There were a total of seven documents and eight photos on the first two disks. The first disk had been some kind of install, and set up a few strange programs of the laptop Logan had bought. The strange thing about the programs: they couldn’t be found anywhere on the hard drive, by anyone. The only trace of them appeared when the second disk went in, demanding Logan’s password and––the second time he tried to use it and every time after––a couple of verification questions, different every time, that only Logan would know, and only once a few of his memories had come back.
And more than a few had come back. Every scrap, every image, and suddenly Logan knew things. There was no flood of memories, no movies in his head. The memories were just there, as though they had never left, but the lights had been flicked on in the darker, formerly unreachable parts of his brain they had been waiting in.
There was no moment of I remember; it was simply. yeah, I know followed shortly by, wait, I do? What the fuck?!
And she sent more, and Logan found himself less distracted by the content of her “gifts” and more suspiciously curious about her. She addressed him familiarly, and tended to make asides in her statements, anticipating Logan’s questions as he read, as though she knew him well, but her scent was unfamiliar, and fainter than it should be, as though her skin hadn’t touched anything she sent. She left no fingerprints. Smells, other than hers, trapped in the envelopes, were public ones: traces of cleaner and the food-smells of a diner, the road-smells of gas and public transport, and one letter came in an envelope that had gotten a bit of sake spilled on it in a sushi bar in Tokyo. She had been in Japan, tracking down Logan’s dead wife, who had been dead for nearly half a century. There was no reason for her to do something so personal, so invasive, and something she could not possibly find personal gain in.
Why the hell was she doing all this?
Not to mention, who the Hell was she?
She used public mail drops with no return addresses or means to trace her, and left nothing traceable, biological or otherwise, on what she sent: no saliva on stamps or envelopes, no hair, no perfume, no specialized materials of any kind. And at first, Logan was irritated, ready to hunt her down. It had taken days for Xavier to talk him down, weeks to investigate all the leads in the documents. Mariko was real; Logan himself found the same book Rogue had photographed, but no one he spoke to, in Japanese he had remembered how to speak, knew anything about Rogue, or any American woman who could have accessed the book. She was like a ghost, and it was seriously pissing Logan off.
After the first envelope came two more, with just disks and documents, no letter: one a month, it seemed, was her goal for deliveries. Then came the fourth envelope. Her letter had a small, smeared drop of blood on it. Rogue’s. The only bit of DNA she left behind, and it had a faint trace of gunpowder residue in it from a government-issued pistol. And there was another letter. No disk. It had been sent by priority mail, and was almost less than 24 hours old.
I met some old friends of the guy that I think gave you claws.
They weren’t happy about it. Sorry I couldn’t leave ‘em for you,
but I didn’t have much choice. No documents this time.
“Why not?” Ya may well wonder. I’ll tell you:
you’re a sneaky son-of-a-bitch, ya know. You’d be surprised, Ah think,
to know how good of job you’ve done, keeping people from learning
how many of the original Weapon X guys you’ve taken out. Some of
the people who haven’t the faintest clue might surprise ya. I was
originally gonna find ‘em for you, but after the fourth or fifth dead one
I figured it out.
But you missed a couple. The guy who put the adamantium on
your bones was an American. Is and American. He’s still alive.
And hostile, by the way. He’s also got mutants doing his fighting for him.
They’re trapped under some kinda...mind control, but still awake: aware
of what’s goin’ on, unable to stop it. Sound familiar to ya? Ah’m not sure
how much ya remember of what they made ya do, Logan, and what they
turned part of ya into. The records are, understandably, not easy to get
one’s hands on.
But I found something about a base at Alkalai Lake, up in your
neck of the woods. I went there. I found your claw marks on the bits of
stone, but I got interrupted from completing my search of the site when a
couple helicopters came in for a landing. They saw my tracks in the snow
and sent dogs after me.
There’s activity there, Logan, but these people know you, and may
even be expecting you to come back. Be careful around that place, if and
when you decide to visit. Don’t go there alone. Seriously. Don’t. Go. Alone.
So says the girl with the gunshot wound.
You’re welcome,
--Rogue
The blue guy, Nightcrawler, had been under the influence of mind control, and didn’t that sound familiar to Logan when he heard about it.
Logan warned Xavier about Stryker, and about activity back at Alkali lake, and pieces of the puzzle began falling together. They were able to neutralize Stryker as a threat, and get him put on trial for corruption, conspiracy, murder, and even war crimes. It went public, because he had gone after children in some of his experiments: children who had been missing and who had mourning, enraged parents whose tears changed opinions across the country when they were, shockingly, broadcast on national television.
Mutants were by no means welcomed into human society, but limits were put on the degree of cruelty they faced; much like news of the holocaust had demonized anti-semitism and the Nazis, so news of Stryker’s experiments had made certain levels of stigma against mutants––viewing them as lab rats or inhuman creatures to be exterminated or treated to a new holocaust––became more politically and socially stigmatized. Mutants were still distrusted, feared, and lobbied against by paranoid people in Congress; however, the difference was that when someone shouted that all mutants should be wiped out, or that they should be forced into mandatory medical testing, that someone was then quietly ostracized, labelled “fanatical extremist” and part of a supposed “ideological minority.”
But it was a tenuous truce, especially with well-known mutant terrorist Magneto still at large, as he always seemed to be; although he was ominously quiet all of a sudden. And the elected officials still in office were still as devotedly anti-mutant as ever, and were simply quieter about it. And Hank, the other blue fuzzy mutant in the house, was given a position in the president’s cabinet, as Secretary of Mutant affairs.
“They still trust Al Quaeda more than they trust any living mutant on the planet,” Logan insisted, to anyone who asked.
In the last two months, he had gotten another letter from Rogue, and another two disks. One had information about his history as a soldier, before he became merely a weapon. The other had information about the horrors he had committed after he had become Weapon X. The former made him feel a sense of honor, and like he knew himself again. The latter made him feel uncomfortably aware of who and what he had been at his darkest moments, and how little he had recovered from it in many ways, but the anger made him feel stronger, and the fact Stryker was locked up and had been torn away and viciously decried for what he had done to the mutants he had stolen lives from, he felt honorable, and like he could face himself. Even the Wolverine became easier to cope with, more easy to understand and thus easier to control or make efficient use of. He was not the man he read about in the documents; he was more scarred and bitter, cruel and ruthless, animalistic and rage-driven––more than he had ever been before, but he had grown to like it, really, and it sure as hell beat being depressed and Hamlet-esque.
The letter she wrote was about a man who Logan had fought alongside in World War II, and who remembered him fondly. She sent him the man’s address, and warned that he had begun to loose his short-term and most resent memories to alzheimer’s disease, but said that the man remembered wartime with impressive clarity.
Logan planned to visit him within the month.
“Do you know what the biggest effect on the media and public opinion was with the Stryker case?” Hank asked Logan, one night after a dinner that was, for the visiting now-Secretary of Mutant Affairs, a pleasantly casual event, which was a luxury now.
“Crying parents and extensive use of the words ‘tortured children’ even though nobody seemed to give a damn about these kids before they were televised,” Logan grumbled.
Hank shook his head. “That was what I thought, but my PR people have compiled research that suggests otherwise. It seems that the buzz was started on the internet by a few videos of the children that were leaked and reached hundreds of people within a single week. No one has any idea where they came from, but they circulated like wildfire; not the worst videos, but one in particular just had the youngest child, a girl of no more than eleven, with no signs of mutant genes except for her unusual hair color––lavender so pale that it was almost blonde––crying and being subject to shocks until she used her power, which was to make plants grow faster and to her whim. Throughout it all, the only thing she did was make flowers bloom.”
“Yeah. Didn’t that one end up on TV, with her parents watchin’ it?” Logan was thinking about the internet, about untraceable information.
“Yes. The video of her death was not, but the two videos, put together back to back, while never posted on any major websites, made for the most watched video clip on the web for more than a month before the trials.” Hank looked at Logan. “I understand you’ve been getting information about your past from a...computer expert. She even warned you about Stryker.”
Logan breathed out a cloud of smoke and watched it trail through the air, lingering and slowly fading as the wind took it. He had been wondering how long Hank was going to beat around the bush. “I have. She calls herself ‘Rogue’ but that’s the only information we have, other than that she visited Japan within the last few months.”
Hank nodded slowly. “I’ve had the best computer experts of the CIA try to reveal and penetrate the programs on your laptop.”
Logan nodded. He knew Jubilee hadn’t really lost it, as she had claimed. He also knew how she had managed to afford that horrifyingly yellow Jeep. “No luck?”
“On the contrary. The only problem is that our prying seems to have triggered a purging mechanism.”
Logan was very glad he had gotten himself a new laptop and that Rogue’s disks had accepted a second install; even if they had done so only after the annoyance of dealing with the twenty-three detailed identity verification questions. He admired the girl’s paranoia, sometimes. It was something truly spectacular. “You think she posted those videos. You want her for something; what is it?”
“I want to offer her a job.”
Logan raised an eyebrow. “You’re serious.” He sounded incredulous. “You usually don’t like the vigilante types like her; she’s too criminal. She commits theft, breaking-and-entering, hacking, probably steals money through that hacking if I’ve gotten the right sense of how she is, and she’s not only blatantly paranoid, but also most likely criminally insane.”
“She’s helping you, though. She reminds me of you, when people describe her the way you do. And she apparently takes a guerilla-warfare approach to publicity that has proven immensely useful.”
“Until Magneto attacks again. Then it all falls again, like a house of cards, with only you to hold it up.”
“Magneto is holding off for the moment, or haven’t you noticed? He’s not ignorant of the political tide. I think he’s unsettled by the positive turn they have taken for us at last. He has no great villain to stand against now, not with the media still in mourning over the lavender-haired girl who made the flowers bloom.”
“Maybe not in this country, and you know he never stops planning. Soon enough another registration act or some other little first-step toward putting mutants in pens will make him rear his bucketed terrorist head again,” Logan murmured. Now that his memory, while still comparable to swiss cheese, went back over a century, Logan found himself increasingly sober and sage-sounding on the subjects of history, politics, the general public, and people’s alternation between strength of character and fickleness. He felt old.
“Has she sent you anything new?”
Logan looked down at his ash tray for a moment and snuffed out his cigar, which was on its last legs by now anyway. “Yeah.” He shot Hank a glare that had been known to make children cry and grown men piss themselves in terror.
Being a furry blue genius, Hank got the point, and looked away for a few moments, letting the other man cool down before he said, “And you have no idea how she even became interested in you? You have not, perhaps, remembered her from your past?”
Logan thought about it, a look of exasperated and almost resigned ire on his face. “Not a damned clue, Doc. If I knew who the Hell she might be, I wouldn’t be here waitin’ for another letter; I’d be huntin’ her ass down to get some answers.”
Logan got two more letters, and one last disk. A total of nine messages from Rogue, one every month for almost a year. Once or twice they had arrived a few days late, but after number nine, three months passed without a whisper.
No letters. No disks. Not a word.
It had taken Logan some time to notice, at first, as after a month of relative peace, his world became suddenly busy. There had been a renewed appearance of the Mutant Registration Act in Washington, the nation of Genosha had declared an all-out war on mutant-kind, and there was a new political group called the Friends of Humanity in the deep south that had instigated a dozen anti-mutant, threats against families with known mutant children, cross-burnings, and angry mobs.
It was another month before Logan had even had the time to recall that he had a reason to check his mail, and by then reports of an attempted pro-mutant terrorist attack by Magneto involving the Statue of Liberty. The reports reached the public, and the X-men, months late. The statue had been damaged, and there were traces of magnetic radiation that doctors claimed might have been geared to activate or develop mutations in non-mutants, but the attack on World Leaders appeared failed, and Magneto and his cronies were nowhere to be found, the reports had said. Once Hank had gotten him clearance and called in a few not-easy-to-get favors, Logan went to investigate what was left of the well-preserved scene.
On the top of the statue, Logan had sifted through the wreckage of the machine (which did indeed remind him of Magneto) responsible for the radiation, but it was in a sealed-off storage room lower in the statue that the best-preserved evidence was kept, until the Liberty Island staff figured out what to do with it. It was evidence that Logan could read with his advanced senses, and was there that he detected the key traces of scent he had been looking for, not washed away by exposure to the elements: Mystique, Magneto, the unmistakable stenches of Sabertooth and Toad respectively, and at least two others, women, whose scents he did not recognize. Amongst the organized debris and smaller leftover pieces of the machine, Logan found what appeared to be a handgrip, with a broken set of handcuffs on it. A prisoner? The metal was smeared with a bit of dried blood. Curious, Logan sniffed at it. He winced a little, at the scent of seared flesh coming from the handgrip. With a claw, he cut the cuffs separate from the grip, sniffed again, and was immediately struck with something like shock and anger and something unsettlingly like fear.
He recognized that scent, that blood. It had been smeared on a letter of warning that had saved his life, and the lives of hundreds of others. The blood was Rogue’s.
Three months of silence. And her blood. Here.
Logan looked at the skeletal remains of the machine for a long few moments, his face a mask of shock and rage. He didn’t even notice that his claws were extended, the blades buried in the floor under his feet, and did not notice Jean’s arrival, or her voice, until she gave him a hard telepathic nudge. He barely flinched, throwing up mental shields, which he could not remember learning how to use, like loud vault doors. He faintly heard Jean’s gasp.
“Logan?”
He stared at her, but his thoughts were clearly somewhere else. With a shrill wail of complaining metal, he retracted his claws and commanded roughly, “Call Hank. Now.”