Chapter Text
Logan, as he is now, was found abandoned at the tender age of 35, with three claw marks on the side of his throat. The kids that found him claim he was bleeding when he found them, but that within a few minutes the wounds had already healed, at which point he just stood and left.
Had it not been for Charles Xavier, however, he never would have survived as long as he has. While everyone else ran off after finding out Logan was not only a mute, but an amnesiac, too, the man helped him get his life together. Xavier learned ASL and lent Logan some money and even got him a job as a cleaner in some run-down facility in the middle of nowhere, and the only reason Logan is still standing now is because of the old man’s kind heart.
He’s 46 now, and he lives in a small two-room apartment on top of an old cinema, and Charles Xavier is his neighbor. The old man is bald and old and paraplegic, but just the latter, by itself, is sufficient an obstacle for him to find a stable job. Despite coming from a prestigious family and holding many equally-prestigious degrees (did he say it was mutation genetics or psychiatry?), the mere fact that he lives tied to a wheelchair is enough to stop him from becoming a world-famous scientist, and Logan thinks it’s really too bad.
He does enjoy the old man’s company, though — not that he’d ever admit it out loud —, and being his neighbor certainly has its perks. For one, the old man is not only bald, old, and paraplegic, but he’s also gay and in the closet. This means that Logan never worries about waking up in the middle of the night to screams of pleasure, and he’s never once had to bump into an embarrassed stranger when he wakes up to go to work in the mornings.
Also, for an old white man, Charles’s food is surprisingly delicious and well-seasoned. He occasionally treats Logan to dinner at his place, and the younger man has to say he always looks forward to those nights — if only because he himself is a lost cause, and six nights out of the week he always orders in.
Logan’s life is pretty routine, and he doesn’t really know enough about himself to say for certain whether or not he enjoys it — whether he’s happy . Not having memories sucks, and being mute sucks sometimes, too, but all the doctors he’s visited say that both those things are permanent. Honestly, he’d rather continue working his boring job, interacting with the only two people who can stand him, than spend his entire life running away from himself — which is exactly what he was doing, before he met Xavier.
Part of it is the age, he thinks. Back when he was 35 and angry and confused, he’d held so much energy and so much desire to answer life’s questions… but now he’s reserved himself to the present, enjoying his talks with his co-worker Ororo and his dinners with his neighbor Xavier and even the occasional one-night stand.
Today is no different.
He wakes up, has some cereal, brushes his teeth and gets ready to go to work. He takes the bus and feels thankful that he doesn’t have to wear those stuffy suits to work, because it’s July now and he’d never survive the heat. Being a janitor sucks, too, but that’s at least one of the perks: he can wear whatever he wants under that horrible onesie, and no one will know. Logan hates stuffy clothes, so much that he often finds himself lounging through his own apartment completely naked, and being able to work in clothes that don’t cling to him is a blessing.
The facility he works at is supposedly owned by the government, but he’s not sure what it is that they do there exactly. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say they’re probably keeping those damn aliens inside the many grey walls of the place, but he’s been working there for nine years now and he’s unfortunately never seen anything, so. Probably not aliens.
Still, the whole place is just a crime against humanity waiting to happen. Propaganda posters fill the walls of the entire place, with cheesy phrases like: “SILENCE is also a weapon”, or “Loose lips sink ships”.
As he changes into his uniform, he ignores all the other janitors and searches for Ororo. She’s the only decent one out of all of them, and honestly Logan doesn’t know why she’s still working this shitty job. She’s smart and competent and, frankly, pretty enough to be something like the President, and if he didn’t value their friendship so much he’d already have tapped that. With her deep dark skin and bright white hair, she’s already captivating enough, never mind her sharp cheekbones and her built figure and her full lips…
But alas. She’s out of his league, anyways. Logan himself isn’t bad-looking, per se, but she’s… something out of this world. He’s asked her time and time again what the hell she’s doing in a place like this, but she’s never given him a straight answer.
“Good morning, Logan,” she says, smiling like she always does in the morning. “How was your weekend?”
He shrugs, and signs, Same as always. Charles made meatloaf, we had a drink.
She laughs. “Really? Charles ?”
In ASL, rather than going through the trouble of spelling out someone’s name, usually people just have a ‘sign name’ — a specific sign that will indicate who you’re talking about. For Charles, they’d decided his sign name would be the same sign as the letter ‘X’, for Xavier, and the man had agreed.
The other janitors start leaving, each going off to their own assigned part, and he turns a knowing look to her.
So how’s T’Challa? , he asks.
He spells the name out, not having set a sign name for the man yet.
Ororo rolls her eyes. “We’re… getting there. It’s complicated, but, well, it’s what we signed up for.”
There’s another reason why Logan and Ororo would never work out: the woman is married. Her relationship with her husband (and childhood sweetheart) is complicated, with them never seeing each other due to their respective jobs, and a few months ago the two were on the verge of divorce. Ever since then, they’ve been working to maintain their relationship.
Well, I wish you the best of luck—
“You two!”
Logan turns around. A man wearing a fancy suit — one of the thousands that work in the facility — is making his way towards them, but rather than angry he looks distracted by something on his hand.
“Come with me,” he says, and Logan realizes it’s blood on his hand. “Don't ask.”
He walks as he talks, and from the look on Ororo’s face she’s also noticed the blood on the man’s body. Logan himself isn’t adverse to blood or to gore in general, being who he is and being able to do what he does, but he understands how some people can hate the sight of it.
As they arrive at Room 616, however, he realizes there’s way more blood than he expected: it’s flooding out of the room, past the door and into the hallway. While the man in the suit types out the passcode to get into the room, he and Ororo share a look.
You think someone’s on the rag? , he signs, smirking, and she makes an unamused face at his joke.
The (heavily secured, what the fuck?) doors then open, and Logan tries not to sigh at the sight that greets them: blood and water, everywhere on the floor. It’s almost like someone died in there, but as he enters he can’t smell a dead body anywhere, so he figures they’re safe for now.
“I want this place clean in twenty minutes,” the man says, then leaves them be.
As big as the facility is, Logan doubts there’ll be any janitors coming by any time soon — and if there are, they’ll be smart to pretend they didn’t see anything and continue on their way.
Well, he signs when Ororo looks at him. Looks like it’s just us.
She sighs and starts mopping. “The quicker we get this done, the quicker we can go back to gossiping about my love life.”
He smirks, but is unable to respond, not with her head down focused on the task at hand.
Logan moves away from her, heading towards the corner of the room, and starts mopping from there. The room itself is pretty standard for the facility they’re in — meaning it’s about the size of Logan’s entire apartment —, but what is different are the weird tanks at the wall opposite the door. There are about three of them, all filled with water and each, he’d guess, connected to the other. He can’t say for sure, though, as the tanks go higher than the ceiling and farther down than the floor.
In the middle of the room, there’s a large tub, almost like a small pool, and Logan wisely guesses that’s where all the water on the floor came from… and tries not to wonder where all that blood came from.
“Uh,” Ororo says, picking up something from the floor between her forefinger and thumb. “Is this—?”
Logan’s eyes widen. That’s an entire arm .
The woman holds the arm by its middle finger, looking like she’s trying hard not to barf. It’s a normal white man arm — at least as normal as a detached right arm can be—, complete with the arm hairs and the blood and the dirty nails.
“What the hell happened here?” She asks, and drops the arm onto a trash bag. “I knew this place was bad , but I didn’t think…”
He nods in agreement. For all they know, they could be working for some sort of secret government lab that specializes in performing unethical experiments on kidnapped humans — hell, for all they know, that arm could belong to a good person. A good person with a family and morals and values who never signed up for any of this.
He doubts it, but at least the thought provides some entertainment while he cleans up the gallons of water and blood on the floor.
The next ten minutes come and go, and then he finds an electric baton just lying there on the ground, covered in blood. After the arm, though, he can’t really say it shocks him all that much.
Ororo takes a break from her hard work and approaches the tubes of water with a curious glint in her dark eyes. Tentatively, she taps a little on the glass, as if expecting a shark or some other sea creature to appear, but no such luck.
“What do you suppose they’re even doing here?” She asks, frowning slightly. “It can’t be good news for us, if they’re just losing arms left and right.”
The woman goes back to work, and Logan approaches the tank closest to him. If he looks closely, he can see the water moving and swishing, as if there’s something in there, but as far as his eyes can see -- and as far as his nose can smell --, there’s nothing .
He’s almost disappointed, but just as he moves to go back to wiping the floor, he sees something. Inside the tank, the water moves and moves, clearer than before, and then, suddenly, there is something — or, rather, someone .
The person in the water is just that — a person — or, at the very least, something that looks a lot like one. Their entire body is faintly covered in blue fur, but it’s short enough that it almost looks like normal body hair, and the hair at the top of their head is long enough to go down to their shoulders. Underneath that their skin looks silky, like a fish, and the person also has strange markings at their sides and neck and forehead, almost like invisible tattoos. In the light these glow bright, almost golden, in that way that some sea creatures do. The pointy ears at the side of their face look like gills — which makes sense, since they’re presumably a sea creature —, and they have a thin blue tail coming down from their spine.
Logan has no idea how long he spends just staring at the blue sea-person and their mesmerizing bright yellow eyes and their three-fingered hands and feet. He loses track of time, because what the hell is this and how the fuck did they get a hold of an actual mer-person and where did they even find —
“Logan?” Ororo asks. He hears the exact moment she sees the person, because she gasps and lets her mop fall. “What on earth…?”
At the very least, he’s glad he’s not just hallucinating this entire thing. Hearing some kind of confirmation that Ororo can see the person, too, releases some of the tension on his shoulders.
The next time she speaks, she’s standing right next to him. “Is it…?”
Logan has no idea what she’s trying to say, but he doesn’t get the chance to ask her about it.
The door to the room slowly starts to open, and with the noise, the sea-person disappears.
“Do we pay the two of you to stand around?” A man asks, and Logan doesn’t have to look away from the water to recognize his annoying-ass voice: Bolivar Trask. “There is still blood on the ground.”
The scientist is, frankly, someone Logan wouldn’t mourn if the other suddenly fell off a cliff. Despite being a dwarf — and therefore a minority— , he seems to have no regard for any form of human emotion, even by Logan’s standards. The man will often “rent out” the government facility for his own experiments, and everytime he does, he makes sure to leave a huge mess behind him.
More than that, however, Trask is one of the more outspoken racist CEOs in America. Of course, Logan knows that there are no shortage of racist and bigoted rich millionaires in the country, but Trask is someone who likes his opinions to be heard loud and clear, and will do everything he can to make sure this is achieved.
Trask then seems to realize the two janitors have found out about his little secret project, because he clears his throat and stands up straighter.
“I expect the two of you to keep this on the down-low for now.” Trask glares, trying his hardest to intimidate them. “I expect it will be very hard for the likes of you to find jobs if you are fired from this one.”
He says it like a threat, and Logan takes it as one. Though Ororo isn’t a completely lost cause, they all know very well that a mute Asian man in his mid-40s, once fired by the government, will see his sad excuse for a career completely destroyed.
Logan and Ororo are quick to finish mopping the whole place up, but before they leave he makes sure to steal one last glance towards the tanks, hoping but not expecting to see the mer-person one last time.
Unfortunately, nobody appears.