Archive of Our Own

Laura doesn’t need him, really she doesn’t.

Not this version of him, not the one before. She was a kid looking for a fairytale he could never give her, he was always honest about that. Logan wasn’t her hero, he wasn’t her saviour. He was an old man that was too tired to keep fighting.

And she lost him.

A handful of days does not make a fairytale or a happy ending and when Laura buried him she buried everything she spent long nights in a prison wishing for.

He didn’t live long enough to be a father and there is a part of her that thinks it’s better that way. He always insisted he would never be a good one.

At least this way she’d never find out if he was lying.

She grew up believing that because it was better than imagining anything hopeful.

So, she left Logan in the ground with an arrangement of pebbles and an off-kilter cross. She thinks she left a part of herself there with him, tiny boot prints on muddy ground, tears splashing onto stones, a child-like innocence she wasn’t sure she was capable of.

Every ounce of her heart that had seen him as her kin.

Laura started running in that moment and she realises now she never stopped.

She travels, at first with the other kids, bouncing from city to city. Place to place. They are never really safe and sooner rather than later Laura’s grief is too great, her loss too endless and she leaves them. It’s a small mercy, she thinks, leaving them before they decide to leave first. They will, she knows, everyone will split up and go to ground, try to blend in, try to survive.

If Logan taught her anything, it’s that she has a better chance on her own.

She ignores the fact it was easier to leave those kids, the family she grew up with, than it was to leave a mound of dirt that used to be a violent, tired man.

Laura shifts from state to state, too numb to stop, too scared to breathe.

She makes it a pattern, five days then move. Five days then move. Five days then move.

She picks the places at random, whichever bus or train is leaving first. She sees more of the United States then she ever thought she would but she isn’t caught in the wonder of it. It’s a blur of places, motels and bus stations.

She can recall everywhere she’s been, but cannot recall anything specific about any of them.

She wonders, more than once, if Logan had a favourite. She never got to ask him.

Laura mourns him longer than she knew him, a tragedy that has her crying herself to sleep on benches and in doorways. Later, she repeats the pattern in motel rooms that aren’t hers and empty homes that stand waiting for their owners to return from holiday.

Time passes much too fast and not fast enough.

Her grief is a constant thing in her chest, never easing or slowly or letting her breathe for even a moment. In truth, she isn’t sure Logan is worth all of this pain. They shared some DNA and an Adamantium skeleton and a temper. Yet, the crater of hurt inside her makes her numb and cold and too lonely to speak.

She becomes more ghost then girl, a shadow in the dark, a bullet that has backfired in the chamber of a gun.

She gets older and people start hunting her, she doesn’t know it’s the TVA yet but she knows what it feels like to be the prey as much as the predator and she holds tight to the promise Logan asked of her.

Not to be what they made her.

So, she doesn’t fight, she runs.

She travels across countries, offering odd jobs in exchange for a one way ticket in cargo holds and container bays.

She spends a Christmas in London, a summer in Shanghai, a particularly stormy few weeks in a harbour in Italy. She doesn’t speak the language in many places she visits and she prefers it, likes the idea of being as separate from the people on the street as she feels inside.

Laura could live centuries like this, she knows, wandering through time and cities and ruins. She could watch wars wage and empires crumble and not do a damn thing to save any of it. She wonders if that’s how Logan survived, if she’s treading streets he once walked, maybe hundreds of years ago.

Her grief is a constant and persistent thing in her chest, the marrow of her bones, the heat of her blood. It greets her in the morning with the sound of his voice, it lingers at her back when she steals food and car keys and cash as a reminder of how disappointed he would be. Her grief is her companion when she wakes in the middle of the night with the scent of his blood in her nose and the burn of tears in her eyes.

Laura lives with her grief because she has long since learnt she can run from everything but not that.

She’s given it a really good go though.

She gives false names, fake backgrounds. She is Lauren and Clara and Abigail. She is the daughter of a professor, the daughter of a soldier, the daughter of a conman.

Laura is hundreds of people but never herself.

She knows that isn’t what Logan meant when he said not to be what they made her but she can’t be herself. Isn’t sure what that looks like. She is too young to know, has seen too much to want any of it.

Perhaps this is why Logan kept an Adamantium bullet in his jacket pocket.

She is exhausted.

She visits Australia and the heat makes her queasy. She spends a New Year in Japan and a winter in Paris. Laura buys a Wolverine comic from every place she visits, sometimes in languages she can’t read. Logan would hate them, she knows, would tell her it was all bullshit.

Laura studies them like they will unlock the secrets of who she is, where she came from, where she is going.

Years pass, her grief remains. It’s a sad thing, the specter she has become in the wake of him. There are days when Laura thinks meeting him was the worst thing to ever happen to her, when she screams into a pillow in the small hours of the morning because her loss is bursting out of her chest, a hurricane of his name and his anger and her rage. She wouldn’t know any different if she hadn’t met him, if he wasn’t hers, if she wasn’t his.

But there are other days when she doesn’t move a muscle because she is using all her willpower to remember the lines of his face, the grey in his hair, the scars riddling his skin. It all fades, a little more every year and Laura hates him for that.

She hates herself more.

She stops by a market in Sweden one frosty morning, making her way through the city like a spirit floating through the world. She manages to steal a roll of bread from the bakery stall, the dough still warm from the oven as she weaves in and out of people. She stops suddenly, drawing attention to herself in a way she’s learnt not to do anymore. People frown and weave around her, suspicious and curious. Laura ignores them all.

It’s a shirt, plaid and blue and cotton. She’s never seen Logan wear anything like it but she can’t seem to make her feet move away. It’s the type of thing he would wear, she knows, in another life where he isn’t dead and she isn’t lost.

She houses so much grief in her bones it rattles her frame in sparks of anger, in waves of pain and in that moment it roars in her chest like a wild thing.

The idea of another life, one where he raised her and she grew up in a house. Maybe a cabin in the woods or a hut at the foot of a mountain. A life where he isn’t tired and she isn’t created in a lab.

Her grief gets the best of her sometimes, even after all these years.

Laura steals the shirt, impulsive and stupid and her heart is pounding as she runs from the vendor chasing her. She ducks into an alley and melts into shadow.

Later, she’ll get on a boat for somewhere new, paying stolen money to a half-blind fisherman that doesn’t even care to ask her name. She slips the shirt on under her jacket, the tail ends hanging down to her mid-thigh as it swallows her.

Her heart stutters, Laura pretends she doesn’t notice.

The TVA follow her across the world and back again, they almost catch her in India. She kills one of them in Spain after they ambush her in an alley. She doesn’t mean to, but she isn’t about to let them take her either. She spent a childhood in a cage and she isn’t going back to one. Her claws unsheathe before she realises it, instinct driving her to rage and survival.

His friend is scared, the scent of his fear sour and ripe. Laura feels the bile rise in her throat as she pins him to the wall, claws grazing his neck as his pulse jumps. His eyes are on the friend bleeding out at her feet. It’s not the first time she’s stood in blood, it’s the first time she’s glad Logan isn’t alive to see it.

“Who are you? Why are you hunting me?” It comes out as a deadly growl.

“I’m correcting the timeline.” His words are choked and Laura sees a trail of red where her claws have nicked his skin.

She doesn’t understand what that means and lets out a curse in Spanish, pressing a little deeper.

“When he died everything changed, became unstable.” He tells her and Laura doesn’t need to hear the name to know who he is talking about, “You don’t belong here.”

She bears her teeth, a wild and wicked thing, “So you want to put me in a cage?”

It’s her biggest fear, the fact Logan died for nothing, the idea of seeing nothing but four walls and fake promises of safety.

“No,” Another thick swallow that causes him more pain than it was worth, “We need to remove you from the timeline. We need to protect our world.”

He talks in too many riddles but Laura understands enough at the word remove. She won’t give him that chance.

She presses her claws against his chest, feels soft flesh under metal and knows he’ll die before he can draw breath.

He seems to know that too.

“Please, don’t.” He pants, “The world is unstable, it’s at risk for collapse.”

As if that will save him, as if Laura cares about the rest of the world. Let it burn, she thinks, let it collapse.

“I already lost him.” She whispers gently, “I have nothing left to lose.”

The slightest pressure and she’s sliding metal through skin like a knife through butter.

She escapes the alley with her wounds already healing, the blood on her knuckles remains.

She ambles back to her stolen motel, sneaking in through the back and then climbing through the window she left unlatched. Laura catches sight of herself in the mirror by the bed, blood coating her hands, adding an unnatural blush to her right cheek and a stain on her jeans. She remembers the blood coating Logan’s skin and feels suddenly sick.

Don’t be what they made you.

What if she doesn’t have a choice.

Laura strips down and runs herself a lukewarm bath before climbing in, the water turning pink in minutes. She sits huddled with her knees up to her chest, arms wrapped tightly around them and tries to breathe. Her chest makes a ragged sound, like a growl or a warning.

For once, her eyes stay dry.

She keeps running after that, finding her way to Scotland and walking through cobbled streets in misty mornings and grey days. Scotland is full of history and memory and heritage, Laura doesn’t even know where her mother’s DNA came from.

She finds a cemetery, one of the many hidden in Edinburgh’s streets and alleyways and spends an evening reading headstones and names. She wonders if anyone has found Logan’s grave, if anyone will wonder who he was or why it’s there. Her legs give out suddenly, a hum in her bones from the hours she’s been walking, the years she’s been running.

Laura doesn’t try to get back up, she wonders if she lies down and stays still for long enough whether the ghosts will think her one of them and guide her somewhere else. Somewhere she isn’t afraid or alone or rageful.

Morning comes, the ghosts don’t.

Laura keeps moving.

She tries alcohol for the first time in Morocco, stealing a bottle of whiskey from a bar with a sloppy bartender. She drinks as she walks, holding the neck of the bottle with one hand and using the other to help steer her through the streets when her legs feel like jelly and her vision blurs. She keeps drinking, the fire in her gut preferable to the ache in her soul.

The bottle is gone before the sun comes up and Laura wakes up without any idea of how she made it back to the home she broke into the previous night.

The pain in her head is fierce and unrelenting but it tunes out the numbness inside her and the voice in her head that sounds like Logan, gruff and angry.

She makes it three minutes before she is retching into the toilet in the bathroom, her whole body wracking with shakes and covered in sweat. Her claws come out at her panic, at her fear, and she grips the bowl, hearing the metal clink against the porcelain as she dry heaves the nonexistent contents of her stomach.

Laura doesn’t try alcohol again after that.

She builds a wall and shoves her grief behind it like a dam against water. It helps, she feels numb, empty, spent but she stops trying to remember his face and the way he was always there to save her, even when he refused to acknowledge who she was to him.

She is still more ghost than girl but for a different reason entirely.

They take her in Prague, more TVA agents than before, she feels the sand burning into her cheek and the press of a gun against her back and then she is gone. It’s more peaceful then she thought it would be.

Her last thought is of Logan, of the peace on his face when he looked at her as his life bled out of him.

So, she thinks, this is what it feels like.

She wakes in the void, Remy standing over her and an old comic curled up in her back pocket. Weather-worn and ripped from rough treatment. Laura glares at him, Remy smiles.

She doesn’t fight, she assimilates.

Remy is kind and she sort of hates him for it, his words a rush that she barely understands. Laura hasn’t spoken in a long time, she isn’t sure what to say so she remains silent. She has questions, she just isn’t sure she’ll like the answers.

She meets the others over time, a rag-tag group of rejects, cleansed from timelines like pruning weeds in a prized garden.

Laura tries to keep her rage buried, tries to find a way forward. She spars with Elektra, learns how to fight, to dodge, to use her mutation in a different way. She shares horror stories with Blade, they count sins and injustices and promises of vengeance. Remy and Johnny try to make her laugh, make her feel included but she resists.

She isn’t looking for a family, she’s looking for a fucking break.

Laura barely sleeps in the Void, the concept of time is nonexistent and being with other people is exhausting after years of being alone.

She leaves them for days at a time, exploring the parameters of her new cage, mapping the layout and the threats like a captain preparing for battle.

This isn’t a life, she knows, and she isn’t planning to stay here despite what the others say.

There is always a way, Logan taught her that too.

If Laura is being honest with herself, she was on the verge of giving up. Her edges fraying with hopelessness and blurred time and endless sand. It's what everyone wants, her to stop fighting, to settle, to just accept it.

Then Johnny gets intel from one of his contacts about a Deadpool and a Wolverine and Laura feels her grief smash down the wall she built like a feral, physical thing.

He isn’t hers, she knows, but she cannot ignore the way her heart drops into her stomach and anxiety fills her chest.

She needs to see for herself.

Johnny goes to investigate, to gather more intel and when he doesn't come back, Laura is already on her way to track them down.

It shouldn’t be her, that’s what the others tell her. It should be someone without personal ties.

Laura ignores them all.

It has to be her.

There is no other option.

When she sees him for the first time, passed out in the back of the Honda next to a Deadpool that’s been strapped down within an inch of his life, Laura wants to run. She can feel the panic in her heart, the blood pumping in her veins.

He looks so much younger yet still so like him. Battle weary and blood stained, finding more peace in sleep than he has ever found in his waking hours.

A part of her wants to shake him awake, wants to see the colour of his eyes and hear the gruffness of his voice, compare it to the years she spent trying to commit it to memory. To keep the ghost of him with her through hell and continents and grief.

But Laura is a coward and it takes all her effort not to run that she doesn’t have the will to wake him. She drives the Honda back to base instead, her mind flashing images for a younger her and an older him. The fear in her chest as she drove a stolen truck to a vet because she was scared he was dead.

He wasn’t, not yet and more importantly, he isn’t now either.

The first time she sees him, really sees him, she can’t find the words or the way to speak them. She stares at him with a wealth of memories, of questions, of pain. Logan looks at her like she’s a riddle he has no interest in solving.

The indifference cuts through her to the bone, like his claws sliding into her skin. Except there is no blood, just the acute feeling of abandonment and the orchestra of her hope dying in her stomach like the last soldier on the battlefield.

Laura has lived with her grief for a long time but somehow this is worse.

And she wants to tell him, she wants to yell and scream and plead with him to see her, to know her, to want to know her even though it’s an unfair request. He isn’t her Logan, she can’t make these demands of him.

So she doesn’t. She swallows them down like swallowing broken glass and tells him it’s okay that he doesn’t want to join them, that he’s the wrong guy. He lost everyone he ever cared about and Laura bites down on her tongue to stop her telling him she understands. God, does she understand.

But she sees him, because he is still Logan even if he isn’t hers and there are some things about Logan that are universal facts. Some things that transcend universes.

She knew he’d come, knew he wouldn’t leave them to fight alone. She knew he’d get that look when he saw her claws for the first time. So like his that he can’t deny it. She watches the knowledge drown him and doesn’t meet his eyes.

She doesn’t have the courage for it.

It seems, neither does he.

Laura isn’t expecting him to think about her once he makes his way back, isn’t expecting anything more than the carved out hollow of her soul and the grief that stays longer than any Logan ever will.

She isn’t expecting him to save her.

But he does. This Logan that is so unexpected, so different to the Logan before and yet so similar they seem to blur into one person before her eyes.

Logan gives her a home, a place with him and Wade and Althea but he doesn’t give her his name. He doesn’t claim her as his daughter.

He buys the type of cereal he notices she likes but doesn’t try to comfort her about the things she’s seen or lost or done.

Laura floats around him like a ghost, never taking up too much space or talking too loud. She doesn’t want to disturb the tentative thing that’s keeping them together like a fracture in glass.

She thinks she scares him, another similarity he shares with the other Logan. Neither one knew how to deal with a daughter. Neither one knew how to cross the void between them.

But he doesn’t deny her either, not like before.

Maybe she needs to wait him out, maybe this process is as slow as her healing grief.

But Laura has never been that lucky.

She wakes one night to voices, Logan’s angry and insistent. Wade’s baffled and pushing. It takes her another few moments to realise they are talking about her.

“She’s your daughter.” Wade’s voice carries through the gap from the kitchen to Laura’s place on the couch which has become a bed, “Time to heal from the trauma, buddy. Wholesome family time.”

Logan’s voice is steel, “I can’t do this. I’m not good for her. I shouldn’t have brought her here.”

“Dude, this is the happy ending portion of the programme. You step up, she buys you a mug with ‘World’s grumpiest dad’ on it. Everyone’s a winner.”

Her heart is pounding as Logan answers, “I’ll disappoint her. I always do. She looks at me like…” Laura imagines him shaking his head, changing course, “She’s better off without me, the sooner she realises that the better.”

She is awake for the rest of the night, turning the words over in her head. Because he’s right, isn’t he? What was she expecting, a Logan that wants her? That isn’t afraid to take the leap towards family?

She doesn’t need him, she reminds herself, not this version, not the one before.

She’s out of the apartment before anyone else wakes up, a rucksack over her back and an extra ounce of grief settling on her shoulders.

Laura isn’t going to stay where she isn’t wanted, isn’t going to force Logan into a role he doesn’t want.

Besides, she’s always been good at running.

She leaves without a word or a plan or the will to find one. She is no longer a little girl, leaving parts of herself behind at a graveyard next to the hope of almost, nearly, possibly and she knows this Logan isn’t the same. He saved her but he didn’t died for her, he doesn’t care about her.

If Laura is being honest with herself, she isn’t sure the other Logan cared about her either. Isn’t sure how much she invented in her grief, imagined in her mind or remembered for their few measly days together.

She steals a car from the next street over, an ugly blue thing that looks older than her and she is out of the city limits before the sun is up.

She heads north, needing to put distance between her and the tentative, fragile things she is leaving behind. She stops for gas, for food and to sleep, curled up in the back seat where she wonders if Logan was worried she left or simply relieved.

Maybe he’ll think she couldn’t do it, pretend he doesn’t look like the man she came to love.

Maybe he’ll see it as a small mercy.

Laura chases the thought away by climbing back into the driver’s seat, pushing the beat-up old car further and further away from the things she left behind.

She makes it to Canada, signs blurring together and the car whinging in protest.

It’s scary how easy it is, slipping back into her old patterns, her old habits. Her ways of survival. She leaves the car on the side of a road and heads into the small town she’s stumbled upon by foot. She has nothing but a backpack to her name and Laura hates how that simple fact alters her entire thought process.

She stops dealing in hope and starts bartering with practical. She needs a place to stay, money if she wants to rely on something other than stealing. She wants to let go of the thought that Logan will know she is gone by now.

Laura finds a motel, pay by the hour type with faded wallpaper from smoking and rusty windows that rattle but she manages to find the end one unlocked and unoccupied and thinks that’s as good as she’s going to get for now.

She spends days locked up in that room, the bedsheets a violent pastel pink and orange which clash horribly with the blue carpet that doesn’t hide the stains as well as the owner thinks it does.

It doesn't matter, she’s been in worse places.

There is an ache in her chest, different to the grief of before. This is more acute, like a slowly bleeding stab wound to her gut. Fatal, eventually, but she can walk around with it for days if she needs to.

It was the right thing to do, she tells herself every night before a fitful sleep, he didn’t want the responsibility for her and she doesn’t need him either. He got her out of that hellhole so maybe they owe nothing more to each other.

Maybe that’s all they are in this universe.

She swallows the thought bitterly but she swallows it nonetheless.

Laura steals what she needs, she has to. Food isn’t cheap and it feels better than stealing a wallet. That’s the logic she tells herself anyway.

Canada rains at lot at this time of year, Laura didn’t realise that. It starts suddenly and sharply, the kind of rain that seeps into your bones like a death rattle.

She’s been there for roughly two weeks when she gets caught in a downpour so vicious she can barely see two inches in front of her face. There’s a part of her that wants to stay in it, letting it soak her and wash her away until she is nothing but rainwater and regret.

There is another part of her that is freezing and when her teeth start to chatter she knows she has to move.

She stumbles into the local bar for the first time since she’s been here like a drowned rat, hair clinging to her face, dripping water on the floor as her boots squelch with every step.

Every eye in the room turns to her.

So much for being more ghost that girl.

“Sam!” A bartender shouts through to the back, “Bring some towels, would ya? Girl is damn near bringing a lake in with her.”

Laura is frozen to the spot, unsure how to proceed. She isn’t used to attention, doesn’t like it much. A towel is thrown in her direction and she catches it without a blink offering a nod as she sets up wringing out her hair and wiping water from her face.

She doesn’t take a step further.

The guys at the back booth fix their gazes on her, a look in their eyes that Laura knows too well. Dangerous, predatory, impulsive.

The ringleader, grizzled and dark haired climbs out of the booth first and makes his way over to her with heavy steps. He sways as he walks and Laura knows he’s already half-drunk and more than a little reckless. His buddies follow, two reedy men in baseball caps, a layer of dirt under their fingernails.

Laura has travelled enough to recognise this story. The dingy bar, the men using drink to made them bolder and more stupid. Her, the pretty girl who is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What they don’t know of course is Laura isn’t that girl, never has been and she isn’t afraid of them. She is afraid of what she’ll do to them.

The ringleader stops inches in front of her, his lips curving into a smile, “Come join us for a drink?” He asks with stale breath, “Dry out for a bit.”

Laura does not smile, “No.” She replies with gritted teeth, then as an afterthought, “Thank you.”

He does that thing all men do when they hear a no when they want to hear a yes. He laughs, as if she told as joke, as if she’s the funniest thing he’s ever seen.

As if her answer isn’t enough, isn’t real, isn’t valid.

Laura imagines six ways in which she could gut him.

“Come on, doll. You’re cold and wet with nowhere else to be.” He insists, “We can solve all of those problems.”

There’s something in his tone of voice, the way the words warp in his mouth. Dangerous, nice on the edge of pushy.

He reaches out a hand as if to touch her. Laura freezes and realises there is only one outcome here, she kills them or she lets them follow her outside and beat her black and blue to prove a point. She is many things but a coward isn’t one and she knows the minute the first strike meets her skin she’ll leave a trail of blood behind her on the way out of town.

She takes a step back, then another, needing to flee before they attack and she ends up soaked in their blood. Her back hits something solid and Laura tenses, waiting for the strike.

Then she hears it, the sound of metal unsheathing from skin. She looks down at her own hands to see her claws still buried. She swallows thickly, inhaling the cedar and pine scent she knows lingers with every version of him.

“You have five seconds to leave my kid alone before I make you.” His voice is gruff and deadly and Laura can’t help the feeling of safety settle over her at the sound of it.

Logan.

She doesn’t stop to consider how he ended up in Canada or how he found her. He came. For her. Laura doesn’t want to think about the fact it leaves a heavy weight in her chest like her lungs are filling up with water.

Logan steps out from behind her, moving in front of her until Laura is hidden from view by a large expanse of back wearing a leather jacket.

Suddenly, impossibly, she feels nine years old again watching him join a fight to her safety and survival.

She can’t help the instinct that has her reaching up to fist a hand in the back of his jacket like a warning.

Not again, she thinks, she can’t let him do this for her again.

And thankfully, she doesn’t need to.

The guys don’t seem to think it wise to mess with Logan and Laura can imagine the scowl of a threat on his face that would agree with them. She watches them back away, first slowly and then in a hurry that has them tripping over themselves to get to the back door and out into the parking lot.

Laura smiles a little at their retreat.

Logan’s shoulders are tense as he slides his claws back and she quickly releases her hold on his jacket so he can turn to face her.

When he does it’s like a hole opens up in her chest, a gaping wound that starts to fester. His eyes are hard but Laura sees the worry there, the anger, the pain. She shrinks a little, the relief from before fading as she opens her mouth to try and form a sound.

“Thank you.” She whispers, her eyes dropping down to the floor in shame.

He’s here, he tracked her down. He came after her, all the way to Canada and Laura doesn’t know what to do with that information. She can’t begin to process it. She feels like she is driving through water and is only just realising how deep it is, how perilous.

“Outside.” Logan grunts at her, “Now.”

He moves around her with clenched fists and a furrowed brow and Laura wants to apologise, to explain, to try and cleave out the pieces of herself to show him how they arrived at this moment. Why she had to run.

She does none of that though, instead following him out into the rain like a walk to the gallows.

Logan rounds the corner and ducks under an awing attached to the bar to keep the rain off them while Laura crossed her arms over her chest and waits.

He doesn’t speak, as if he isn’t sure what to say.

She hates the silence.

“You didn’t need to come after me.” She tells him eventually, “I’m fine.”

Logan scoffs, “You left in the middle of the night without a word, stole a damn car and you’re fine?”

The worry crosses his face again, Laura can see the dark circles under his eyes and knows without a doubt he didn’t stop for a single second to find her.

“You don’t own me anything, okay?” She tells him, “You didn’t need to come look for me.”

He stops then, frown deepening as the rain pounds the pavement around their shelter.

“You really thought I wouldn’t?” Logan asks softer than before, “That I wouldn’t care? Fuck kid, who did a number on you?”

Laura doesn’t think she should tell him the answer so she bites her tongue.

“You called me that.” She says instead, “In the bar.”

Logan nods, “Well, it’s true isn’t it? Same DNA.”

She wants to laugh or sob into his chest, she isn’t sure which, “Logan, I heard you talking to Wade. I know you didn’t sign up for this. It’s okay.”

The realisation hits him like a slap in the face, his head tilting skyward slightly. She can practically hear the self-loathing creeping in.

She isn’t sure how to comfort him, isn’t sure she’s that good of a person when she’s hurting too.

“Fuck.” He utters, wiping a hand over his face, “I didn’t… sit down, okay?”

He motions to a bench against the wall and Laura takes a sit on the very edge, as if she is getting ready to bolt. She wants to tell him he doesn’t need to do this, they can skip this conversation and save them both a world of hurt.

Something stops her, a small fragile thing in her chest.

“I was scared. I am scared.” He admits, not looking at her but a spot over her shoulder when he crouches down to her level, “I never… you weren’t meant to hear that. I never wanted you to hear that.”

“Why not?” Laura burst out, the anger bleeding into her tone, “It’s how you feel. You never asked for that. Fine. I don’t need you, I didn’t need him. So, go. Go back to your life and forget about me.”

“Laura, I’m not…”

“Go!” She insists, her voice breaking a little at the word.

Logan watches her like she is a feral thing, a hurricane at the peak of destruction, a bomb about to explode.

Laura doesn’t watch him, she simply waits for him to leave.

Then she feels the bench sink down lower, a groan of wood as it settles under Logan’s weight. She feels the heat of him, despite the small gap between them.

“You’re angry. You’re allowed to be. I was a fucking coward, okay? I know it, Wade and Althea know it and now you know it too.” He tells her softly, a small sigh escaping him before he pushes ahead, “But I am going to sit here with you for as long as it takes. An hour, a day, a week. You’ve been alone most of your life, Laura. I’m not walking away, I refuse to be another thing you have to mourn.”

The words are a physical ache in her chest, a stutter in her heart and a chill to her soul. How much had Logan worked out about her despite her never saying. How much did he recognise because he was wrestling with those same things.

Perhaps she is more of a coward than he will ever be.

Perhaps, survivors are never good at trust.

“I didn’t want to force you to stay.” She admits, “I didn’t want you to think I was some sort of responsibility.”

“I don’t.” He replies, “I think you’re my kid and you clearly still need some guidance because if I was five minutes later I would have walked in on a bloodbath. I kind of wish I had been after meeting those assholes.”

She offers him a watery smile, meeting his gaze for the first time since he joined her on the bench, “They started it.”

“Guys like that always do.” He tells her, leaning back against the bench to stretch his legs out in front of him, “Look, I have no idea how to do this. I’ll probably say the wrong thing, fuck it up somehow and then have to grovel an apology. That’s what you’re signing up for. I’m not him.”

Laura nods, “He wouldn't have been that good at it either at first.”

“The thought of you needing me, it knocked the wind right out of me, okay? Because the people that needed me in my universe ended up dead.” The breath he lets out rattles his chest, “And the thought of anything like that happening to you? I can’t…”

“I get it.” She cuts him off, “I lived through it. I shouldn’t have left like that. I thought it would be easier but it wasn’t. I’ve regretted it since I left.”

“Can you just leave a note next time?” Logan asks, “So I don’t get gray hair?”

She laughs, “You’ll look good with a little gray.”

Logan grunts and Laura thinks about an older him, she thinks about watching this version of him get older. Gray in his hair and beard, laughter lines around his eyes. She thinks she would like to see it, a version of him that had the peace to get older when it doesn’t cost him his life.

“What I’m trying to say,” Logan presses, “Is I’m in, if you are?”

So unexpected, this conversation, this man, this universe.

She leans back in her seat, her shoulder brushing up against his as she settles back, “I’m in.”

It’s sudden and unexpected when Logan pulls her into his side, arm tugging her shoulders so she collides into him. Laura is struck by the hug, the ease of it, of him.

“You came all the way to Canada to get me?” She asks, sinking into his warmth a little more.

“I’ve have gone all the way to the end of the universe for you.” Logan tells her like it’s nothing, like it’s not her whole heart in his hands, “Besides, I’m Canadian. This is hardly the worst place you could have ended up.”

She smiles a little then, leaning her head against his shoulder, feeling Logan lean his cheek against the crown of her head.

Simple, effortless, terrifying.

“Thank you for coming.”

Logan squeezes her, “Thank you for letting me in.”

They stay like that for a while, Logan’s heat seeping into her despite the damp clothes and Laura’s heart pumping a steady rhythm. He came to get her. He’s staying. He’s in.

“You know,” she muses softly, “Wade is going to want some epic retelling when we get back.”

He pauses and she knows he’s thinking about it as well, “Maybe we don’t rush to get back.” He replies, “Canada is beautiful, we could take the scenic route, stop off a few places along the way.”

She slips an arm up, fingers curling into his jacket. Peace, she thinks, that’s what this is. A chance to get to know him better, a chance for him to know her, a road trip that won’t end in his blood and her grief.

Laura likes the sound of that.