory holes in his hands.
Stepping carefully around behind him to afford herself as much protection from his hands as possible, she knelt close against him and saw the vial protruding from his back. With a trembling hand, she reached for it just as he gave a deep groan and rolled toward her. Rogue scrambled into a quick reverse and saw the vial snap off as his back touched the ground, bringing another cry of pain from him. She saw the gleaming metal claws shoot halfway out from his shaking hands, then return to their fully retracted position as more blood pumped afresh from the six slashes. She almost breathed a sigh of relief that his claws were still intact. She didn’t even want to think what kind of person, mutant or otherwise, could have ripped out the Wolverine’s claws.
Magneto. Impossible! The metal-manipulator had been neutralized in the Alcatraz battle.
Rogue shook off the crazy notion and tried again to get Logan to respond to her voice. His eyes struggled open, scanning erratically around him before locking onto her face. He was gasping for breath, still crazy from pain and something more.
It had to be some kind of poison, something his mutation couldn’t fight off. Rogue kept her eyes locked on him and kept talking to him softly, making him concentrate on her.
“Logan, it’s me, sugar. I’m here with you. I’ll take care of it. Can you talk to me?” She knelt by him and reached a hand down, softly stroking his forehead as he began quieting. The tremors were almost gone now.
“Yeah....” She could barely hear his words. “Yeah. What happened?”
“I don’t know. I heard you call for me and then I found you here on the ground. I can get Pete and we can call 911, get some help here.”
“No!” He snarled at her uncharacteristically. “No doctors, no hospital, not ‘theirs’.” She knew that meant a regular hospital with non-mutant doctors. “Hank...” He was gasping for breath again, “Get me back... get Hank.”
“Lay still, and I’ll get Pete here in a few seconds,” Rogue whipped off the light vest she’d put on that day and wrapped it tightly around his bleeding hands. “Stay quiet. I’ll be right back.” She feathered a kiss on his forehead, appalled at the clamminess of his skin, and ran for help.
Shouting across the traffic for Piotr to bring the first aid box from the jeep, she ran back to the grove where Logan still lay with his hands wrapped in her blood-soaked vest. Only moments later, Piotr skidded to a halt at Logan’s other side and together they wrapped fresh packing and gauze around his hands, and helped him sit up against a tree. When Piotr asked what had happened, Rogue just shook her head in bewilderment.
With Piotr’s strong arms around Logan, the two men managed to rise and walk toward the jeep. Rogue grabbed the vial from the ground where it had snapped off, and checked the end. The needle was gone, probably still embedded in Logan’s back. She studied the vial briefly, wondering where she’d seen one like that before. Then it struck her: the security camera videotapes from Worthington Labs on Alcatraz! She had reviewed the tapes from the island with the other X-Men after the battle against the Brotherhood, and she had watched with leering satisfaction as she’d seen Hank slam a handful of such vials into Magneto’s chest, the older man then dropping to the ground.
It had to be the cure vaccine! It was a different form of delivery than she’d gotten at the clinic, but it would explain Logan’s sudden loss of the ability to heal himself rapidly. A shrill scream from the park brought her attention as she ran to catch up with the two men. A woman had been walking her little dog through the park and screamed at the sight of the two men, one covered in blood, walking out of the park. Ignoring the woman, Rogue jammed the broken vial into her pocket and ran to unlock the jeep.
Jerking open one back door, Piotr half-lifted Logan onto the seat as Rogue jumped in the other side, catching Logan and easing him down to lie half on her lap while Piotr fired the jeep to life and nosed them quickly into the flow of traffic, heading home as fast as possible.
“Baby... oh god, baby... it’s okay,” she kept whispering to Logan who seemed to be experiencing intermittent waves of tremors. He lay quietly with his head in her lap, stoically silent, eyes closed as if concentrating on maintaining himself. Keeping her finger lightly on the pulse point behind his ear, she monitored his rapid heart rate, and with trembling fingers stroked his hair to help calm him. By the time they reached the mansion, he sat up on his own and tried to step out of the jeep unassisted, but Piotr had called ahead on the cell phone and Hank was waiting with a gurney.
“I don’t need that thing,” Logan groused, five seconds passing before his knees buckled. The three of them together caught Logan and lowered him onto the gurney, then made a fast bee line for the Med Lab.
Gathered in Hank’s office an hour later, he reviewed his findings for Rogue, Storm, and Bobby.
“I’m very glad that I was already here working with the pre-med students at this time. I’ve never consider myself a diagnostician, but thanks to Rogue’s quick thinking in retrieving that vial, it has been determined that it was indeed the ‘mutant cure’ vaccine that was delivered to Logan in this afternoon’s attack. There was enough liquid left in the vial to test with Worthington Lab’s assistance, so that diagnosis is confirmed. The needle broke off in his back near the inner edge of the shoulder blade, and if not for his generally muscular physique, it might have punctured the right lung. The needle shattered into several pieces, possibly when it struck an adamantium-clad bone, but all pieces have been removed under local anesthetic, and should cause no further problems once the wound heals, at a natural human rate, of course,” Hank scanned the eyes of the three, then continued, pushing his glasses up his nose.
“Local anesthetic has also been applied to Logan’s hands and the holes from the claws have been closed with a total of sixty-six stitches. These will remain in place for about ten days to two weeks, depending on how quickly he heals, and how well he takes care of the wounds.” Hank hooked the glasses back down his nose again with one clawed finger and peered over them, “Knowing Logan, it will be two weeks. He’s not famous for his restraint or caution.” The glasses went back up, and flipping one page in the chart, he continued.
“I’ve started him on a routine of antibiotics for the wounds, noting that even the simple pin prick of a blood test did not heal immediately. From that observation alone, I can confidently say that the ‘cure’ has taken total effect, and his mutations have been completely shut down: the regeneration, and apparently the heightened senses as well. He required a transfusion to compensate for the blood loss he suffered as a result of the attack and the unsheathing of his claws, which then would not heal as normal for him. Logan is a rare blood type, O negative; but fortunately, and thanks again to Rogue here who shares that same type and donated a while ago, he received the transfusion he needed.”
Looking up from the chart, Hank expanded on his current thoughts, “We need to establish a donor program here for the student body as a precaution, and that’s something my pre-med students will begin organizing first thing tomorrow. No one else in the mansion has O negative blood but the two of you,” he looked directly at Rogue again, “so for both your safety, we should try to keep a unit or two on hand for emergencies such as this.”
Rogue sat silently between Bobby and Storm, her fingers grimly laced together so tightly they almost hurt. Bobby had gently placed an arm across the back of her chair as a comforting gesture; he’d freaked out when she appeared in the hallway soaked in blood and frantically holding on to Logan’s shoulder as they’d wheeled him into Med Lab. Bobby had breathed a deep sigh of relief as soon as he learned the blood soaking his girlfriend’s clothing was not her own, and now focused on being her support system.
Storm interjected questions, “How is he now? Can we see him? Does he know what happened?”
“I’ve explained to Logan that he was injected with the ‘mutant cure’ vaccine. To say that he did not take this news well would be a gross understatement,” Hank gave them a smile tinged with an ironic sadness. “The man has an astonishing vocabulary at times, none of which I’ll repeat here. He is weak, he needs bed rest, and I chose to administer a strong sedative so he will be asleep the rest of the night. If he seems stable tomorrow, I’ll release him from Med Lab then, and keep a close eye on him the first few days. Other than the amount of stitches needed to close the lacerations from his claws, and the attendant blood loss, he’s in fairly good shape. He’s a strong, healthy man. Even with his mutations eliminated, he should heal up, in time.”
Hank seemed hesitant, then continued, “A great deal of Logan’s personal ‘style’, his individualism, is invested in his mutations; his skills as a fighter; his almost constant use of his heightened senses; and now all that has changed. Whether or not this affects his feral nature, I have no way of deducing. He will have a lot of adjusting to do, and it will take time. But first, he has to get his strength back and heal,” Hank gently folded the chart closed. “This will not be easy for him.”
“Doctor McCoy, can I go sit with him after I get cleaned up?” Rogue spoke for the first time. She had refused to leave the Med Lab waiting area while Hank and his assistants had stitched Logan and worked over him, running tests, bandaging his hands. Bobby had repeatedly asked her to go with him and clean up. The smell of her bloody clothing was making him slightly ill, but she’d flatly refused. She’d only agreed to come to this office now because she wanted to know everything.
“Of course you may, but as I said, he’ll sleep the rest of the night.”
“I don’t care,” Rogue rose to leave the room, Bobby following closely on her heels. They walked in total silence until reaching Rogue’s door, when she turned to Bobby.
“Thanks for the company, but I need to handle this on my own. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” With a peck on his cheek, she started into her room.
“Rogue,” Bobby moved toward her, but she said one word to him before shutting the door.
“Tomorrow.”
Freshly scrubbed and with her hair still damp, Rogue threw on clean jeans and a t-shirt, fastened on the magnolia blossom necklace and dropped it beneath her shirt, then made herself walk instead of running back to the Med Lab where the activity around Logan’s bed had now ceased. Monitors beeped quietly in the student’s station, but near his bed all was quiet. Hank nodded to her as she slipped in and went to Logan’s side. She stood close to the bed and looked down at him.
She’d never seen him pale before, except for those moments in the past when she’d used her former mutation to suck energy from him. His hazel eyes were closed in sleep, the relaxed state deepened by the sedation. She allowed herself to examine him by her own standards: monitor cables snaking across the sheet and into the panel above the bed; an IV drip on the other side into a needle in his left arm, and she knew how he hated invasive medical stuff. Two bags of liquid fed their droplets into the tube that ran to his arm, but she couldn’t tell what they were, and she didn’t care - she trusted Hank to do what was best.
Rogue moved her eyes down to Logan’s hands, swathed in white bandages and resting on a folded blanket placed over his abdomen to keep his hands elevated above heart level. She stroked her fingers lightly over his where they showed beyond the bandages, amazed at the smoothness of his skin. He would have scars now; scars from the cuts, scars from the tiny stitches that held in place the fine webbing of skin between his fingers, and eventually gray hairs snaking through the dark ones on his head, crow’s feet would start to gather at the corners of his eyes when he smiled, rare though his smiles were...
‘Oh god,’ Rogue thought to herself, ‘I’ve been waiting to grow up for him, to be old enough that he doesn’t feel guilty about being with me. Now he’ll age, too, and I’ll always be too young for him to feel right about us being together.’ Those abrupt thoughts finally brought her to a full and profound understanding of the depth of her feelings for him. She loved him, more than a friend, more than the ‘big brother’ role that some people tried to impose on him, more than her protector when she needed one. She loved him, deeply. She loved him as a man.
The cure was the final stroke that severed their future together. She’d taken it voluntarily for her own good., while he’d been forced into it, and the cure would end everything she’d wanted for them both. His words from their earlier conversation on the subject echoed in her mind. He had said the cure would be a form of slow suicide for him.
It was too much. Gasping for breath, she broke down, collapsing on the floor beside his bed, wracked with shuddering sobs, tears pouring down her cheeks.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Rogue thinks fast, and Hank makes the dreaded diagnosis.