The Wolverine & Rogue Fanfiction Archive
Barely Legal Since 2000
Author's Chapter Notes:
Trigger warning: this chapter contains extremely violent scenes - war crimes, sex crimes and crimes against children in flashback.
Thanks as always to my wonderful beta Bancainte who turned this monster around super quick.
Thanks as always to my wonderful beta Bancainte who turned this monster around super quick.
Hank is itemising his to-do list and trying not to let his attention drift to the man plastering at the far end of the room. The dining hall has been converted into a makeshift medlab facility, and Logan – Howlett, he corrects himself – has taken on the task of rehabbing the battlescarred walls.
There's a mountain of research that needs to be recovered from the computers buried in rubble on the lower levels – the contractors are warning that the roof could cave in any time, and he has no intention of losing even one more data set to this catastophe, Hank thinks tiredly. Then he needs to ferret out the medical records for the children the government have “taken into care.” Buchanan's people are full disclosure of all genetic data before they even contemplate releasing the children, and Rogue can't seem to see how perilous that is, he frets.
He'll do as he's told, of course – he had voted for her when Scott stepped down as leader – but it rankles to be reminded he's their only doctor. He needs to remember that, she said.
As if he could ever forget.
He tries not to think about Jean these days. After a week, it had been obvious the Cure had worked magnificently, and they had nothing to fear from the now-powerless woman. After two, she had been told she was free to move about the house, to eat with them, even to sit in on meetings. She hadn't even bothered to answer, let alone leave her room.
Rogue, he suspects, is thinking good riddance. Scott is stony and unmoved. Storm is concerned, but is always so distant now. And the young ones, well. They'd put a bullet through her if Rogue would let them. It's only their loyalty to the new leader that's stopping them.
And Wolverine. He hardly knows the man, but it's clear he's not himself.
It's like watching an automaton. Stir, slop, smooth. Stir, slop, smooth. Stir, slop, smooth until he wants to tip the bucket over the other man's head, or beat him about the head with that damn stirring stick.
Hank orders himself to leave Howlett be, even as he is loping over to inspect the newest batch of repairs.
“Very nice. Are you planning to paint soon?”
A shrug. Communicative.
“It's a fairly standard colour. We may even have some in the garage – would you like me to check?”
A grunt this time. Charming.
Hank snaps, reaching out to yank the plaster bucket away, forcing the other man to look at him.
“Got a job to do here, Doc. You got a job to do over there. Way over there,” Howlett warns, and for a moment, he's as menacing as Logan ever was.
Under the circumstances, he'll take that as a victory. And license to proceed
“Stop torturing yourself!”
Logan's not completely gone, Hank reassures himself. The way he raises an eyebrow, two parts challenge to one part question is pure Logan, but it's Howlett who kills the moment to return to stirring the plaster. Hank, however, refuses to move away.
It's a mere interest of his, psychology, not an area in which he can claim any expertise, but he is forming a theory nonetheless.
Howlett is the raw material, and the social conditioning it received. Logan is the personality he created to function in the absence of memory, and Wolverine is something different again. Something older. Conceived when he was a child, perhaps, a repository for all those feral instincts so unwelcome in a young man of his class. Likely birthed in trauma, like so many young mutants.
All real, Hank wants to assure the man assiduously avoiding his gaze. All you, and all valuable.
“Pretty sure I deserve to suffer,” Howlett mumbles after long minutes of ignoring him. “You don't know the things I've done.”
“We do what we have to do to survive. We use what we are given to make a life.”
“I used what I was given to take lives. Lots of them. So many I can't even count that high, Doc.”
“And this bastard?” he says scornfully, tapping himself on the side of the head. “He's proud of that. Proud of killing people. What sort of man is that?”
He had asked that question himself, when he'd first met the man, Hank will admit. Asked it without appreciating the Wolverine's history, or the complex moral lines Logan drew for himself. At least he has an answer now.
“A man who did what he was taught to do. A man who changed the rules when he learnt better. A man who mastered his own nature, who imposed his will on it, rather than letting it rule him. Yet allowed it to exist. Allowed it to become more a part of him than any feral I know.”
“And that's a good thing? That I have an animal inside of me?”
“We are what we are, Logan. The feral nature – it's inescapable. But you do it more honour than most. You allow yourself to love it,” Hank says quietly.
“You mean – he does,” Howlett says with narrowed eyes. Hank nods to concede the point, surrendering the plaster bucket with a sigh.
Logan might be hiding, and Wolverine in chains, but the wall would soon look brand new. And he'd hardly be the first to turn to work as therapy, even if the warrior Hank has come to admire seems lost in a fugue.
*
Plastering hasn't changed much, at least. He stirs slowly, unwilling to hasten the job, and tries to remember when he last did something as simple as patch a wall. It's in there somewhere, cramped in amongst the years in Montana … his entire body bristles with horror, but it's too late. He's already gone.
The milch cows need to come in for the night, but this'll take another hour at least. Mona has been onto him to fill the gaps for months and now with winter coming, may as well get it done. He hollers for Tom and sends him out after the herd - “and don't be letting that sun get too low – you don't wanna be out there in the dark!”
Damn boy glowers at him under those heavy eyebrows but manages “yes, papa” after a minute. “Don't think I can't see that book!” he calls after his son, but he's only pretending to mind. Boy's as smart as Mona is pretty, and even if his name is Jimmy Logan now, there's enough of James Howlett left to value that. Not that there's much book learning to be had out here, breaking sod and trailing around after cows.
An hour later, the sun's sinking into the western horizon and there's no sign of boy nor cows. Logan throws down the trowel and heads out - that red shirt won't be hard to spot, even in the half light. Boy should be home by now. Probably hiding up a tree with that book, he thinks with a reluctant smile. God knows where he's finding the light to read by.
He sees the shirt first, fluttering against the black leaves of the big oak. There's a moment of confusion – how is he up there, why? - before the stink of soiled pants and terror reaches him. His heart is thumping even faster than his feet can run, and his anguish echoes through across the empty range.
Not empty enough, some cool, calculating part of him observes as he slashes at the noose with his claws. There'll never be anywhere you can escape this.
“No, no,” he pleads as he cradles the child in his arms, and he begs and curses and spits at God right up until the moment he accepts the boy is gone. He'll do it all over again later, when he discovers the words carved into the boy's belly.
“Demon seed” it said. If they could think that, if they could believe that of a small boy …
He would happily give them a demon.
“Wolverine?”
McCoy is standing several metres away, concern on his face as he signals towards the pool of plaster, now seeping all over the floor. Wolverine rights it with a curse, then tries to relax enough to retract his claws.
“Can I help ya?”
“You seemed … I had thought ...”
“Don't think,” he snarls, and channels his violence into slapping the plaster over the gouges in the wall. Don't look, don't think, don't feel.
Don't live.
The red mist lifts, and he is surrounded by bodies. He checks the doorway first, and they were men, at least. Not like the woman still spitted on his claws.
Not like her child, brains splattered all over the wall.
He forces himself to his feet, and stumbles outside to see if it will make any more sense out there. Had his unit been slaughtered? Had something driven him to this?
Or was he just like his brother, mouth red with blood and cock still pulsing from the corpse he had just fucked?
His legs were moving before his brain had fully registered the horror, stumbling and lurching over the rough ground towards the cliff face. Stupid cunts, to live on the edge of a fucking cliff, Sabretooth spat contemptuously. He had shrugged and gazed out at the blue-green precipice. Maybe they liked it, he'd said. Nice view or something.
Easy way to die, his mad brother had sneered.
Not if you were me. Or you, he remembers sourly, his brother's outraged scream still ringing in his ears, and the agony of their landing a phantom ache in every bone. Back then, before the adamantium, he'd broken easier, but healed quicker.
Already a killing machine, though. Already lost.
He hadn't agreed to it until they promised to take away his memories. What a dumb fuck he was. They'd taken them away, and he'd spent the next fifteen years searching for them.
Then he'd found her, and he'd been able to stop. She made being Logan enough. And in his gratitude, he made her into a monster.
He's praying the bubbles cover his rapidly stiffening cock when the hands kneading at his shoulders still.
“Is it hard to kill a man?”
It's not unexpected, exactly, but he hadn't expected her voice to wobble like that, or break with the emotional strain. He doesn't know what to say, so tells the simplest truth.
“No. The actually killing is easy. Living with it afterwards can be hard.”
“Can be?”
“Comes down to who you have to kill, darlin'.”
She's trailing her fingers in the tub now, massage completely forgotten, gloved hand brushing his thigh with every pass.
He's fighting the urge to pull her in altogether when she walks her fingers up his chest and looks him straight in the eye.
“My father.”
He can't bear to ask her why, so sticks to the practical stuff.
“Fast or slow?”
She'd been good with a knife, by the time they rode south. He'd made sure of that.
Bile rises in his throat and he has to brace himself against the wall to stop from emptying his shame all over the floor. When the retching subsides, he picks up the trowel again and slides it over the new plaster until it's perfectly smooth and unblemished, glaring white against the battlescarred surface.
He'll paint this wall, and the kids will never have to know what went on here. Never have to see the scars, and wonder what's underneath. What's the cliché?
“Ignorance is bliss,” he murmers to himself, sick with envy.
*
He's not sure why he came to the meeting. He's not an X-man. Now that the killing's done, there's nothing left here for him. So what's he doing sitting at the Professor's long table, listening to them make their plans?
Common sense, he decides. Knowing what they're up to will help him avoid them in future. Whatever that might be. Might even be able to get something out of it; make some contacts up north, or do the odd bit of work if they've got anything going on up that way.
Nothing to do with her. She's keeping busy, that's for sure, but there's a lot to do, and she was stupid enough to take it on. Not his business if she's looking fragile and too dark around the eyes – nothing a good night's sleep wouldn't fix.
Nothing he can do.
“I've been going through all the files that Gil brought us, and they know so much more ...”
“Why you?”
“I'm sorry, what?”
“Why are you doing that stuff? Why not someone who isn't running the whole place – Pryor, or one of the girls,” he snaps, yanking his thumb towards the young women at the other end of the table.
“Because finding out what information the federal government is storing on us is absolutely critical to our future safety! Because it's my job to keep us all safe!”
“No, it's not. You agreed to lead the Xavier Institute, and the X-men. Sure - lead them into battle. Talk the talk. But you can't do everything – the biggest part of your job is finding the right person for the job.”
Her mouth this and her eyes spit death, but she is forced to concede his point with a stiff nod of her head. He should have expected the follow through.
“That is true, Wolverine. And from what I can tell,” she shuffles several folders crammed with printouts from the Professor's computer, “you are currently our contracted head of security for the Mansion.”
“So?”
“So – secure! Work with Kitty and Gil on this lot and decide what threat this poses, and what we can do about it. I'll expect your report on my desk by Monday of next week.”
He stares, and fumes, then nods his head stiffly. He'll do her damn report, then he'll do what he should have done weeks ago. He'll leave.
*
Every day, she steals some time to sit by the lake. It's not like she can afford it, what with the government breathing down her neck demanding “assurances” before they return the kids, and half of the team suggesting they just turn Jean over and be done with it. Pryor's doing his best to keep everyone off her back, but there's only so much interference one super-diplomat can run.
She's it, now. She's the official leader of the X-men. It's her heat to handle.
They'd turned to Storm, first. The Professor's right hand in running the school. Scott's second in the field. But she had shaken her head, uncharacteristically blunt in her refusals, and the pain and regret in her eyes made it too cruel to ask why. Beast cited the need to concentrate on his research, and Scott – Scott smiled sadly, and fingered a tear in the knee of his uniform.
“I don't really have a right to wear this at all,” he said quietly, brushing off the denials that followed. “The X-men are a mutant force, and the Xavier Institute exists to show the world that mutants can and will protect their own. Especially now, Rogue,” he insisted when she opened her mouth to object.
“I'm not going anywhere. This is my home. But I can't be the one to stand up and say 'this is who we are.' It needs to be you.”
She'd sat there in disbelief, staring at the expectant faces around the table, and wondered how it had come to this, from public enemy number one to only logical X-men leader in one long week.
“Marie happened,” Rogue laughed quietly somewhere. “Face it, girl. You've got more resources than most. We can do this.”
Hard to say no when you've got your own personal pep squad rah-rahhing inside your head, but my God, talk about the frying pan and the fire. She knows things are getting too much when Rogue takes over wholesale, snapping and snarking and cursing up a storm. It's then that she heads outside, no matter that the wind from the north already tastes of snow.
They find peace here.
Mystique, in particular, finds it soothing. She points out the tree she used to climb to get a glimpse of whatever it was Marie might be doing in her life at the Mansion. Not spying, just … watching, she assures her daughter. Wanting to see.
Hope y'all didn't see too much, Marie says, alarmed. She can't see her mother smirk, but knows she is. Oh lordy, she thinks, and knows she's blushing.
They'd made love out here, her and Wolverine, more than once. Last time, they'd been walking back from a session in the Danger Room, so hot for each other that she'd ended up bent over a low hanging branch. He'd fucked her so hard that her legs wouldn't work afterwards, and her breasts and belly had been scratched up something shocking. Take a little, he'd begged, just enough to heal some.
Only if you promise to do it again, Rogue had purred, and that, ladies and gentlemen, had been that.
She misses that man so much.
Howlett has been watching her for a good ten minutes from the edge of the lawns, but hasn't plucked up the courage to come close yet. She grinds her teeth, and tells herself patience, but … fuck that. Just fuck it.
“You got something you want to say to me, old man?”
He looks back towards the mansion, obviously wondering if it's too late to escape, and then marches over to sit a few feet away.
“Just wondering how you're coping. It's a big load for a young girl.”
Marie snorts inelegantly and rolls her eyes.
“Oh, puh-lease, Logan. Get over yourself already. I'm fine – you're the one having problems.”
He's bristling because she refuses to call him James – let alone Mr Howlett - and also takes umbrage at the suggestion that anything is wrong. He still watches her, and she's seen desire flaring in his eyes more than once. Whoever this is, he refuses to acknowledge it, let alone indulge it. It's eating her alive, and she knows she's not the only one. He looks haunted.
Some of that my sins, sugar? Thinking about the things we used to do together?
Rogue's remembering the weight of his knife in her hand, and Wolverine-in-her-head is salivating at the way she tasted, that first time, in Havana. Logan is sneering at the man, too fucking good to give a girl want she wants? Trust me, bub, you couldn'a said no to this girl, and I know it …
“That much of a slut, am I sugar?” she murmurs, and Howlett harrumphs.
Prig, she makes the mistake of thinking, and Logan howls with laughter as she tries to smooth the feathers of the man in front of her.
“Sorry. Internal monologue. I do that,” she offers with a wan smile. “You out here now, two versions of you inside my head, and every one of you has an opinion.”
“What were they thinking?”
She's not sure this man, basically a relict of the nineteenth century, is ready to hear what his alter egos have to say. But … she's not ready to give up on Logan. He's whispering maddening little suggestions in her ear, and they're getting more tempting with every moment she looks at this not-quite-stranger.
Little push couldn't hurt.
“You gotta lot of new memories to deal with. I was wondering if it was the old ones, or the newer ones that were troubling you.”
“You mean the things I did to you.”
The repulsion in his voice cuts through her own issues on the subject. Makes her angry.
“What things, sugar? Making me the best little assassin there ever was? Keeping me at arms length as long as you could? Or ...” Rogue purses her lips into the pout she knows he loves and slides close, unable to stop her fingers from toying with the smooth flannel stretching across his chest. “Was it the way you made me shiver and shake and scream for you?”
She lays her hand flat over his heart and feels it pick up pace as she leans up to breathe her truths into his ear.
“Never come so hard, sugar. Not for anyone else. That's why I hated you so much. Because no matter what happened, you'd always be the best. First, best … “
“And only?” he asks with a sneer, and fuck him. She refuses to be judged by some antiquated morality that simply did not apply. Time for the big guns.
“Only one I ever loved, sugar. Only one I ever loved.”
His sound of disbelief has Rogue throwing herself forward to kick some sense into him. Hush, girl, Marie soothes. You come out swinging, we all know what's gonna happen. And he'll end up hating himself ever more.
She gathers herself together and lets every ounce of Marie's sweetness shine through trusting brown eyes.
“It's true. You know it is. And you think I don't know what the problem is, but I do.”
“I'm Marie, Logan. I'm in charge. I'm the one who loves you the most.” She presses a chaste kiss to his shirt-covered chest, and drifts her fingers down to take his hand.
“You take the time you need to figure it all out. Look at all those memories and see the good ones. And then look at the really good ones.”
“Then you come find me, sugar. I'll be waiting.” She bites her lip as a muscle leaps in the side of his neck and the need to have him back nearly swamps her. “We all will.”
*
Every night, he passes Jean Grey's room on the way to his own. He's got no reason to talk to her – she'd been his enemy twice as long as she'd been anything else – but it's becoming increasingly hard to ignore the stink of despair. Only himself to blame if he chooses not to do anything about it, he tells himself as he knocks on her door.
“Miss Grey?”
His knock is ignored at first, and he has already given up on her by the time she cracks open the door.
“What?”
“Nothing. I just ...”
“Wondered if I was okay? Thought there might be something you could do?”
She looks so weak he's astonished she has the energy for such scorn. Haunted eyes stare out of a deathshead of a face, and one lip quivers with some sort of palsy. How can her friends bear to look at her, he wonders, then realises with a jolt that they don't. Nobody visits. Scott Summers is the only one allowed through her door, bringing trays of food from the dining hall to serve in her room. Otherwise, she pushes people away, physically when she has to.
He understands, now, why Summers had laughed bitterly when Pryor had complained about the lack of restraints or a lock on her door. Jean Grey has no need to be kept prisoner. She's already locked in an unbreachable cell.
He knows it well.
“Too busy hating yourself to talk?” he sneers, and murder flashes through those once-brilliant eyes.
“Too bored, really. You're hardly the conversationalist, Mr Howlett,” she bites back. “If you're looking for someplace to hide from Rogue, try your own room.”
He's horrified by the growl that slips out, then decides if she's going for the jugular, so is he.
“Here will do just as well. Doubt she could stand the stink.”
She stiffens and moves to slam the door shut; he catches it easily and holds out a hand to appease her.
“Sorry. I was out of line. I was hoping you could help me with something.”
“You do have a funny way of asking a favour!”
“My social graces might be a bit rusty.”
Her lips manage to twitch at that and she moves aside, allowing him into the room. He takes the long route across to lean against her window, racking his brain for something sensible to ask.
“You're planning on leaving, aren't you?”
He looks up in shock.
“How did you know that?”
She shows her teeth in a caricature of a grin, and then shrugs. “Logic. I can't hear what people are thinking anymore, so I find I listen more. Work harder to catch the undercurrents. Watch more.”
“You've been outside a lot. Trailing around after her, but trying not to let her see you. Scott says you are doing a report for her, but refuse to take on anything else. It's fairly obvious.”
He wants to ask just what she thinks is so obvious, but he's a little afraid of the answer. And it looks like she has no plans to spare him anyway.
“You want her, maybe even love her, but there's something between you. Something you think you did, or you think she did, and it's bigger and more important than giving whatever it is a chance,” she says, dripping scorn.
“So what's that got to do with me leaving?”
She snorts.
“You're a man! That's what you do. You run.”
He isn't stupid enough to deny it. She can't know about the duffle bag already packed under his bed, but the witch knows people, he'll give her that.
“Some things – they can't be fixed. They haunt you, and poison everything, and when it gets like this – leaving is the best thing you can do.”
“Maybe for her. But what about for you? Take it from me, Wolverine. You can't run from your demons forever. Every time you do, they get bigger, and hungrier, and faster.”
Jean Grey steps closer with every word, until her face is just below his, dull green eyes burning with a fever uncomfortably reminiscent of the Phoenix.
“You either turn around and face them, or you get eaten alive,” she hisses, driving home the point by stabbing at his chest with a sharp finger.
His mind fills with Rogue, and Marie, and what might happen if he just took that advice. What they might be able to win if she can forgive him, and he can get past his shame.
What living a life might actually look like, if it was a life with her.
The madness passes while he's lost in fantasy, and when he looks back again, she is simply tired, and defeated.
“You can't go back, you know,” she says quietly as heads for the door.
“What?”
“The past is done. We can regret, and repent, and try to make amends, but we can't go back. Can't change things. We are who we are, Logan.”
The denials bubble in his throat, but this woman is so fragile he doesn't want to upset her. He simply nods and closes the door gently behind him.
It's not until he's falling asleep that he realises she called him Logan.