Archive of Our Own

When Logan opened the door at quarter past ten on a Tuesday evening, a beer in hand and some ancient-looking sitcom he had never seen before playing in the background, he was immediately aware of two things. 

The man standing at his doorstep who looked like nobody and everybody all at once, holding a meticulously wrapped parcel clumsily in his arms, stunk like a lit match, the familiar scent of sulphur that pricked his nose and burned the back of his throat like the good kind of whisky. And when he spoke, somehow confident and shy at the same time, his gentle cadence was accented with strong, lilting German.

"Good evening," this mask, this blond-haired blue-eyed man with narrow shoulders and a thin waist, long limbs crammed into a bland postal worker's uniform, greeted politely. The hologram flickered at the edges of Logan's perception, intangible and unreal. "I have a package for James Logan Howlett?"

"Oh, yeah?" Logan leaned up against the doorway and crossed his arms over his chest, the neck of the bottle dangling from his fingers. "It's a little late for deliveries. Where did you say you were from, again?"

The briefest flicker of hesitation crossed the delivery man's face, and if Logan hadn't known Kurt so well, he most likely would have missed it. He was starting to learn that despite the many differences between this world and the one he once knew, and despite the many changes he was slowly experiencing, some things would always be the same. The X-Mansion would always be a home to mutants. Mutants would always be considered lesser no matter how many lives the X-Men saved. Logan would always hate wearing that stupid fucking uniform no matter what it began to mean to him. And he would always know Kurt Wagner better than he knew himself, no matter what face he wore, no matter what universe he came from, no matter how long it would take them to learn everything there was to know about each other. So he saw the flicker of hesitation, the briefest beat of uncertainty, despite how quickly Kurt worked to smother it.

"The delivery company," he smiled blandly. There were no blue lips pulled taut over sharp canines. It was a dull, unassuming, human smile. In one hand, he held the parcel wrapped in butcher paper, and in the other hand he held a small electronic tablet with a stylus attached to it by a short length of twine, and he held them both out for Logan. "If you could just sign here-"

"You don't even know if it's for me," Logan pointed out. Kurt hesitated, blue eyes went wide, and glanced down at the parcel. "You could just be giving away somebody else's stuff. That wouldn't make you a very competent delivery guy, would it?"

"Uh, nein- no, no it wouldn't," The German slipped from Kurt's tongue before he quickly corrected it, so quickly that Logan would have missed it if he hadn't been so used to hearing it in the first place. He took a step backwards into the hallway, his knees bending in an unnatural way for a moment before he remembered himself and stood up straighter. "You're right, I apologise for bothering you, I best be on my-"

"Can it, Elf," Logan reached out and snatched the parcel from Kurt's limp grasp. He tore it open without pause and dropped the butcher paper to the floor while Kurt stared on, wide-eyed and stunned. The parcel was a framed photo of the Kurt in front of him and a different Wolverine, grinning for the camera with Wolverine wrapping an arm around Kurt's shoulder and Kurt's tail wrapped thrice around Wolverine's wrist. Logan smiled down at the picture. The frame was new, the stickiness where the price sticker had been removed a tacky blot on the edge, but the actual photo itself seemed old, worn at the edges and smeared with wetness in places and it reeked of abject misery, as if Kurt had worried it between his three fingers while crying over it in the days after his Wolverine's death. Good, Logan thought, he and Kurt were friends in every world. "I've been needing something to decorate this shithole. Are you going to come in or are you just going to stand there all night?"

This facsimile of his best friend blinked at him, stunned. It was hard to catch Kurt off guard, almost as hard as it was to surprise Logan. "I'm- was?"

Stepping aside, Logan nudged the door open a little further. "You're letting the draft in," he said, despite no draft to speak of. "Come in already."

Kurt skidded into the room with a movement that was unbecoming of his fake-human legs, and Logan smiled as he shut the door behind him. This hologram wasn't one that he recognized, and he wondered if Kurt had chosen the form specifically to meet Logan, or if this particular version of his friend was devoid of all the theatrics and had willingly chosen this unremarkable-looking man for him to wear outside of the school. He stood in the middle of Logan's shithole of an apartment with its black mould crawling up the walls and the peeling paint and the sink that rattled loudly whenever Logan used the hot water and mustered a smile. It looked foreign and uncomfortable on his face, and Logan pictured the same expression on blue skin with fanged incisors and pupilless yellow eyes. "Your home is very...quaint."

"Yeah, yeah," Logan drained the rest of his beer and disposed it in the steadily growing pile on the edge of the counter. "You know you can take that thing off in here," he gestured vaguely at Kurt and his blond-haired-blue-eyed-ness. "It's only us in here and it's nothing I haven't seen before."

Glancing away, Kurt shuffled awkwardly in the middle of the room. "I haven't any idea what you mean."

"Kurt," Logan sighed and Kurt straightened up like he had been electrocuted. "I ain't got all day. I'm getting older just waiting for you."

The hologram dropped faster than Logan was expecting, and the bland everyday man faded to reveal the face of the man that he had missed in all his furred, three-fingered glory, his tail swishing quietly against the dirty carpet. "Mein Gott," he breathed, looking at Logan as if he had never seen him before, yellow eyes wide on his face. "It really is you."

Logan shook his head. "Not the you that you remember," he said almost apologetically. "And you're not the you that I remember."

"Ah," Kurt grinned that devilish, fanged grin that promised trouble, and Logan felt a familiar zing of readiness zip through him and disperse through every fibre of his being like morphine from a drip. "But I am me and you are you and so we are still us, ja? My Logan has died, and I can only imagine that your Kurt Wagner has suffered a similar fate, but yet here we stand."

It was such an unequivocally Kurt thing to say that Logan found himself laughing. He remembered the last time he had seen his Kurt, sightlessly staring up at the starless night sky with blood crusted at the corners of his mouth, his stiff body cool in Logan's arms, his tail unmoving where it rested on the grass beneath him, his blood seeping into the knees of Logan's jeans from where he had been kneeling in the slowly spreading pool, and remembered, a lifetime ago, when he had gotten drunk on shitty American beer that made him wince with every swallow and said, "It does not matter what happens to our bodies, mein freund, because our souls will always find each other no matter what form we might take!" Logan had rolled his eyes and smiled as he handed Kurt another beer, letting him lean his full weight against him and sway to the music.  

The Kurt in front of him- the man he didn't really know but had already spent many years with- was different in so many ways from the Kurt that died in his arms. His skin was a lighter shade of blue and was covered in a heavier coat of fur. His tail was spaded and looked sharp at the edges, a weapon in its own right. His teeth were not quite as pointed, and his eyes were more yellow, and his hair was longer, falling across his face in artful swoops. He was clean-faced, not heavily bearded like the Kurt from his old world, and he wasn't as tall, but his limbs were all as long. He had the same three fingers and two toes, and in the darkness caused by the flickering kitchen light, the edges of him seemed to merge into the shadows. In so many ways, he was the man that Logan remembered, right down to the eager way his tail flicked against his legs and his smile pulled wide enough to see the points of his canines, but he had to remind himself, as was typical these days, that he had no idea who this man was even though he wore a skin that he recognized. 

"I like to think so," Logan eventually replied. I hope so, he thought but didn't say, covering up his reluctance by gesturing at the brown butcher paper discarded at the doorway. "What was that all about? I know that you're fond of theatrics but even my Kurt didn't need a gimmick to speak with me."

"Sure he did. I know I needed one to speak to my Logan about how he was sleeping and if he was eating and when something was bothering him that he didn't want to admit," Kurt shrugged, coyly, and Logan huffed a laugh because he knew exactly what he was talking about. "The truth is, mein freund, that I wasn't sure if you wanted to see me and I did not want to make you... vexed with me before we had even gotten a chance to become acquainted. Reauainted. It is all very confusing."

He was hesitant, almost, in a way Logan didn't recognise. There was no Kurt, not in any universe, that should be hesitant, especially not around Logan, who had seen him beaten to all hell with his own blood caked in his fur and crying into his beer in the middle of a crowded bar and praying on the floor of a chappel until his knees ached and his throat went dry and covered in puke after teleporting too many times and collapsing right into his own slowly spreading putrid puddle. All on separate occasions. "Why the fuck wouldn't I want to see you?"

"Ah," Kurt brought a hand to the back of his neck and glanced away. "Colossis informed us that you had been here for quite some time now and had made no attempt to visit the school so I had just assumed that you didn't want anything to do with us. Which I understood, of course. Ororo- did you know an Ororo? Storm?" He suddenly asked, hopeful and curious, and Logan nodded, and his shoulders relaxed slightly. "Well, that's good. She told me to leave you be, that you would come to us when you were ready, but I... I just wanted to see if it was true. If you really were Logan like everyone was saying or if you were just wishful thinking."

"It's really me. Unfortunately," Logan replied. "Not the me you probably wanted but I'm me all the same."

"I had no expectations upon coming here," Kurt promised. This version of him seemed to be just as eager, just as forthright, just as sincere. "I just... well, I wanted to see you, that's all."

There was a time, with another Kurt in another universe, when he never would have asked to spend time with Logan. He would have teleported into his room in the X-Mansion, taken one of his beers from the fridge without asking, and lounged on Logan's bed with his feet up to complain about something or other. Logan found, staring at this person who he had missed, that he wanted to reach that point again, when Logan could cajole Kurt out for a night of drinking in the pub together and Kurt could appear at Logan's side at any moment knowing that he was welcomed. He wanted to know this person, wanted to know his favourite television shows and what classes he taught at the school and where all his worst scars were and what nightmares kept him up at night and where all the places that ached in the cold were. He wanted to know it all so bad it ached. For once in his life, Logan wanted something for himself, something that was within his grasp, something that Kurt was offering him on a silver platter.

Feigning nonchalance, Logan jerked his head towards the kitchen, the rattling fridge and the growing pile of bottles left out for recycling. "You drink beer in this universe or did I just lose my drinking buddy?"

Kurt blinked in surprise, rearing back as he stared at Logan, speechlessly. Then a small, pleased smile spread across his face, slow and sweet like molasses. "Ja," his tail whipped against the back of his legs, the familiar swishing sound making Logan's shoulders unwind from where he had subconsciously bunched them up to his ears. "I will have a beer if you would like some company. The Logan I knew typically preferred to drink in solitude."

Shrugging, Logan moved to the fridge. "I guess that's the same across all universes," he retrieved two cold beers, dripping with condensation, and slick to the touch. Kurt wrapped his long, textured fingers around it with a grateful hum. "But I don't mind switching it up every now and then if the company is good enough."

Twisting off the cap from the bottle, Kurt laughed high and happy, a musical chime that sounded exactly as Logan remembered it, despite never hearing this iteration before. It made a phantom smile tug at the edges of his lips in reply. "How very pragmatic of you," he teased. It was so good to be teased by Kurt again that it nearly took Logan to his knees. "It is good to know that you are just as accommodating as the version of you I am familiar with."

Logan forgot how much of a balm Kurt was to the soul. He had been without him for so long and had lost himself for even longer, alone and hating himself and with nothing but a glass of whisky for company, trying to forget at the bottom of a bottle that he had almost started to overlook just how good and light Kurt made him feel, always making him laugh when he needed it and keeping him company even when he didn't want it and lifting his spirits when he least expected it. He was Logan's first real friend, the only person who had been brave enough and stubborn enough to break through the walls he had built over centuries of anguish and paved the way for the rest of the X-Men to build a roost in his chest. When Kurt had died, with Logan's arms around him, his stricken face the last thing he would ever see before his spirit ascended to join that god he worshipped so much, a part of Logan died with him, the good part, leaving behind nothing but putrid rot that ruined everything he touched. But maybe this was a second chance. Looking at this Kurt, who observed him without fear or hesitation, so genuine in his approach and hopeful right down deep in his bones, Logan realized that maybe he could get back everything that was taken from him, staring with Kurt.

Starting with his best friend. His first friend. Now, maybe, his only friend.

"So," he gestured with his beer at the TV, still playing the crappy sitcom that he couldn't name, though he suspected that Kurt would probably have an answer if he asked him. "You still a fan of Errol Flynn movies or is your vice different here?"

"I would hope that every version of me is a fan of Errol Flynn," Kurt replied, cheeky and satisfied, as he followed Logan over to the couch. "Why are you watching The Golden Girls?"