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Frank first met Logan not long after he had started his rampage.
Frank was angry. Really fucking angry, at everything and everyone. He wanted people to hurt the way he was, and was doing his damned best to do so. He didn’t have a hit list, really, he found people who were hurting other and bashed their skulls in with bottles and hammers and the butts of his guns. It worked. It was what he wanted.
He’s scoping out a new target— a fucking drug dealer, selling to kids. The worst of the worst.
A man slides into his booth. A short man, with knuckles gleaming metal and messy hair and a golden-brown drink in his hand. Frank doesn’t acknowledge him.
“You’re doin’ a lotta damage for a man who’s s’posed ta be dead,” the man rasps. Frank huffs.
“I am dead,” he mutters back, glaring at the wall. “I died when my family did.”
“You’re breathin’,” the man corrects. “An’ yer hurtin’ people. That’s close enough to alive fer me.”
Frank sighs. He lifts his gun from its holster, aims it at the man under the table. Clicks the safety off with a pointed look.
The man regards him with a completely unimpressed look. “That won’t hurt me.”
A beat. “I’m Logan.”
“Just Logan?” Frank asks skeptically. He doesn’t move the gun. He doesn’t know who the hell this man is, but he knows a bit too much about Frank for comfort.
“Just Logan.” Frank doesn’t like that, and he says as much, and just-Logan scoffs. “Look, buddy,” he snarls in a low, threatening tone, “I can’t control what’cha do. Sadly. But yer fuckin’ shit up for everyone, and it’s gonna catch up t’ ya soon. Believe me.”
“I don’t think I do,” Frank mutters back. “Look, man, I don’t know you. Piss off before we see just how much a bullet won’t hurt you.”
Logan regards him with an even stare. He puts both hands on the table. His knuckles gleam with metal indents that really do look like they go into his hands, and Frank’s pretty sure that’s confirmed a few seconds later when fucking knives slide out of Logan’s knuckles with a slick sound.
“You can’t hurt me,” Logan reiterates, “but I sure as hell can hurt you. Or help you. Your choice.”
“Help me?” Frank resists the urge to scoff. “You can’t help me.”
“I can’t help a dead man.” Logan corrects, retracting the… knife… things with a sharper noise. “But I can help Frank Castle.”
“Frank Castle died—“
“—In Center fucken’ Park, yeah-yeah-yeah.” Logan rolls his eyes. they’re a startling yellowish-brown, pupils just a little wider and wilder than a human’s. “Frank Castle is currently wanderin’ the streets of NYC shooting up any an’ every gang meeting he can get his grubby little hands on. So forgive me if I don’t quite believe that one, bub.”
“…Fine,” Frank relents, if only to get this weirdass guy away from him. “What, exactly, can you help me with?”
“I know a guy,” Logan says, and goddamn if that isn’t ominous, “who’s pretty good at helpin’ people with PTSD—“
“I don’t got PTSD—“
“—Hear me fucken’ out, you bitch— he’s good at helpin’ people wit’ brain issues, God knows you’ve got a baker’s dozen. He helped me.”
“You’re a basket case.”
“Maybe.” Logan shrugs, leaning back. “But I was a whole lot more of a basket case ‘fore he dragged me in.”
Frank considers Logan with a glare. “I have a war to fight.”
“I live with a bunch of child soldiers.”
“I think I might have to kill you now, too.”
Logan scoffs. But that turns into a solid laugh after a moment. Frank doesn’t get what’s so funny.
“They ain’t my child soldiers.” He grins. “And they… more or less chose to be there. I work there, too. Ever heard of the Xavier School?”
“…The mutie place.”
“Say that word again and I’ll rip out yer spine. But yes, the mutant place.” Logan nods. “Featurin’ Professor Charles Xavier, the one bitch out there who made a career outta figurin’ out people’s brains in a literal sense. He helped me a lot, an’ I think he can help you too.”
“Do you really think Professor fucking X would enjoy a whole-ass human taking up residence in his school for superpowered teens?”
Logan shrugs. “Prob’ly not. But I’ve made a career outta pissin’ him off, and he can’t resist a guy that looks like a downtrodden wet gutter-cat.”
“I do not—”
“Point bein’, you need help. I get it. I did too. So did every other fucker at that place, once upon a time an’ still. So I’m takin’ ya there, and you can continue whatever stupid-ass war on crime you’ve got goin’ on for all I care, as long as ya give healin’ or whatever a damn chance. I used to be a soldier, too. I lost my wife, too. Lost a whole lotta kids. You keep goin’ this way, Frank Castle,” he jams a finger into Frank’s chest, now a little too close for comfort, “and ya ain’t gonna drag yerself out.”
Frank uncomfortably slaps Logan’s hand away, frowning. “Fine. I’ll come with you to your stupid school.”
The glare passes. In fact, every ounce of anger in the guy passes, as if he was calm from the get-go. “Good.”
He’s fucking freaky.
Frank is slightly horrified to discover that he doesn’t really mind.
———
Nevermind. The Xavier School is a new brand of Hell.
Logan drags him up to Professor Xavier’s office, and Frank’s basically told to sit pretty as he and the Professor argue their way through letting Frank stay (Logan) or kicking out a legally dead mass murderer (Xavier). Frank pretends to ignore them and ignores the itch in his hands to clean his guns. Wouldn’t be a wonderful first impression, he assumes.
Logan wins the debate and stalks out of the office with a grumble of ”C’mon, Castle, we’re goin’” that Frank follows quicker than he normally follows any order anymore.
The room Logan winds up bringing him to looks severely lived-in already. Frank frowns. Glances at Logan. What the fuck, he attemps to mentally communicate, before realizing Xavier was probably the only one who got that message.
“My room,” Logan says breezily, as if Frank isn’t in Logan’s goddamned room. “Chuck said somethin’ about me vouchin’ for ya. So no murder, actually, thank’ya kindly.”
Frank scowls. Logan studiously ignores it. Frank scowls harder.
“It’s the best I could do,” Logan finally relents. “He doesn’t really want ya here. It’s a work in progress.”
“I’m a work in progress?”
“Yeap,” Logan says, seemingly fine with the whole idea. He tosses Frank’s bag on the ground, jerking his head at the currently sheetless bed. “We can make that. I don’t sleep on it.”
Frank blinks. “Where do you… sleep?” Does he sleep? Frank doesn’t know how mutants work.
Logan gestures in the general direction of the closet. When Frank looks, there’s a… solid nest of pillows and blankets and various articles of clothing that can’t all belong to Logan. “There,” he says gruffly. Catches Frank’s look. “It’s a nest, a’right? Closest I could get. Beds suck.”
Frank knows a thing or two about that. For months after his tours, he just couldn’t sleep in a bed. Had to find somewhere closer to the ground, even if Maria didn’t like—
Not thinking about Maria. Not thinking about Maria. Or the way blood pooled in her blonde hair or the way she didn’t even get the chance to make a noise before she went down
“A’right,” he says instead. “Sure. We can… do that.”
Whaaaat the fuck is he getting himself into with this bullshit.
———
They get the bed set up eventually, and by the time they do it’s… late. And so Logan curls up in his closet-nest and Frank lies down on the bed, and it’s a shit bed, but he’s used to shit beds, so he gets to sleep eventually.
———
Logan is a teacher, Frank finds out. He teaches wilderness survival to an array of children in various stages of inhumaness, and Frank does his utmost not to stare as he lurks behind Logan. The kids stare anyways, a whole lot more unabashed about their general hostility. Frank doesn’t blame them. He’s an adult human in a place meant for mutant children.
He sees Lisa and Frank Jr. in every one of them.
Logan studiously ignores the pain in Frank’s eyes at he looks at the children gathered around him.
Frank pretends the kids slowly warming up to him doesn’t feel like knives.
———
Tuesdays mean not-quite-therapy with not Xavier, but a redhead woman named Jean Grey who makes him sit and meditate as they work. She asks him to tell her about why he’s done what he did, and he tells her about dead children in Afghanistan and screams and bombs and a sense of purpose and the ease of not thinking and just following orders, and the feeling of being lost he got when he got back, and his own children on the grass of Central Park with bullets in their tiny little hearts.
He thinks Jean tells Logan about it, but the man doesn’t look at him any different and he can’t tell. He doesn’t go out and kill people anymore. He sits in on lessons and smiles wider at the kid’s tricks and can’t show any back and they don’t seem to mind.
Frank occasionally lies with Logan, nowadays. In the little closet nest. He ignores his shirt that’s somehow migrated into the nest and just lies still, listening to even breathing. It’s weirdly comforting.
———
Logan tells him his own stories. What he can remember, because apparently he can’t remember a whole fucking lot. Frank wishes he had that problem. He remembers too much. He spends less nights vomiting over reoccurring nightmares nowadays, but they still happen, even if Logan sits by him in the bathroom and rubs at his back through it.
So they swap the stories they can remember, and Frank gets drunk and Logan doesn’t, and it ends with them in bed together and it’s nicer than he ever thought a guy could be. He— knew, vaguely, that you weren’t supposed to look at other soldiers the way he did. but it never crossed his mind all that much.
Logan is a surprisingly holy experience for how sinful the whole thing should be.
That makes Frank vomit again later, because holy fuck he just fucked a man, his poor Maria, he’s moving on he’s going to forget her and his kids and he can’t fucking do this, he has to leave, he has to get revenge on all the men who ripped his life away from him—
Logan sits. And listens. And in soft, hushed tones, tells Frank about a wife named Itsu and a son named Akihiro and a girl named Laura and a girl named Gabby. About a past lover who now returns every year on his birthday to try and rip his heart out over things he can’t remember.
Frank sobs for a long time.
Logan and him go out and buy a heart-shaped locket and they get it ingraved M and L and F and Frank puts it on the necklace he still wears his dog tag on.
Logan has a ring on his own chain.