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He woke up convinced, the tent roof must have torn. Sure, in the hurry of their departure, he'd probably been sloppy with the equipment check and reached for some old gear by accident which hadn’t withstood the test of heavy Canadian snow. Now his damn sleeping pad was soaked and by sunrise, he'd probably be down with some flu instead of helping his mission partner hunt down the deserted Weapon X armory they'd come here to check on after some alarming activity readings close by lately …
Only that couldn’t be quite right because he wasn’t freezing. At all.
The more, orientation tried to creep into his sleep-addled mind, the more he realized that actually, this felt more like his clothes and the paper-thin mattress were sticking to his numb-feeling skin sticky and salty instead of clammy and freezing. There was also the suspicious fact that his throat was burning with far too hectic, shallow breaths, every muscle in his body tense, his hands trembling so badly that even the weak attempt failed to push the cover, which also felt like he could easily have wrung it out to dry, off of his far too hot shape. And trying to shake off what had such an alarming grip on him, long after leaving an apparently far too intense REM state behind, only had those very same images in his head crash down on him all over.
Gritting his teeth, Scott rolled on his stomach and braced himself on both fists to force at least that tremor in his hands under control, gritting his labored breathing through his teeth with his eyes firmly shut behind his sleeping goggles as the disgusting sensation of cold sweat tried to keep stinging in them. More impatiently by the second, he waited for that newest wave of long-meaningless memories and slaughtered demons in his mind to pass, while he counted both the seconds and his blessings regarding his tent partner's absence, courtesy of Logan's hunting instincts having taken over before they'd even laid down. The last thing he needed right now was someone to baby him over what was nothing more than a couple of blurry images of a little blood and humiliation in his head. Not like Scott hadn’t had plenty of that long before the Orchis war already. Plus, he'd already had one embarrassing freakout over that shit after his little run-in with that asshole of a Suit in a certain diner a couple of days ago.
One panic attack a month, he could fit in his schedule if he squinted. That was already more attention than these latest bigot bastards whom mutant world had sent into oblivion, deserved.
He was pretty confident he'd gotten that message through to his rebellious body, feeling that unbearable tightness in his chest giving in slightly when he forced his thoughts onto the pleasantly intimate mission at hand that Logan had practically dragged him along to. Not least in order for the two of them to get some time to work out their issues. To find back whatever strength, harmony and stability they'd drawn from their feelings for each other on the moon at the time, and to move forward, finally, in this new, so much smaller mutant world, even without Jean by their side for the moment …
But that latest reminder that the woman Scott loved and had given his all and life for more than once, dwelled millions of light years away from him while he was busy keeping their mutual mission for peace on Earth together by the seams … That pain wrecked into the rusty wall around his messed-up emotional world right again, bringing back all that had haunted him in his dreams a minute ago. All that had followed his wife's latest temporary demise last summer, and a certain long fall, ending once more with Scott's body broken in more places than the Orchis medic hacks had managed or been willing to mend for many months … with none of those injuries coming even close to what had come after though. Close to what no one but the people present at the time knew details about, to what even Jean had only been able to guess at.
As the phantom pain throbbed through his still freshly relocated ribs, his scarred eyelids, his cramping guts, the acid of glycerine and copper and black powder burning on his tongue, he wondered, not for the first time, if this, right here, was why Jean preferred the vast open to the confined fucked up mess that was a marriage with him.
The shaking growing worse instead of better by the second, he found himself tearing at his soaked clothes without even really realizing it, brittle nails scratching faint stripes into his skin, his breathing hardly more than a wheezing, strangled hiss at this point that threatened to leave him dizzy instead of just lightheaded. Not that blacking out felt like the worst option right now.
Hell, whom was he trying to fool? He was a fucking wreck, pretending to resemble even a shadow of the once unwavering leader that whatever was left of the X-Men would have needed right now. It really was no surprise there were hardly any of their kind following his call to Alaska or that his own wife preferred not to be even in the same damn galaxy as him. And that the man Scott also happened to love couldn’t stand to be in one room with him for longer than an hour at a stretch and would probably fuck off from his life and team again as quickly as he'd shown up today …
Scott almost jumped out of his crawling skin when something ice-cold and wet suddenly grazed his neck, his hand – fortunately still quite uncoordinated – reaching for his glasses on pure instinct. Only when a familiar grip of faster reflexes pushed it back down to the ground, Scott spotted its familiar huge, hairy shape from the corner of his eyes, and his scrambled brain checked back in with reality.
Belatedly, he felt the soothing touch of a stiff fall breeze coming in through opened tent flap, filling his clenched lungs with a much needed sob of clear air, as a far gentler touch between his shoulder blades further grounded him, guiding him to lie flat on his stomach. His defensively clawed fists found another snow-filled piece of clothing somewhere in front of him to dig into, its temperature further helping to freeze the irrationally panicked reactions of his body bit by bit.
Only when the painful razor strokes in the back of his throat turned into a somewhat tolerable rhythm heaving his chest, the familiar weight of a smaller but far broader chest settled down on him, pressing him into the sweat-soiled mat, and Scott thought he should probably be disgusted. But for that, it felt far too good, at least not trembling away by himself in the dark anymore.
Not to mention that, while Logan was smelling of his unplanned sprint back to the tent, and of fur and blood of whatever he'd tried to cut them for a late-night snack, there was also that very familiar, comfortable fragrance of whiskey and tobacco and freshly cut woods surrounding him that Scott would always have recognized immediately in a million, no matter the meaningless escapades of the past that his messed up brain was caught in at any given time ...
And without him really realizing, the torturous tension in his limbs and spine finally left his stiff shape for good.
Finally, he could really breathe again.
Talk, even, though he knew his partner well enough at this point to be aware, that was usually pretty secondary to him. "I always forget how good you are with this."
Scott more knew the shrug to be there than feeling it or seeing it from the corner of his eyes when he arduously turned his head, trying to catch his lover's gaze.
"Routine." Logan nuzzled his face against Scott's still slightly feverish neck for a precious second of even more comfort, his thick beard scratching Scott's skin when just the hint of a kiss found his pulse line, drawing away as soon as his lover seemed satisfied with the pace there, enough to sit up again already.
Scott let him, though with the worst of the attack over, he was suddenly freezing miserably. But extensive cuddling was for victory sex, at most, or for those rare nights that they'd managed to spend together with the third in their relationship back then.
But he forced himself to turn around as soon as he could move again before his partner could vanish into the night again. This time, he managed to find the darkened look in those narrow bright eyes and immediately wished he wouldn’t have, seeing all reflected in there that the two of them had never worked out, even long before the fall of their last home.
Maybe they never would. Maybe in truth, they'd only come here, on this trip a couple of days apart from the others, to leave the past behind instead. To find a way to move on, somehow.
Scott just wished he had the faintest clue where to start. "What's routine saying, how long until the dreams stop?"
He didn’t need to specify, not with someone who'd been through his own plenty share of torture, of living with ticking bombs inside his body, of having been torn to pieces and put back together for sports.
Maybe Scott should take to nightly hunting himself.
Too bad that for an Alaskan, he famously lacked a real love for freezing his balls off.
A faint grin curled on Logan's lips as if he'd read his mind; Scott's reflexes actually were good enough again to catch when Logan threw him a flask with the good stuff and sat back against the still half-open tent flap. "Why do you think you never see me sleep, Slim?"
Scott let out an unhappy sigh and grimaced at the sharp taste in his mouth, happy to give the bottle right back. It wasn’t like he'd expected anything different. Logan wasn’t here to figure shit out for him. Only to support him while he tried to manage that on his own. "I lack the feral metabolism to get by on booze and passing out for an hour every other night. Can't run a team on coffee IVs and delirium speeches."
The hint of moonlight shining through the flap crack had Logan's sharp canines flash in a now broader smile. "Didn’t stop you couple of years back when we tried to kill each other at every turn."
Well, yeah, Scott had run into that one headfirst. "I like to think we progressed from there."
For a moment, Logan promptly looked as if he'd slip back outside immediately again at just a hint of that required but maybe not entirely urgent conversation in the air again …
When he saw Scott still slightly clumsily reaching for the covers again, he pulled the tent close from inside with an impatient sigh and got down on his own mattress, unceremoniously pulling Scott into his arms from behind. The ever-present heat of his mutation breathed a far more comfortable warmth into Scott's cells than those dreams earlier. No urgency of another kind, not out here, not when they were on the clock … But Scott thought, they might at least finally get to that once they'd return to the base, now that the silent awkwardness from the first few hours after Logan's arrival was beginning to fade.
"Us, maybe. The world didn’t. Not sure it ever will, Slim."
They'd had that talk before, too, not too long ago, so Scott just answered with a tired shrug. "Me neither. But if I gave up on it before we can tell for certain that it's hopeless, I'd become either Charles or Erik. Not sure either this damn piece of rock or I would go down first when it came to that. Is that what you want me to become?"
"If I did, I wouldn’t be here now, watching your thin ass for your wife until she comes back from her latest ego trip," Logan answered soberly, and Scott thought he should probably hate him a little for saying what he himself hadn’t even let himself think in such clear terms but couldn’t bring himself to.
If they were only holding on to each other for the moment, maybe this was a good time, making sure, that at least wouldn’t go to hell again anytime soon. "Maybe I don’t want you just as a placeholder. Maybe I want you to stick."
"Guys like us don’t do promises, Slim," Logan reminded him softly but pulled him another inch closer instead of pulling away, tree trunk-sized thigh bracketing Scott's hips, that possessive grip from earlier finding his lower stomach, and maybe it wouldn’t take longer than until dawn after all before they'd fuck away the last of the night's gloom. "But I've always been around when you said you needed me. Just get it in your thick skull that sometimes you gotta use your damn words for that. Can't always scent your cold sweat from everywhere, you know."
"I'll try," Scott murmured, his cheeks promptly an embarrassing shade of red not only thanks to the lingering heat of rising want in his cells.
They both knew he probably wouldn’t, just like they knew Logan would be around when it counted anyway.
It wasn’t a lot but that was already more light and stability than the rest of their kind had these days.