Chapter Text
Logan had just buried Charles when he heard the sound of gravel crunching and he looked up.
‘I’ll tell you,’ a British accent said and a fair-haired man stepped out of the woods, ‘different universes being in different years. Boy, is it disorienting.’
The way he walked and talked told Logan exactly who – or rather what – he was. ‘So, what is it this time?’
‘Nice to see you too, Logan.’
Laura stepped up next to Logan and tugged on his hand.
‘The Transcendent Souls,’ Logan told her. ‘They got picked and tried out to act as guardians over a set of cosmic artefacts. Whenever they die, they’re just reborn into new bodies. They have multiple powers.’
‘And have to constantly earn our powers,’ the fair-haired man said. ‘To answer your question, this lifetime I’m Joel Clifton. And I have some information the Reavers would not like you to know.’
‘Yeah? What’s that?’
‘They’re quite anxious that you do not get the kids over the border to Canada,’ Joel answered glibly.
Logan’s eyebrows went up at the mention of his home country. ‘Canada?’
‘Yeah,’ Joel said. ‘About 30 years ago, Canada suddenly remembered that Lt. James Howlett served in their military for over 100 years before being scooped up by an American officer and vanishing. A few enquiring minds not only found out what happened, but released the information publically. The direct result was a slew of public pro-mutant protests and a piece of legislation being introduced which recognises mutants as humans and citizens.’
Logan’s eyebrows flew up. ‘You’re shitting me.’
‘Would I shit you about something like this?’
‘I suppose not…’ Which meant Canada was the safest place for the kids to be.
‘So,’ Joel said. ‘What do you suppose would happen if Lt. James Howlett returned to Canada with 20 mutant kids in tow?’
Logan smirked. ‘And there’s your Eden. It’s a metaphor.’
‘What is metaphor?’ Laura suddenly said.
Logan froze. ‘You can talk?’
Laura nodded.
Joel answered Laura before Logan could lose his temper and start yelling about her not talking since Arizona. ‘A metaphor is a figure of speech where we compare two unrelated things. The real Eden was a safe garden paradise. You’re not actually going there, but crossing into Canada will make you safe from Transigen, hence the comparison.’
Logan sighed out heavily through his nose. ‘All right. How long are you staying, Joel?’
‘I’m here to make sure you safely cross into the border,’ he said. ‘Mai is keeping a link to me. When it’s done, Sharee will open a portal to get me home.’
‘Okay then,’ Logan said.
***
Joel mostly kept away from Logan and Laura’s bonding.
Logan was resisting the bonding thing because he was ready to die, and he didn’t want a new attachment that needed him. But, once he got home, he’d be too worried about the situation he found himself in the middle of. Joel had already warned Logan that he was a national hero and walking in with the kids would cause quite a fuss, but he likely underestimated that.
Joel had Logan stop by a used car dealership, where he purchased a mini-bus that would carry 20 children plus one adult across the border.
Once Laura explained to her friends, they all piled into the mini-bus.
And then off they went.
And the closer they got to the border, the more frequent the attacks from Transigen came.
‘I can see why they sent you,’ Logan remarked as he drove through the attack.
Joel simply held his hands up, projecting out a barrier that travelled with them and couldn’t be penetrated by anything. ‘Yeah. Not silly, was it?’
‘So, what’s the plan?’ Logan asked.
‘As we come close to the checkpoint, there are face ID cameras,’ Joel said. ‘And if those fail, the border guards have handheld ones. Regardless of the beard, they’ll immediately link you to your military records. So you’ll be let through the border before they ask questions. And Americans or Mexicans shooting at Canadian border guards would cause an international incident which, I believe, is what they’re trying to avoid.’
‘And you?’ Logan asked.
‘Let me off just before you get there. I’ll deal with your clone who, I imagine, they’ll fish out for this.’
‘Oh, that’s right,’ Logan said. ‘You also got supernatural condition, don’t ya?’
Joel smirked. ‘Yup.’
***
The camera at the Canadian border checkpoint had stopped working.
The tech was pulled in and he quickly ran a diagnostics. He frowned. ‘Outside interference.’
‘Who’d want to hack our cameras?’
‘Someone trying to sneak past the border?’
Their boss shook his head. ‘If someone was trying to sneak past the border, they’d hardly drive through where our cameras are – enough to know to knock them out. Besides, these checkpoints are on every road, and the scanners are littered across the entire borderline.’
‘Yeah. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. Unless…’
‘Unless there’s a mutant, or a group of them, seeking refuge in Canada and the Americans are trying to stop us seeing them coming.’
‘That makes far more sense.’
‘And, if it is the case, he’ll drive straight up to the checkpoint.’
‘Maybe not.’ Their boss frowned. ‘Haven’t America blocked all avenues for international news from their general populace. If it is a mutant trying to leave the country, they may not know they’d have legal protections here.’
‘And they may not know how extensive the border protections are now.’
The boss nodded. ‘Okay.’ He headed over to the phone to call it in with his superiors. In a few minutes, he hung up. ‘We’re to go out and wait for whoever it is; be as unthreatening as possible.’
‘Don’t think we have to, sir.’ One of his men was leaning out the window. ‘There’s a minibus driving right up to the checkpoint.’
They all turned and looked. Sure enough, a minibus pulled up…full of kids. Quite a few of the border guards had kids of their own, and they didn’t like what they saw. Those kids were staying low in the bus, almost hiding. The driver of the bus looked into late middle age and had blood splatters on him.
The man on the window picked up the face ID scanner. ‘One moment, sir.’
The man sat there and waited as his face was scanned and then the scanner beeped. The border guard on the window’s jaw dropped and his eyes widened. ‘Holy shit…’
The driver just looked tired, and his sigh emphasised that.
‘What?’ the boss walked over, and took the scanner. ‘…the Hell?’
Because, written on the scanner, complete with comparison pictures from the 20th Century, the name written was one that, by now, every Canadian knew: Lt. James Howlett.
And it was most definitely him.
The famous James Howlett had just driven up to the border, clearly affected by the poison they were putting in the food down south, with a bus full of children.
The head border guard quickly hit the button to open the border. ‘I’ll ask you to pull up after you’re through, Lt. Howlett, because I will need to make a full report about this.’
***
There was a panic to catch Wolverine before he got to the Canadian border.
He had all 20 escaped X-23 subjects and he was very clearly heading north. He was getting so dangerously close that Rice juiced up X-24 and sent him in with them. That was when they found him.
A middle-aged man with pale hair just standing there as a mini-bus rolled away. Pierce could see some of the subjects looking out the back window. Several of his men raised their guns and opened fire. But the blond man lifted a hand and clicked. The bullets seemed to bounce off a barrier of some kind.
With a frown, Pierce tapped his sunglasses.
SCANNING…
SCANNING…
NO MUTANT GENE DETECTED.
‘You’re not a mutant,’ he said.
‘No,’ the man said with a British accent. ‘But your little hunt is over. You’ve neutralised or killed every mutant in America and Mexico, and the international community is about to explode with news of the greatest war crime of the century.’
Pierce waved to have them release X-24.
With a snarl, the beast launched at the man with his claws out.
Pierce began to walk, confident the interloper was about to be killed.
But then the man moved at inhuman speeds and there was a spray of blood.
X-24 gurgled.
Pierce stopped.
The man stood, his hand pushed straight through X-24’s chest, the clone’s heart clenched in his hand. The heart gave a few more futile pumps. Then it stopped, blood still poured from the organ. X-24 slumped, instantly dead. The man pushed the body off and it fell back to the ground. He began speaking in a bored voice.
‘The Nazis,’ he said, ‘believed their crimes against the Jews and other minorities would never be discovered too. But every dirty little secret is always hung out on the line, sooner or later.’ The heart in his hand dissolved into dust and, then, so too did X-24’s body. ‘And you hate mutants like Hitler hated Jews, don’t you…Donald Pierce.’
Pierce glared at him and waved a hand, ordering the men forward.
Nobody moved.
He twisted around. All of the men were pale-faced and their guns visibly shook in their hands.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he demanded.
One of them men spoke up. ‘With all due respect, sir, he did just turn X-24 into dust by clicking. And that’s after he ripped its heart out. He also can stop our bullets in mid-air. How do you fight something like that?’
Suddenly, a glowing golden portal opened beside the man. ‘Well, you’re too late anyway. They’re over the border.’ With that, he stepped through.
Pierce bolted.
He and his men ran through the woodlands, cutting distance down…and came to a sharp stop as they found the checkpoint, and several Canadian officers with their guns aimed at them.
Wolverine had stopped the minibus and was leaning on the hood while he talked to someone. The only X-23 subject visible was the one that’d been made from Wolverine. Both men looked over as the border guards lifted their guns. The man Wolverine was talking to said something and Wolverine nodded, before ushering Laura into the checkpoint building.
Then the man walked over. He stopped at the marked line.
‘This is Canadian soil, sir,’ he said coldly. ‘You are not authorised to pass this point.’
Pierce scowled. This was exactly what he wanted to avoid. ‘Wolverine was permitted to pass.’
‘Lt. James Howlett was born on Canadian soil nearly 200 years ago,’ the head of the border guard responded. ‘He has served in our military since 1867 until 1972, when an American officer was, for some Godforsaken reason, allowed to walk in and turn the longest-serving soldier in our army into a lab rat.’
Pierce scowled. ‘He’s a mutant!’
‘And Canadian law recognises mutants as human beings,’ the other man retorted.
Pierce squinted. How could mutants be recognised as human by anyone’s law? They weren’t human! Wait a minute…
‘…What did you call Wolverine?’
The head border guard glared at him contemptuously. ‘Go back to wherever you came from, and batter down the hatches. The whole world’s about to find out what you’ve done.’
‘There’s no way you know what the deal is!’ Pierce snapped.
‘It’s enough that the kids came in with Canada’s biggest war hero,’ the head border guard said. ‘It’s enough that one of them is calling him “dad”. It’s enough that he had to tell them we wouldn’t treat them like you did. And, right now, Ms. Lopez’s phone is charging so we can access the video evidence she made on it.’
Shit. Shitshitshitshit!
‘You can’t speak for your country’s entire government!’ Pierce insisted.
‘Mutant Protection Act of 2015,’ he said. ‘Article six. Any persons of mutant nature seeking asylum in the country are granted temporary visas until their individual cases can be reviewed. Persons under the age of 18 are granted automatic asylum.’
Shit.
London, England
Joel had returned to the Wolverine’s dimension, only to grab a paper a few days later that detailed what had been discovered. There was a picture of Logan, standing outside a government building. The children stood around him, but their faces were all blurred out to protect their identities.
Logan himself, after only a few days off the mutant gene suppressant, had already begun to regain colour in his brown hair. He’d shaved away his beard back to his more familiar sideburns. And he had significantly fewer scars than what Joel had seen on him. As he’d suspected, Logan wasn’t healing properly because of that damn drug.
Then there was the article itself.
CANADIAN NATIONAL HERO EXPOSES CRIME OF THE CENTURY
Canadian National Hero, Lt. James Howlett, with a military career spanning over 100 years thanks to a healing factor which rendered him practically invincible, returned to his home nation a few days ago. He drove up to a Canadian border checkpoint from the United States in a minibus which contained 20 mutant children – one of which being his own.
In the 1970s, Lt. Howlett was scooped up from the Canadian army by Col. William Stryker of the US Army and folded into a strike force, which he famously deserted upon refusing an order to murder innocent civilians in Kenya, leading to other members of the strike force to follow suit. However, it now is revealed that genetic samples were taken from certain members of the strike force. These samples were taken without the knowledge or consent of the strike force members, and they were later made into embryos.
The samples were sent to an American company called Transigen, that is positioned in Mexico. The embryos were injected into “Mexican girls that nobody can find anymore”. Many more than 20 children were born in this manner.
Lt. Howlett only discovered the existence of the children when a nurse from Transigen managed to track him down to request transport to the US state of South Dakota. The nurse, one Gabriela Lopez, was killed by the Reavers, Transigen’s own strike force. And only after this event did Lt. Howlett discover how the children had come to be. By his own admission, upon discovering that Transigen was anxious to stop himself and the children from crossing the Canadian border, he decided that was the thing to do.
This case has been turned over to federal authorities, who have not released many details.
With a slight titter, Joel folded the newspaper. ‘Of course they haven’t released many details, you wankers. It’s an active investigation.’
A second portal opened next to him and Sharee walked through. She took at seat opposite him.
‘Cold war or hot?’ she asked.
‘Hard to tell at this point,’ Joel said. ‘But both America and Mexico have been thrown in the hot seat for this one.’
‘Both names were involved, huh?’ Sharee chuckled. ‘Aren’t they already in the hot seat for being among the very few countries that actually use that mutation suppression shit?’
‘Yeah.’ Joel smirked. ‘Most others think it’s unethical to use it.’
‘Or sacrilegious to try and control something that occurs naturally.’
‘Or they just hate the good ol’ US of A, and won’t abide by something they made.’
Sharee snorted. ‘Pity about that, isn’t it?’
Joel grinned. ‘Tragic.’
‘But you saved him,’ Sharee said. ‘This dimension’s anchor is still alive and kicking.’ She tapped the paper. ‘And, by the looks of that, in recovery. His full powers should be restored within the week.’
‘I should think so.’ Joel looked at her. ‘So, what about you? Didn’t you have an anchor to save too?’
‘I did,’ Sharee agreed. ‘Wasn’t that hard, actually.’
‘Did you even have to do anything at all?’
‘Not really. Just schooled a Sorcerer Supreme.’