IT’S A DULL LIFE



Her door closing behind him, Logan thinks that this, more or less, is the order of events:

1. Bobby, Kitty, Piotr go back to the mansion first.

2. He, Hank, Storm and Warren remain in San Francisco to aid in the post-disaster relief; consisting mostly in recovery of survivors (which, since there aren’t any, doesn’t take long) and clean-up (which, in turn, does).

3. When he arrives at the mansion, a month later, she is sleeping with, or has already slept with: Bobby, Piotr, Jubilee, plus four or five new mansion residents he has never met before.

4. And on that same day, Warren mysteriously disappears for several hours, then shows up to dinner looking extremely refreshed. “I think I’m going to like it here,” he tells Logan, who tries to smile.

5. A week later, the news comes: in very rare cases, and almost exclusively for those with immunocentric mutations, the cure’s duration has been shown to be—less than permanent.

6. She disappears. They look for her, the old-fashioned way; Cerebro is gathering dust.

7. Three weeks later, she returns in gloves and a long-sleeve shirt.

8. He finds her before she even makes it to her room, demands to know where the hell she has been. She says only, “Manhattan,” then slips past him and closes the door.

9. The near-constant stream of moaning and dirty talk that once came from her room is now almost entirely replaced by silence.

10. A week later, Storm—with whom he has been casually sleeping with himself, here and there; a few times in San Francisco, and then twice since they have returned to the mansion—calls him into what is now her office.

11. She says, “Did Rogue tell you what happened in Manhattan?”

12. He says no. She brings him to the Danger Room—

13. —where, from the viewing area, he watches as the kid throws a fully metallic Piotr across the room, then flies twenty feet up in the air up to grab Warren by his wing and hook-kick him in the face.

14. Next to him, Storm comments, mildly: “She came back a little… different.”

15. So that night, he goes to her room to talk to her—

16. —and “almost entirely replaced by silence” was right, because in the hallway, he passes the new target-practice instructor: a young Cajun man with fucking spooky eyes and a cheating habit at the men’s weekly poker game (though Logan has yet to succeed in definitively proving it)—

17. —and the young man smells so much like her, he thinks she might be hidden in his trench coat.

18. It takes fifteen minutes of knocking until the door finally opens. Her hair is still wet from the shower. She says, “Jesus, Logan, it’s just you, I thought there was an emergency or something.”

19. He leans against the door frame, arms crossed, and says, “So. You’re a certified bad-ass now.”

20. And she grins at him and says, “More or less.”

21. He asks, “So how’d you get ‘em?”

22. Still grinning, she shakes her head. “Not telling,” she says. “Why not?” he asks. “Because I don’t feel like it,” she replies.

23. He looks at her; at the dripping locks of hair, darkening the shirt around her shoulders. And he says, “Fair enough.”

24. But before he is about to leave, he asks, without looking at her: “So you and the new guy—that’s still going well?”

25. And she bursts out laughing. “Going well? We’re just fucking each other.” She pauses, then says, “So yeah, it’s going really well, actually.”

26. Then she shrugs and says, “As long as the sex is good, I’m not that picky.” She wiggles a gloved hand at him and smirks. “It’s hard for a girl to find a creatively inspired partner.”

27. He says, without knowing what he is saying, “So what, anyone’s okay?”

28. She answers, “As long as it’s good, and it stays strictly casual, anyone’s okay.”

29. He asks, without knowing what he is asking, “Even me?”

30. She raises an eyebrow at him. “If you’re any good.”

31. And an hour later, while he is still shaking, she says, not shakily at all: “Okay, you pass.”

He thinks about Storm’s words, that she came back a little “different.”

Well, who knows how many people he himself has been, in all the years he cannot remember, he thinks to himself. He must be a little different, too.