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This girl is a weapon of mass destruction. Silent and deadly as she tracks him down and makes herself comfortable on the log near him, waiting him out.
He can’t do this.
He cannot fucking do this. He needs to tell this kid to get lost because whatever it is she’s looking for she won’t find it in him.
Logan can’t make himself force the words past his lips though, a problem he has never had before. The kid is still sitting on the log a few feet away, looking at him like he’s something worth her patience and he wants to unleash his claws at her. Scare her enough to get her to leave him alone.
The kid. Laura. Christ, something in him tenses when he thinks of her name. Wade had called her a smaller, meaner version of him but Logan knows there’s more to it than that. The way she’s looking at him now, the way her eyes went immediately to him when he walked in earlier. He’s missing something.
And he wants to ask her, demand an answer for why she’s looking at him like that. Like he’s her whole damn something. But he also knows he’s too fucking scared to do it because once she answers him, and she will, he won’t be able to unhear it. Logan can see it in her eyes, the way she’s practically vibrating with the need to say something but is holding back because deep down she knows, she must know, he isn't the Logan of her world.
He isn’t her Logan. Whoever the fuck he was.
Laura is unashamed as she openly gawks at him and it makes his skin crawl. Briefly he wonders how the other him dealt with it. Her eyes are fixed on his face, as if tracking the changes between him and the version of him she knew before. Is he younger or older? Does he have more lines on his face? Is his hair the same? Her fingers seem to twitch and for one horrified moment Logan thinks she wants to reach out and touch him.
This girl is a weapon of mass destruction, he thinks, wearing the ghost of him on her face. Her eyes alone could reduce cities to dust, so much emotion reflected in them Logan does know how she holds it all in her tiny frame.
God, she must hate him. He waltzed into her life wearing the face of someone she obviously cared a lot about. Maybe she’s planning on how to corner him. Maybe she’s getting ready to attack.
He’s survived one atomic bomb, he isn’t sure he’ll survive her.
Yet, Logan isn’t sure he really believes that. Her gaze is intense but not hostile. In fact, it’s the opposite. Open and slightly guarded but there’s a turmoil there too. Looking at him hurts her but she still does it. She can’t seem to look away. He was important to her, the other Logan. The best Logan.
He curls his fingers into fists, tries to ground himself by staring into the flames of the fire. It’s like she can’t look away because she’s worried he’ll disappear if she takes her eyes off him for a single moment. He feels uncomfortable under her gaze, a bug under a microscope, a broken bone on an x-ray that hasn’t healed quite right.
But Logan is an asshole, he can’t help it and he hates himself for what he says next.
“Why don’t you take a picture, kid?” It comes out harsh and gruff and Laura seems to startle at the sound.
Fuck.
“I’m sorry.” She says softly, dragging her eyes over to the fire as well, “I’ve never seen you this young.”
He snorts at that. He definitely doesn’t feel young. He feels tired. He feels like he needs a drink. He feels like he needs to hit something, preferably Wade.
“He was older?” He says instead, uncurling his fingers, “You’re….” He can’t finish the sentence, can’t find the words.
He wants to run.
That’s what he does. He left the X-Men, he needs to leave Laura.
She’s a weapon of mass destruction but Logan doesn’t think she understands the power she holds. Not with her violence, with her presence.
She pushes on though without seeing the despair churning around in his head, “Yes. He was sick.”
“You lost him.” It isn't a question. Logan knows that much. He saw the screens at the TVA, heard Wade talk about the precious anchor being of his world. Whoever he was to Laura, he was more important to her than the rest of the world. Logan thinks the feeling was probably mutual although he doubted any version of him would ever admit that.
He hears a small sniffle, looks over at Laura to see glassy eyes. No tears though, not yet.
God, he hates it when people cry around him.
But she’s so young. Still a kid, stuck in the Void for years. How many of those years did she spend mourning him?
Something breaks, shatters, somewhere in his chest and he needs the burn of alcohol to numb it before he realises what it is.
It’s like a slap to the face when she moves to stand, “I should go.”
He should let her, take the coward’s way out. It would be easier, he isn’t whatever her Logan was. He isn’t this.
“Laura.” It’s the first time he says her name aloud and he sees her freeze at it with her back still turned on him, “Who was I to you?”
Her eyes flicker, like a light going out, like she was dreading and hoping he would ask in equal measure.
She shakes her head, “It doesn’t matter.”
His heart kicks into overdrive. “Yes, it does.”
He swallows the lump in his throat and prepares to wait or wait for her walk away. He doesn’t push but he knows, without knowing her, that she’s stronger than he is. Less of a coward. She’ll answer, he wouldn’t.
She might be meaner by Wade’s words but there is a compassion there, a kindness he doesn’t see in himself. He wonders where she gets that from.
“You were my dad.” A single tear tracks down her cheek and she manages to look at him again, “He was…”
No. Jesus, no.
A weapon of mass destruction, he reiterates in his mind, who can bring a man to his knees with a few words like blowing open a crater in his fucking chest.
But it makes sense doesn’t it? A smaller, meaner version of him. Wade gave it to him, he just didn’t connect the dots.
He understands then why she stared at him like she did. Why she seems to gravitate towards him. She was looking for the father she lost. The father he would never be.
Because he was a fuck up and he had no idea what her Logan was like but clearly he was a better man.
He is not father material.
Laura seems to read his panic, “He wasn’t… it wasn’t what you think. No birthdays or teaching me to ride a bike. I was born using his DNA. He saved me, got me to safety. We had a handful of days together. But I…”
Logan could imagine it as clearly as drowning. A much younger, smaller version of her. An older version of him. Is that why she thought he was a hero? Because he saved her?
“He didn’t know?” Logan asks, unable to stop himself from trying to picture it. The other him. The one this girl clearly loved even if it was only for a few days. She spent years loving the ghost of him after that.
Laura shakes her head, hair whipping around her face in the breeze, “I was an experiment. There were a bunch of us. Kids born with mutant DNA sources. They wanted to make soldiers, killers. I was raised in a lab until they wanted to kill us. One of the nurses kept me safe, brought me to Logan, they killed her for it.”
And him, he thinks despairingly.
He died for her. Her Logan, her father. To protect her, to ensure she has a life.
Jesus, was the man a fucking saint?
“I’m not a good man, kid.” He tells her, needs her to know, “You don’t want this from me.”
Laura gives him a watery smile, “You were always good, Logan. You just never thought so.”
That stops him short.
A fucking weapon of mass destruction, no claws required.
He can’t be this for her, for anyone. He isn’t what she thinks he is. He is a stranger and so is she. She’s looking for something that doesn’t exist. Logan can hear what Charles would say as if he was speaking right into his head. Except that’s impossible because all the X-Men are dead and he did nothing to save them.
A daughter.
He never considered the family life, he never would have been good at it but his life since his makeshift family died has been as lonely as hers. They both lost everything to get here. That doesn’t mean they were meant to find each other. That doesn’t mean he can do… this.
He doesn’t want to imagine it, the life she had growing up in a lab, a prison. He doesn’t want to think about the pain he went through to become what he is, the same pain she must have endured as such a young age.
With a life like the one Laura hinted at, no wonder she prefers living in the Void.
But if Logan understands one thing from their conversation it’s that she deserves a life better than this one. Better than a cell and a kill order. Better than a forgotten wasteland that every multiverse rejects.
Better than him.
“I’m not him, Laura.” Logan tells her, his voice losing some of the gruffness, “I wish I could give him back to you but I can’t.”
“You remind me of him, you know.” She tells him, “He was angry too. He’d given up just like you. He didn’t want to get involved in my shit, get involved with me.”
Okay, so maybe not a saint but still not even close to being him despite her words.
His eyes narrow, “Maybe he was doing you a favour.”
Laura pauses for a moment, “I think he was fucking scared.” She admits, “Until he wasn’t.”
“And that made him a hero?”
“No.” Her lips twitch into a sad smile and Logan knows she’s thinking of him. The other him. “It made him just like everyone else.”
The silence descends around them like a chill seeping into his bones, suddenly he’s cold, the fire doing nothing to help. The distance is a chasm between them, a whole damn multiverse and he isn’t taking on this fight. He’ll lose and she’ll be disappointed.
Whatever DNA they share, whoever he was to her in her world, she doesn’t need anything from him in this one.
She nods as if she already knows his mind, “I should head back. Big day tomorrow, even if you stay behind. It’s okay if you do.”
She wants to retreat and he needs her to go because his thoughts are screaming too loudly in his head and he needs a drink.
“Goodnight.” He manages, not quite a dismissal but something like a surrender.
Laura gets a few steps away before she stops and turns to him again, “Logan?”
He flinches at the sound of his name, silently praying her not to ask anything he can’t answer.
When he meets her eyes, she is more vulnerable than before. She looks younger. His heart almost cracks for her, for how much she lost.
“Yeah?”
She takes a step forward, stops, slides the fingers of one hand over the knuckles of the other. The place where her claws extend.
“Can I…” she stops, unsure of herself, “I just…”
Then she launches herself at him. At first he thinks it’s an attack, waits to feel the sharp claws cutting into his skin. If she wants him to bleed because he isn't her Logan then he will let her do this, he knows, he can give her that at least.
Only the pain doesn’t come and it takes him a moment longer to realise she isn't attacking. She’s hugging him.
Her arms are banded around his waist, a firm, vice-like grip and her head is nestled against his chest just under his chin. Logan freezes, arms awkwardly at his sides as she clings to him for dear life.
“Laura?” The question is evident, the reason behind it is not.
“I never got to do this before.” She tells him, voice muffled against his suit, “in my universe.”
Well, fuck.
She means with her Logan. She never got to hug her Logan and he’s standing there and of course she wants to pretend. She’s a kid and he was the closest thing she had to her father.
She’s a weapon of mass destruction, not because of what they made her, not because of the DNA they share. But because she’s a girl who lost the only father she ever had and underneath is all, Logan knows she wants him back. She’s powerful in her grief but also vulnerable and the only reason she’s letting him see it is because of his face, his voice, the echo of his soul.
Logan pushes past his own thoughts, pushes past the rage at her loss and the fact he hasn’t hugged someone in years, isn’t sure how to do it anymore. How to be gentle and considerate and kind.
Then he folds his arms around her, dropping his chin against her head. He stands there, holding this girl who shares his DNA, who misses the man who saved her life and lets her pretend he can be the same man.
He can’t but he can give her this. This moment, this tiny scrap of comfort she’s been longing for since she lost her Logan.
“What would he say?” Logan asks her softly, “What do you need to hear?”
He isn’t asking because he sees her as a bomb he needs to defuse. He isn’t trying to cheapen her grief. He’s trying to be the good guy, a fucking laugh if he’s ever heard one.
She holds him impossibly tighter, “He’d say something that would ruin the moment I think.” She lets out a breathless chuckle, “He wasn’t great with words.”
Logan huffs, “That makes two of us.” One of his hands moves to cradle the back of her head, gently holding her to him in a gesture he hopes is tender, “It’s going to be okay, bub.”
He isn’t sure if that’s enough, if she even heard it considering he’s sure she is trying to burrow herself in deeper but it’s the best he can do and he just hopes it doesn’t make anything worse. This kid. His kid. The other his kid anyway. Is this what he was like in her world, so unsure and scared of screwing up. So afraid of everything this hurricane of a girl might bring to his door, to his bruised heart?
Laura breathes him in and then gently, so slowly he thinks she’s drawing it out so she can commit it to memory, she lets him go.
Logan catches her eyes again, sees something haunting there but lets it go, “Get some sleep.”
He turns his back on her this time, refusing to watch her leave. He feels like he shouldn’t have said anything, shouldn’t have offered her this because she might expect it. She might want him to try and if he tries, he’ll fail. He always does.
He’s an echo of the man she called her father, nothing more. She won’t find anything good in him. He’s the worst Wolverine after all.
“Thank you.” He hears her gentle voice on the breeze, timid and a little more shy than before. He doesn’t ask what she’s thanking him for, it doesn’t really matter. Then he hears her footsteps crunching against the ground as she leaves.
Logan doesn’t want to admit the small voice in the back of his head, the one that sounds like Charles, the voice that tells him that maybe he’s the worst Wolverine because he never met her in his universe.
No, he’ll need more whiskey to drown that thought out and paint his world back in the shades of grey he is used to. Laura is a streak of red and he can’t let that seep into his skin, he won’t. He loses everyone and everything and he isn’t about to let Laura tangle herself up in his mess because she is searching for something he can’t give her.
He is most definitely not father material.
A weapon of mass destruction, he thinks again, going straight for his heart. Maybe she knows that’s what will do the most damage.
Maybe she knows that’s where he’s weakest.
Or maybe, she’s searching for someone who understands.