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The fact that the kid had somehow managed to slip past him and into the trunk of the car was like a sliver under Logan’s fingernail. He was losing his touch, and his fist tightened on the almost empty bottle of Jim Beam where it hovered over his coffee mug. Caliban poured cornflakes and milk for the kid like it was a regular Saturday morning back at Westchester. From the corner of his eye he almost expected cartoons to appear on the screen, but as it was, it showed nothing more than stretch of dirt road that ran toward the smelting yard, empty for now. It was anyone’s guess how long it would last, given the state of things at the motel.
He glanced back at the kid, perched on the bench, Charles muttering in terribly broken Spanish - and Logan knew Spanish, but that wasn’t the point, she wasn’t saying anything with her mouth anyway - chewing almost robotically, her knapsack on the table next to her. What the hell was so damn important about that thing, anyway? Logan growled, and lunged, and snagged the strap, yanking it up for inspection.
The grip she’d had on her knapsack was like iron. Logan had tugged, and she’d growled and tugged back. The muscles of his arm had gone slack with shock; she was a slip of a girl, barely ten, but she was powerful. And the sound in the back of her throat was all too familiar.
“She’s like you,” Charles had murmured from the backseat of the Dodge. “Very much like you.”
Five hundred miles down the road he watched the girl eye the cash box of the pony ride and he moved into action before he saw the twitch of one dark eyebrow, and the glint of feral yellow flash in those dark irises. He knew what she was thinking - mutilate, demolish, destroy - because even though he was a little less wild these days, that part of him still bubbled under the surface.
Two feet away from her he could feel the shudder beneath her skin, the twitch of bone, the cold, surgical slide of adamantium, the hot, searing pain when it cut the flesh to ribbons. Rolling his shoulder, he cranked his neck to one side, grunted as the bones cracked into place, and dug a quarter from his pocket.
“Last ride,” he warned, plugging the machine.
The animal slunk back to its cage, for now.
+
She liked Charles. She couldn’t really explain why; she’d never met a person older than Dr. Rice. Perhaps it was the way he’d spoken to her, in her head, that put her at ease. The thing inside of her, la leona, Charles called it, liked him, too. For a man that spoke to her inside of her brain, he gave her a rare glimpse of normalcy, and the warmth and hospitality he radiated seemed to offset the anger of the other man.
There was really no other way to describe him other than angry. He looked like she felt, and while that gave her a strange sense of familiarity, it also served as a warning. As she and Charles flipped channels on the screen in the hotel room, she’d made him pause on a program about animals in captivity, watching the sick, endangered, formally wild things pace back and forth, and back and forth, and-
A shadow caught her eye and she looked up to see the man move past the doorway in the other room and then come back...then past it again, and then back, pacing.
Always pacing.
She cocked her head and leaned forward.
He’s worried, Charles said to her. He’d changed the channel to something with cowboys and men on horseback.
She scowled at that. Why would he be worried? Her hand hovered over the knapsack on the bed beside her, the place where she’d stashed her handful of comic books. The Wolverine doesn’t have the capacity to worry, she thought. The Wolverine is powerful. The Wolverine is ruthless. The Wolverine is-
Logan is just a man, Charles explained, and a man worries.
She sighed, still unsatisfied with the answer, and tossed the knapsack to the floor with a scowl.
He’s sick.
Taking a breath through her nose she caught the scent then, of herself and of Logan, and something deeper, older, and covered with blood, and decay. She knew that smell, and yet she didn’t.
She worried, too.
+
Fuck, he was tired. It went bone deep this time, a sensation he wasn’t quite sure he understood, and one that he definitely didn’t welcome. The adamantium wasn’t helping anymore; in fact, it was hindering, and the shred of something Hank McCoy had said during one of their last meetings had all but torn the fangs from the Wolverine’s mouth.
They’d struggled to grow back, of course, and Logan wasn’t quite convinced they’d come in the same way. He hurt, hurt everywhere, and the liquor didn’t work, and the fighting just made things worse. He creaked first thing in the morning, rolling out of bed, which was an exhausting feat in itself with his body weighed down by more than a hundred pounds of metal grafted to his bones.
Some days, on the days where he could afford it, he didn’t bother getting up. And if he slitted his eyes until they were almost closed he could just catch the glimmer of a thousand stars over a thousand more, banding the dark, sky, the cold rush of a winter’s night lifting the hairs on his arms and thighs, the smell of woodsmoke filling his nostrils.
Or was that him, rotting at the core?
He didn’t like looking in the mirror. Before - before it was because he was never sure who he’d encounter staring back at him: a version of himself he didn’t know, the man he’d pieced together, or worse? Now, however, he was becoming well acquainted with the ageing man that looked back: haggard, defeated, used up. Wasting away. The wild, dark hair that had sprouted ruthlessly form his head, his jaw, everywhere, was now dull, the colour of sand and age, and the years he’d been alive - almost two hundred, if he were correct - seemed to be etched into his skin: one line on the surface for every year he’d lived, one line deep on his conscious for every man he’d killed.
“There’s still time.”
Fuck you, Chuck, the Wolverine had growled.
Easy, Logan had warned.
Hrmph. What’re you gonna do about it, bub? Can’t fight worth shit anymore, we both know that. So what are we gonna fuckin’ do?
It had been a while since he’d carried on a conversation of this length with the Wolverine, and part of him was happy to find that the beast was still there.
Ain’t got anywhere else to go, bub.
Fuck you, Wolverine.
You gonna do it, then? Finally gonna put that bullet in our skull? Hell, it’d be doing me a favour. Put me outta my goddamn misery. You got soft, Logan. Eatin’ scraps, drivin’ humans around like you ain’t better than any of them, than all of them put together. Shit, I almost feel sorry for you, but then again, we share this body, and there’s only one way out for both of us. Just put the bullet in the fucking gun, you pussy, and pull the goddamn trigger-
“She’s your daughter.”
Well, shit.
Well, the Wolverine echoed, shit.
+
She’d learned to read at a very early age, and had excelled at it, according to her handler. Not her mother, as she was inclined to call her; mother was not the name for god on her lips, or anyone else’s lips here. It meant swift reprimanding, if they could catch her unawares.
If was a very big word in her vocabulary: two letters, a multitude of possibility.
If we can get out of here, if we can find him, if he’ll take us where we need to go.
The ‘him’ in question were more letters on a page in a file that was a chilling substitute for a baby’s book. She read her name, and then her real name, letter, number, all in black and white.
Genome donor: James Howlett
“He is your father, Laura,” Gabriela had explained when asked to define the foreign words. She then pulled out the thin, ragged booklet of colourful pages, a letter from her name splashed on the cover, uplifting her. Turning the pages, Gabriela pressed her short-nailed fingertip to one of the illustrations: a short, stocky man in yellow and blue, with flashing metal born from his knuckles.
El gloton. The Wolverine.
She’d turned pages then, in back issues squirrelled away around the facility, and found that he had another name, a man’s name, Logan, and a man’s uniform: jeans, vest, flannel. Even a cowboy hat in some stages.
She rolled the name off of her tongue. Logan.
There was nothing for her to base her knowledge of the word ‘father’ upon. She understood it in terms of biology, but knew there was something more to it, more than what she saw swaying before her in the parking lot of the motel.
He was a lot bigger than she’d expected.
The wind had shifted then, bringing his scent to her nostrils, that first order of business, of knowledge, something rooted deeply within her genetic makeup. She was an animal after all, all humans were, according to Gabriela, and she felt the metal in her hands and feet sing with vibration, a humming whine in her ears as she glared up at the man who just glared right back.
The thing in her mind, the part she called her Growl, looked at him thoughtfully.
A lot bigger than I expected, the Growl noted.
Exactly what I was thinking, Laura shot back.
Hm. This him, then? The Wolverine? Doesn’t look like much.
Shut up, she hissed, tilting her head at the man, watching as he did the same to her. I think he can hear you.
‘He’ can’t hear me, the Growl insisted, but the Wolverine can. He knows I’m in here.
Laura shivered, and the ball slipped from her hand, a wayward shot going straight through a window. She groaned, her control having slipped in that split second, as if the Growl was putting on a show on behalf of the Wolverine.
All it got her was the lady from the office screaming her head off, and Gabriela running frantically, trying to diffuse the situation. Laura merely stared at the man, watching him watching her, like he knew.
He knows, the Growl repeated. The Wolverine knows, like any animal would know their own cub.
Laura shivered and clenched her jaw. So this was what it felt like.
+
Things are normal for a single meal, shoveled forkfuls of corn and green beans, and so many heaping spoonfuls of mashed potatoes that Logan finally has to tell her “enough” with a gruff tone that finds him under the scrutiny of those surrounding the table.
“There’s lots, honey, if you’re hungry.”
Implying like he doesn’t know how to take care of his...his what?
Charles. And Laura. They’re like some stitched together thing, forged out of necessity, to get them off the road, to cover their tracks.
And then suddenly Logan’s voice is bubbling with affection as he talks about Charles and about his school and Charles smiles at him like maybe he is Logan’s father, and it’s amazing easy to relate stories about the past without much glossing over details. They’re stories of mutants, yes, but if you leave that detail out, then they’re just stories, of men, and women, and children, and-
He doesn’t see the way Laura watches the family they’ve descended upon, but he does notice with chagrined reluctance that she is more accepting of this than he ever could be. She craves this, the closeness, the word family. She needs it.
You sayin’ you don’t?
“There’s still time, you know, Logan, for this. For a family. A chance at life-”
“Sure, Charles,” he replies half-heartedly, wondering if the road is catching up with Charles again. He hasn’t been taking his meds and he seems to be better for it but…
But goddamn the clock, am I right, bub?
The corner of Logan’s mouth twitches where he’d be chewing a cigar if he had one.
Attached to a ticking time bomb -
“Get some rest. We’re leaving first thing in the morning.”
Charles smiles softly, creases at the corners of his cloudy eyes, and he pulls the covers to his chin. “Thank you, Logan.”
“Mmmrmph,” is the eloquent reply.
+
Her terrified scream nearly ended him, tearing into his guts deeper than that...that thing that looked like him had. In shock, shackled on the lawn, in the dark. Helpless. Caged.
The Wolverine growled lowly.
Sit back, Logan muttered.
Make me.
She screamed again, a wild thing caught in a snare.
The Wolverine grunted smugly. Would you help her? If you were me, and we were free to roam; if you came across her and knew her like I do, would you help her?
Logan snarled, and declined an answer for the beast in his head. It was becoming habit again, letting the Wolverine talk, and actually listening. He made his way in the dark, through the blood and the smoke, and found her thrashing in the wet grass.
“Hey. Hey, I got you,” he heard himself say. “I got you.”
He didn’t know where he found it in himself to say what he did; perhaps it was the Wolverine that did it. Perhaps they both did. All he knew was that she was scared, terrified, and trapped. He knew that look on her face well enough. But then she looked up at him, the blue glow of the halogen lamps skittering across her small featured face. Had he looked like that when he was boy? Small, upturned nose, dark eyes, questioning eyebrow...she shuddered, and relaxed, nodding her head, making her surrender known. She wasn’t very big but he still staggered under her weight. It was the metal, of course, that dragged them down.
In the cab of the truck the barely suppressed rage broke the surface again, and it was like watching a film from a long time ago, one that starred him, and Charles, and Jean -
Don’t go there, bub.
Laura thrashed in the seat and screamed and some leftover part of Charles reverberated in Logan’s mind.
“She’s your daughter.”
“Hold still.” He reached for her, watched her shrink back against the seat, another girl, same fear of the unknown.
Don’t touch me, she growled.
Calm the fuck down, the Wolverine countered.
She flailed in the seat once more and he clenched his fist, the blades singing as they tasted the air once more. “Hold still,” he grunted again, grasping the bar that ran from her wrists to her ankles and giving it a shake. His other hand flashed in the light still coming from the farmhouse and he flicked his wrist, slicing through the restraints with ease.
Her eyes found his and she let out a shaky breath before falling back into the seat. Her chin pushed out in a gesture of thanks, like the words were there on her tongue, wanting to bubble out.
“How long has she been like that? Mute?”
Since the beginning.
Normally, he’d be grateful for the silence, but this was too much, it wasn’t natural; he’d been around children from all walks of life and knew that the silence came with a price. Hell, he’d been not much more than grunts and growls himself for years, like an animal, in the cage and out of it.
“Don’t let yourself become what they made you.”
He’d give anything just to fill the space that hung between him and the girl now. Without Charles to run interference and interpret one on behalf of the other the breadth of silence became more agitating with every breath. But Charles was dead. A lot of people were dead, a trail running from Mexico all the way to...he squinted as they passed a sign on the highway. Where the fuck were they?
Way hell and far gone from North Dakota. Can’t you smell it? The air ain’t that fresh down here. Need to get to cover. Get to the trees. Mountains. We need to go north.
He gripped the steering wheel and watched for an exit ramp.
+
“They’re like sponges, Logan. They absorb everything they come into contact with.”
He remembered Ororo’s words from that day he’d come back to Westchester, after his failed trip at Alkali Lake. They’d needed a babysitter; he’d been terribly reluctant. And, incidentally, not the best babysitter, either, though Charles had argued otherwise.
He shook her hold off of him as they stood next to Charles’ sad little grave, because it hurt to feel her soft, warm hand against his weathered skin, and it hurt to know that beneath her knuckles the same metal ran over her bones. She was a product of him, and he hadn’t even been able to enjoy the act of creation. Christ, he would have been somewhat satisfied had he jerked off into a cup and someone turkey basted him and set the timer for nine months. But no, they’d had to scrape a piece of him off of the floor at Alkali, after the Weapon X project had disintegrated, after Stryker - she’d been born, then, not under a full moon, not in the wilderness, but in captivity, in blood and pain. He remembered the video on Gabriela’s phone and he clenched his fist, and his jaw, and felt the tips of the steel prick between his knuckles.
“When they come out - does it hurt?” Another kid, another sponge, this one quite literal, but a kid all the same, soaking up pieces of his heart and soul, and like him in so many ways it scared him.
He moved away from Laura, stalking through the marsh back up to the road, and didn’t look back.
The last time he looked back he’d gotten more than he bargained for.
+
The various ways in which he imagined Laura might have managed to get him into the truck, let alone drive it, were eclipsed by by one softly uttered word:
“Denada.”
And for a moment he kept talking until he stopped talking and stared at her because she’d started. “You can talk?”
“Si,” she shrugged, rattling off another few sentences in Spanish.
“Wait. Wait, wait, wait, this whole time you could talk and you...didn’t say anything?” He turned in his seat and grabbed her arms, shaking her roughly. “Why the hell did you wait until now?”
“North Dakota,” she replied. Then, rifling through her bag she came up with the bundle of cash Gabriela had wrapped in the bottom half of a manila envelope, the coordinates scrawled in jagged red ink. “Eden.”
He shook his head. “It ain’t real, kid.” And even as he said it, he felt like an asshole, because he knew that it was real to her. Charles had been certain to make that perfectly clear.
“The new mutant...is waiting for you at the Statue of Liberty.”
The image of a half-burned out strip of neon, but the name of the motel and its mascot was clear enough in Logan’s head.
He swore at Charles, and wasn’t surprised when he heard the Professor curse him right back.
Still, it was risky - as much as she wanted this place to exist, and as much as he wanted it to exist for her, there was still the chance that it was just some story conjured from a comic by a woman desperate to save a little girl.
His little girl.
He rubbed a hand over his mouth as Laura rattled off a string of names that meant nothing to Logan. He told her as much. Shoving the envelope of cash into Logan’s face, Laura seethed, hotly declared, “Eden,” tapping the sequence of numbers, and then sat back and repeated the names again.
“What if you’re wrong?” Logan spat. “Huh? What then?”
Slowly, as if speaking to a child, the girl said the names, and Logan growled, and threw his hands up. “That doesn’t mean anything to me!”
For a moment Laura hung her head, rubbing her thumb over the foxed edges of one of the comic book covers. Then, she shook her head, and fixed Logan with a hard stare. “Twenty thousand,” she declared, nodding to the envelope. “They are my family.” Her gaze then lifted to the road that stretched out of the small town. “They will be there.”
+
For the first time in forever, it wasn’t his nightmare that woke him.
It was hers.
His eyes shot open, and for a moment he stared at the rough hewn beams overhead and thought maybe, just maybe, he was back in his cabin with Silver Fox-
Laura growled, and shrieked in her sleep from somewhere near him.
Don’t ask him how he knew it was her, he just did. He ignored the comments sputtered by the Wolverine and sat up, head pounding, and swung his legs over the side of the bed.
“Hey,” he called out, already reaching for a match. He lit the lantern and watched Laura fuss, and furrow her brow. “Hey, kid,” he tried again. Still no response. With a sigh he stood from the bed and crossed the two feet between them, and crouched down next to her. “Laura,” he called softly.
Her eyes shot open and she sat up with a gasp, and Logan leaned back at the sound of metal singing in the darkness.
“Take it easy, you’re all right. You’re…” he let the word ‘safe’ die on his tongue, and cleared his throat. “You were dreaming.”
The foot long blade retracted back into her knuckle and Logan made a face at the way the skin and tendons there rippled.
“Nightmare,” she corrected, gazing blanking into the lamplight.
“You have them a lot?”
She nodded, wiping the sweat from her brow.
“Me, too-”
She sprang from the bed, ignorant, or perhaps uncaring, of Logan’s attempt to talk, and she shrugged into her coat and headed for the doorway.
“Hey,” he barked, grabbing her shoulder and wheeling her around. “What’s this about?”
She shook him off with a warning glare. “It’s nothing.”
“Bullshit,” he snapped, internally wincing at the curse word. It wasn’t the worst he’d used in front of her, and he felt strange for censoring himself. Whatever she was up against was a lot bigger than a few colourful words learned from her father.
“You aren’t coming with us,” she snarled. “So it makes no difference.”
“What do you think this is, kid?” Logan waved a hand to the doorway and beyond, to where the raggedy bunch of kids - mutants - sat huddled around a campfire. “This isn’t Camp Sleepaway.” He shook his head. “You don’t know what you’re up against.”
Laura shrugged. “Maybe not. But at least I’ll be with them. I’ll be with people who care,” she added with a pointed look.
Logan rolled his eyes and let go of her shoulder with a shove. “Look, I can’t go with you.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t,” he said. “I-”
Because I’m too old? Too slow? Too dead already? You’re fucked, bub, an’ she’s got your number. What are you gonna do, go die alone in the woods somewhere? You know they need your help. Selfish prick. You know, you an’ spent a lot of time running away from something, and it didn’t help. It all caught up with us eventually.
“I can’t,” he repeated, his voice low, but firm. “I’m sorry.” Fuck, that was weak, and it burned in his chest like a shot of cheap whiskey.
The way she looked at him then made him wish that Stryker had taken his heart, and replaced that with adamantium, too.
+
He used to come and go as he pleased, never used to care what anyone thought about him, or said about him, but as he raced through the tree line, the chemicals rocketing through his veins, he thought very simply, this is how you redeem yourself, and find forgiveness for all of your transgressions.
It felt good to kill again, like this, with the Wolverine stalking, swinging, ripping through creatures who had the balls to call themselves men.
And it felt even better to kill with his kin.
The Wolverine howled in triumph as he worked in tandem with the cub, slicing and scoring, felling the enemy with every breath. For that brief moment under the sun, beneath the swaying trees and with his feet dug into the ground, he became what they’d made him, what they’d pushed him to: a savoir, a teacher, a caretaker, a protector, and a father.
“You took all of the medicine, and now it’s wearing off,” the older boy had warned.
Nothing like a little adrenaline and a lot of instinct to kick you into action.
But he was beginning to wane. Even as he swung, feinted, and swung again, ripping into another one of those goons, he knew he would go down soon, and he couldn’t let them win. He looked up across the clear cutting he and the cub were making, and saw the others - her little pieced together family, the ones that she’d fought beside, and grown beside, and would die beside - and he realized that he could at least give her that.
And if he was going to die, why not die having done it all?
If he couldn’t be there for her beyond his next breath, he would give her what he knew she needed.
He’d give her a choice, and a chance, the bare minimum any parent could do for their child.
After all, she’d done the same for him, and look where that landed him.
This is how it feels.
+