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.”