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.