Chapter Text
Hands.
Smoke, burning flesh, blood, chemicals, animal dung.
Hands. They hurt, a sharp pain in his knuckles and travelling up through his wrists to his forearms.
He heaves his breaths, dragging the air through aching lungs, and he doesn’t remember why. If he was fighting something, or running from something, it’s gone now - or hiding. He sniffs the air, but finds only those same initial sensations. There’s too much going on for him to pick out the scent of anything alive. His eyes are already smarting from the smoke and the piercing light of the fires burning elsewhere in the room. Despite the pain, he’s uninjured, as far as he can tell - which is actually a little miraculous, considering his surroundings.
There is blood and glass and concrete. And bodies. Lots of bodies. Some missing limbs, or heads, others with only deep gashes, but with claws longer than kitchen knives. Most of the victims were wearing masks and tactical gear. Private army. There was some kind of logo on their arms, but he didn’t recognise it. Sort of circular, but with a crown shape at the top, and three inverted teardrops in the centre.
When he got up from inspecting the corpse, he saw something move in the corner of his eye, and pivoted to face it with his fists up. The man he saw was grizzled, bloody and dishevelled. He was wearing some sort of skintight suit, all black, and it was riddled with holes all along his chest but he had no wounds to match. His head and face were exposed, wild, dark hair and mutton-chops. He had an old scar over one eye, almost faded and he looked furious. It took him another second to realise he was looking at his reflection.
He touched the scar, and tilted his head. “Sure it’s a good story,” he said under his breath. Shame he didn’t know it - but at least he was learning some things about himself. Like the fact he talked to himself as a matter of habit.
There was a choked, pained noise, like a wounded animal, and he sniffed it out. He was starting to be able to distinguish smells in his surroundings. He found another body, dressed in what used to be a white lab coat, apparently having dragged themself into a corner if the blood from their leg was any indication. There was a lot of blood. This was a corpse waiting to happen. They had one hand clamped over their nose and mouth, but a whimper escaped when they saw him approach.
“Please,” they sobbed, as he knelt down. “If you can understand me. Please destroy my brain. I don’t want her to take me.”
“I understand you,” he said, not sure how else to respond. That was a hell of a way to say hello. He found the wound on their leg and pressed down on it, prompting another noise from them. It was a foregone conclusion at this point - they’d be unconscious in under a minute and dead in two. There was an ID card clipped to their coat, smeared with blood. Dr. Bernard Delacroix. Soteira Labs. Same logo as the soldiers. “What happened here?”
Delacroix blinked at him through watery eyes. “You don’t… remember?”
“No. Sorry.”
Delacroix grabbed his wrist and forced it away from his wound to his head, pressing the knuckles of his hand into his forehead. With renewed vigour, he pleaded, “You have to kill me. Please. Don’t let her take me. You used to be a hero, didn’t you? You helped people? Please help me.”
He yanked his hand free. What the hell was he talking about? Did he know him? He observed the suddenly deranged, wild look in the scientist’s eyes as he pleaded for death like it was a lifeline, and chose a different question. “Don’t let who take you?”
“Persephone. Please, Wolverine.” He lurched forward, fingers fumbling around his collar for something to hang onto.
What kind of name was Wolverine? “You know me?”
“Please. Please, you have to help me,” he begged, the words starting to slide and slur together. Hanging on to the front of his suit was the only thing stopping Delacroix from slumping all the way forward and passing out. Time was up.
He pried himself loose and picked up an automatic rifle from one of the headless soldiers nearby. There was still a third of a clip left in the magazine, and he took aim and fired without having to think about it. The recoil felt familiar, like it kicked up dust in a neglected corner of his mind, but nothing concrete sprang forward to back it up. He tossed the gun back to the floor when he was finished with it. He didn’t like guns, but he knew how to use them. There. He learned something else about himself.
It was time he got out of here. A sign glowing red for EXIT took him into a corridor that had glass screens along one wall, where greenery and artificial springs grew. The signage told him this was ‘Animal Habitats’, but he didn’t see any of the animals in question. That didn’t register as a problem until he noticed that the last of the glass screens in the corridor had been smashed. He had time to realise he was being watched, but not to get out of the way, and his senses were overwhelmed with wet animal fur and carrion breath as something with very, very big teeth pinned him to the ground and he tried his damnedest to hold it at arms’ length. He felt a tension release in his left arm, and as the tiger roared, blood cascaded down his arm.
The claws in his right arm, he saw come out. SNIKT, gleaming silver and sharp as they plunged towards the roof of the tiger’s mouth and sliced through the gristle and bone to its brain effortlessly. The beast’s head collapsed onto his chest, and he had to pry himself out from under it, until he knelt, catching his breath, by its body. He ran his hand through the fur behind its ear. “Sorry, kitty,” he said.
Why that reminded him of falling cherry blossoms and a pair of brown eyes, he had no idea.
He thought about the impossibly deep gashes in the corpses around Delacroix, the limbs and heads severed in one swipe. Bile stained his tongue. He didn’t like how easily the instincts for killing bubbled up under his skin and settled there. He looked at his hands, blood shining and dripping off the distended claws. Claws of a killer. Of an animal.
A guttural snarl came out of this throat, and he snapped, “Not an animal. I am a man. I am--”
His heart skipped a beat in his chest. Logan.
“I am Logan.” The claws retracted, sliding into the metal casings under the skin of his knuckles. It was like he had stumbled on a well-trodden path, making a groove out of the earth. He had dug his heels into the mud and walked it over and over again, I am not an animal, I am a man, I am Logan. Carved into his brain until scouring away the surface of his memory couldn’t erase it. It was comforting at the same time it was unsettling; he tried not to think about how deeply he had had to ingrain his sense of self in his mind to protect it. “Gotta keep moving,” he muttered.
The carnage continued through the rest of the lab, but the exit was wide open when he found it, transporting him from red emergency lighting and blood-soaked miasma into a grey cloudy sky that seemed almost luminous white after the shadows of the lab. Down the hill, he could see what looked like a military town, surrounded in chain link fence. Just barely clear of the facility’s garage, he found a motorcycle with a very dead rider hanging onto it with one foot, and plucked the keys from their palm.
There was activity in the compound below, people running, but the wind was blowing the wrong way for sound to travel. There was one exit, a big open gate flanked by two watchtowers.
He almost missed the glint that flashed out of one of them, but he reflexively jerked the handlebars of the bike, and the bullet thudded into the ground much too close to his wheels. He darted through the gate with his head ducked, but the next shot wasn’t aiming for him; it was aiming for his front brakes, and he was flung over the handlebars before he had time to understand the noise of it shattering.
The CRACK of rock splitting under his skull made his vision go dark.
He was dizzy. It went in a spiral, up, up, up, and he stood at the bottom of it with unsteady feet as he gazed up at the endless tower of bars. Light filtered down from a grate in the top, like this was a gigantic smokestack full of cages. He reached out to steady himself on one of the bars, and heard a hiss of air, a metal CLANG, barely registering either before he recoiled out of the reach of the razor sharp metal claws. The face snarling and gnashing his teeth through the bars was his own, but… not. He was feral and drooling, with wild eyes, and his hair was shorn but there was still a scruff about him, like no one had gotten close enough to shave him since.
“Don’t worry. He can’t get to you unless you unlock the door.”
Logan turned to see a woman, tall and dark-skinned with a pristine high-collared white coat. She had a gentle face and a calm expression, giving him the barest hint of a smile. In the cage, the prisoner had stopped lashing out, sitting down and staring at the ground. His claws shked back under his skin. Then out again, in again. SNIKT. Shk. Over and over. In the next cage, there was another him, this one better-kept, with a plain black and white suit and a patch over one eye, watching him without much interest. But not all of the prisoners looked like him - he could see women, kids, big guys, skinny guys. No one he recognised.
“Who’re all these people?”
She placed a hand on his shoulder. “They’re you. Your hopes, your fears, shames and prides, your hates… your loves. A thousand little pieces of you.”
“Why are they locked up?”
“Everyone contains multitudes, but you’ll die trying to be all of them at once. You’ve lived a very long life, and you’ve been a lot of things to a lot of people. Take a look around.” She held up a small, dark steel key. “Open any door you like.”
He took it. The metal was warm, like she had held it in her hand for a long time. “Who are you?”
“My name is Persephone. I’m a very dear friend of yours.”
“Really,” he said. On the white brick wall behind her, there were three inverted teardrops, red, arranged in a triangle. Like the soldiers he dismembered in Soteira Labs. “I know a dead man who was very afraid of you. Seemed to think you’re bad news.”
Persephone smiled, and brushed an out of place strand of hair from his face, smoothing it back. “Well who wouldn’t be afraid of the Queen of the Dead? But you have nothing to worry about.” She touched her lips to his, and her lipstick tasted of pomegranate juice. “Baby, I brought you back to life.”