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Logan remembers the day he woke up with metal claws. Out of all the years he’d lived, it remains among one of the most vivid. The transition had almost felt like blinking.
He remembers war, one of many— remembers fighting alongside Victor in a country far from home.
And then he’d woken up— blinked back into existence on some island in Pennsylvania. There’d been no Victor there, no war, no memories as to how he’d gotten there, just flaming debris and a man named Remy who’d told him the year when Logan demanded it— looking just as confused as him.
He felt weighed down by his own skeleton, every footstep heavy, gravity crushing. It’d taken time to relearn how to be human again, for his mind to adapt to what his body had already accustomed itself to, and to accustom himself to the empty void of the last however many years.
He made due, like he always had. Though there’d been no sign of Victor over the course of the next twenty years. And Logan had been left to wonder, at times, if death had finally dug its claws into him, if the reason Logan couldn’t remember what’d happened was because it’d tried to do the same to him. It never explained the metal claws though— never explained the shine of silver in wounds deep enough to show bone.
It’s why, despite everything, he’d ended up staying at Xavier’s school. Because maybe they could find the missing years that Logan had spent the last two decades searching for. And they had, in a way— they’d dug up the paperwork Stryker had on him, though admittedly there hadn’t been much. It didn’t take much though, to understand they’d used him as a lab rat— that they’d tried to make him a weapon. He and Victor had been smart enough to lie, at least. Given most of their personal details were made up— the same information they’d used to enroll for the last war.
Still, Logan didn’t think he could trust any kind of government body again after he’d gotten ahold of those papers, not that he’d had much trust in them before. He knew propaganda when he saw it and some part of Logan knew that any government worth their salt would’ve been experimenting on people like them long before the word ‘mutant’ had been popularized— long before their existence had been publicized. He’d buried the idea of it of course. Distanced himself from it alongside everything else about the world that he didn’t like and couldn’t fix. Because it was easier to ignore, to forget.
Logan stuffs his hands in his pockets, leaning back against Xavier’s desk as the others ramble about the morality of a drug able to ‘cure’ mutations. Logan didn’t think morality had anything to do with it. He’d lived long enough to know that some mutations did more harm to their hosts than others— long enough to know that regular people could do more harm than any mutation if they caught wind of someone’s otherness. Hell, half the kids in Xavier’s school could attest to it too.
When you’d lived as long as Logan had, met the people he’d met, lost the people he’d lost, when you’d watched everyone you’d ever loved grow old or die without you— a ‘cure’ became far more than a simple temptation. It was a way out. A way forward.
But he knew how shit like this worked.
“For all we know, the government helped cook this up,” Logan grunts, pushing away from the desk to better join the conversation.
“I can assure you the government had nothing to do with it,” Hank protests. It’s Logan’s first time meeting the guy, very furry, very blue, very good at pissing Logan off.
Logan scoffs. “Well, I’ve heard that before.”
Hank straightens, bodily turning towards Logan from his spot on the couch. Logan can tell from that move alone that the mutant’s about to say something that’ll piss him off even more. “My boy,” he starts sternly, like a professor chiding an unruly student, “I have been fighting for mutant rights since before you had claws.”
Logan chuckles, a breathy, sardonic thing. He shakes his head, looking at Charles with something akin to amused disbelief. “Did he just call me ‘boy’?” He turns back to Hank, a gleam in his eye. “Here I thought you knew everything about me.” Logan’s grin is biting, but it’s not long before his smile slips into a sneer. “Trust me, bub. I know government bullshit when I see it. You think they’d tell you if they found a ‘cure’? Run it by the Secretary of Mutant affairs first?” he spits. “You’re a show dog,” Logan snarls, stepping forward. “If you think for a second that the government stopped experimentin’ on mutants just cause they put you on tv then you’re even more of a fool that I thought.”
“Logan,” Charles says firmly, reaching a hand out to stop him, “That’s enough.”
Logan sneers, turning back towards the desk, glaring out the window. “Boy,” he mutters like a curse under his breath.
There’s a palpable silence in the room that follows, tension thick enough to carve with his claws. He flexes his hand, watching the muscles ripple beneath his skin.
“Logan is much older than he may seem, Henry,” Charles says, attempting to ease the atmosphere. “Older than either of us by far.” When Logan glances back there’s a hint of a smile on the professor’s lips, something meant to sooth.
Logan only scoffs, looking away.
Logan had lived a very long time, longer than he’d perhaps ever wanted. It’d been somewhat bearable beside Victor, his brother, someone who had lived that same, long life. The world had changed in ways they wouldn’t have been able to comprehend a hundred and seventy years ago. But people? They never changed as much as they liked to think they had. Their intolerance for those labeled ‘other’ had only ever changed targets. Even now, that’s likely where the idea for this supposed cure had come from— though he supposed it was a step up from burning supposed ‘witchbloods’ in city courtyards.
Behind him the doors of the office are thrown open. He turns at the intrusion to find Rogue, her wide, desperate eyes framed by the snow-white bangs Magneto had left her with. “Is it true?” she asks, desperate, hopeful.
A terrible combination, in Logan’s opinion.
“Did they really find a cure?”
Charles turns his chair to face her, expression thick with sympathy. “That is what they are claiming.”
Hank rises from his seat, eyes flickering to Logan. “We were only just made aware of the drug in question, we cannot say yet whether it’s truly safe or not.”
“But they announced it,” Rogue says, half pleading, looking between the four of them. “They wouldn’t announce it if it didn’t work.”
Logan doesn’t think the others do a very good job of talking her down. Not that he thinks he would’ve done any better. Wasn’t his place either.
She takes on a crestfallen look when Ororo explains it’s not a good idea, not safe, that she’s perfect the way she is— Logan wants to think he understands the expression on Rogue’s face best out of anyone. He couldn’t begin to count the low points he’d hit— the amount of times he would’ve jumped at this kind of chance, government or no.
Her face twists with barely constrained misery.
She turns abruptly from Ororo, barreling into Logan’s chest, gloved hands clinging to the front of his shirt. He returns the gesture stiltedly before sinking into it, chin settling carefully on her hair. He can feel her tears, silent as they are, wetting his shirt.
Logan holds her a little tighter, meeting Charles’ gaze over her head. To his left he can feel Hank’s stare, only casting a narrow eyed glare the man’s way.
The first war Logan ever fought in was America’s civil war. He was twenty-nine at the time and until that point he’d only been shot once before, his mutation pushing out the musket ball with a sickening sort of display. It was the only reason Victor had suggested such mercenary work— because Logan’s near instant recovery had proven bullets couldn’t kill them anymore than the steel of a blade could.
Logan hadn’t been sure at that time whether getting stabbed hurt more. But there, running forward amidst the musket fire, he’d understood that the minié ball shattering the rib in his chest hurt far more than anything else he’d experienced up until then. He’d cursed Victor, only for a moment, for having convinced him that the work would be easy enough money.
Victor hadn’t waited for him when he’d been thrown back into the mud from the force of the blow, so Logan had pushed himself back up despite the gawking of the men behind him, despite the terribly excruciating pain. He’d bared his teeth like an animal, and charged forward after him.
He was still young then. Being immortal had still felt like a gift— something to wear with pride and vigor.
At eighty-five, the first world war had already half through when the U.S. joined. Victor had seen it as another opportunity for the both of them. And Logan, of course, had gone with him.
It was their first time overseas, and bloodier than any war they’d fought before. The weapons deadlier, the tactics meaner.
But it was there, amongst the mud and dying soldiers that he’d met another mutant for the first time. A woman, working the infirmary tents with a steely sort of resolve that commanded the respect of all— Logan included. He won’t say he fell in love at first sight— eighty-five was too old for that, he felt— but it was a damn near close thing.
He’ll admit, their first interaction hadn’t gone so well. But he remembers catching her at the next meal time where he’d succeeded in making her smile before she’d run him off with a: “Take a bath, Howlett. Unless your plan is to drive off our enemies with ‘ur stink alone.”
He’d met the jab with a grin. “Might save ya some patients if it works.”
She’d been 37, American, 3 years widowed with a son old enough to enlist but riddled with enough asthma to prevent him from doing so. She’d told Logan on their fourth meeting that he was going to school in Boston to be a doctor.
Luck saw them in the same encampment for the next long, bloody month. They were kept busy. But their meetings, though infrequent and short-lived, had felt more than enough to keep Logan fighting.
Her name was Anna. Logan thought he could’ve imagined a life with her, after the war. Imagined the ire of her son with an amused sort of fondness in the dark hours of the night when sleep had eluded him. It had been something to look forward to, something any soldier would’ve strived for given the chance— and Logan felt he’d finally been given it. Victor liked to give him endless shit for it. Because he knew well what Logan couldn’t bring himself to think on: that even as the years passed and she grew older, Logan would seem to remain frozen in time— that she would die someday and Logan would have to live the rest of his forever with her death.
Logan hadn’t known she was a mutant at that time. Not until enemy troops had surprised them in the night, marching forward into their midsts. Logan had woken to the sound of shouting and gunfire. He and Victor were the first up within their barracks, senses sharp enough to hear the distant fighting. Logan had roused the others with a bellow, stuffing boots over bare feet and rushing out into the fray.
It was that night he’d seen Anna stumble from the blazing infirmary tent, untouched by the heat or flame licking plainly at her skin, coughing, stained with soot, unharmed. She’d managed to drag another woman out by the armpits, starting immediate chest compressions that’d failed to circulate anything more than dead blood.
He’d rushed to her side, dragging her sobbing off the body. She’d fought him, beating at his chest. But Logan had only cupped her face between his hands, checking feverishly for burns beneath the smear of soot. “Anna, Anna!” He’d called desperately, trying to get her to just look at him.
Her cheeks had been unflushed from the heat, puffy only from tears. And there, Logan had thought for one blazingly brilliant moment that perhaps she was like them— like Victor, like Logan. He’d never met another mutant— never dared to imagine that there might be more people like them, that Anna might—
A stray bullet catches him in the thigh, his body jerking with the force. A second bullet catches Anna’s side and Logan stumbles beneath the sudden shift of her weight. He’s quick to turn them, shielding her with his body as a third bullet catches him in the back.
He’d lowered them haphazardly to the dirt with a hiss of pain, of panic, pressing a shaking hand to Anna’s wound.
He’d half expected the bullet to push back through her skin like Logan’s had, metal thumping dully against the dirt. He’d expected her rib to fuse its broken pieces back together, expected the gaping hole in her side to knit itself closed in a mimicry of Logan’s blood-slick skin.
It hadn’t.
She’d died there, despite Logan’s shaking attempts to staunch the flow of blood— despite his hollow reassurances that everything would be fine as she’d openly wept, words he’d repeated without thought to her over and over again. It’d been the first time Logan had considered his mutation a curse. The first time he remembers vividly wishing he could just die— holding her close, the cries of battle a distant thing past the ringing in his ears.
The only mercy was that Victor knew well enough not to chide him in the aftermath— only grinned at him when Logan had thrown himself into battle with claws extended, ripping through the opposition as violently as Victor always had.
“I wanted to express my apologies for earlier,” Hank says. He’d caught Logan in the kitchen, guzzling down his second cup of instant coffee with a disgusted grimace. He’d dosed it with the last of the good whiskey Charles usually kept locked in his office, something he felt was a necessity given the day before. Its fancy, previously full decanter sits empty on the counter behind him.
Logan levels Hank with an unimpressed look over the rim of his mug, taking another deep drink despite the acrid taste.
A night had passed since Logan had stalked out of Charles’ office following their meeting. He’d secluded himself to his room in the aftermath— trying and failing to sleep off the surge of distant memories that’d plagued him throughout the night and into morning. Memories that felt not so distant given the recent announcement of a drug that could ‘cure’ mutants.
Idle thoughts wandering to ‘what ifs’.
That is where Charles’ whiskey had come in.
Hank straightens himself under Logan’s scrutiny, pulling himself up to stand taller. It was his attempt at being the bigger person— a truce offered to smooth things over between them.
Logan would let him— be the bigger person that is. Logan had been a short bastard all his life, after all, and there was no reason to change that now.
“I believe we both let our emotions get the better of us yesterday,” Hank continues diplomatically, “and wanted to apologize for my words. I was not as aware of your situation as I believed myself to be and said something regretfully unbecoming of myself.”
Logan grunts, unimpressed, which Hank seems to take as some sign of forgiveness or encouragement or some combination of both because the tense line of the mutant’s shoulders loosen— the tight lipped expression melting into a soft sort of smile.
A group of students barrel into the kitchen past them. Among them, Logan’s eyes catch on a girl with hair like flickering fire.
He averts his gaze, wishing for more whiskey.
The concept of ‘mutants’ didn’t yet exist in the 1930s, not in any public sector at least. Many might’ve considered them the devil’s work if confronted with one, others still a sign from God, or witchcraft, or whatever explanation they made up to explain the unexplainable.
Logan was in Canada for most of the 30s. He’d spent a majority of his days drinking then, working grueling graveyard shifts assembling cars just to drink more. There’d only been one bar open early enough to fuel the habit and he’d gotten rather friendly with the bartender during that time.
Logan hadn’t been quite sure where he was from— some slavic country given the heavy accent he carried with him. All he knew was that it set the man apart, made him a specific kind of ‘other’ during a period in time where being so could get you killed.
Logan had never minded. He’d been there to drink and forget and start fights with the idiots who tried to give the guy a hard time.
He’d give Logan a free drink when he did as thanks. His name was Leszek. 31 years old, an immigrant from Czechoslovakia, half Polish on his mother’s side, Logan would come to learn. He’d been living in the area for the last 11 years and that was about as much as Logan knew about him.
Leszek had never talked about himself much. Logan hadn’t either. Still, he would’ve considered them good enough friends.
“You drink too much,” he’d said in that thick accent of his. Logan liked listening to it, liked the deep sort of timbre it had.
Logan let his head slump into his palm, staring into the last dredges of amber in his glass. “Hasn’t killed me yet.”
Leszek snorts at that, hands busy polishing a glass. “It seems the world wishes to keep you yet.”
Logan grimaces, knocking back the rest of his drink in one go. It burns on the way down. “Got anything stronger?” he asks after a moment. It’s late enough that other patrons had begun trickling in, noise rising as they too got deeper and deeper into their drinks.
Leszek arches a bushy brow. “You drink worse than a Slav,” he mutters, turning from Logan to look through the bar’s shelves. “This will be your last for the night,” Leszek warns, settling for a green bottle on a higher shelf. He grabs a new glass for Logan, filling it a quarter full with a dark liquor. Even from here the smell of it was vile enough to curl his lip.
The man pushes it across the bar to him. “This one, it is on the house.”
“On the house, ya say? What about the rest of us?” Logan recognizes the bastard that leans against the counter next to him, the man’s gaze fixated on Leszek. His words have a hint of a slur to them, his breath reeking of cheap beer.
He worked as a day manager at the same factory Logan did— had been well known for running people he didn’t like off his shift and to Logan’s.
Louis Earl. This was Logan’s first time meeting him.
Still, he pats Logan’s shoulder like they’re old friends.
Logan snarls at him. “Hands off, bub.”
The bastard pulls away slyly, hands raised in a show of surrender though his slimy grin remains. “Apologies.”
Logan downs the black drink in one go. The taste is foul, burns worse than anything else he’d had the unfortunate experience of swallowin’. He must make a face of some sort because Leszek’s mouth twitches with a hint of a smile.
“Well?” Earl presses, “If you’re givin’ out freebies, my buddies an’ I will oblige your generosity.” It’s clear he’s addressing Leszek, though Logan is the one to answer for him.
“If you want a drink, pay for it, asshole.”
Earl has the audacity to look annoyed when he glances back to Logan. “I’m talkin’ with the foreigner here, ya pill,” he growls, “If he’s gonna take our jobs he might as well offer up a free drink or two as an apology.”
Logan slides from the barstool, glaring at the man. He’s a good head taller than Logan, but that had hardly dissuaded him from throwing punches before. “You lookin’ for a fight, bub?”
Two other men slink up behind Earl, sensing the rising tension. “No,” Earl assures, “but it seems you are.”
“Logan,” Leszek says quietly, seemingly more out of concern than any sort of warning. “No fighting in the bar.”
It does little considering Earl was the first to swing anyway.
Logan had tanked the hit to his jaw, calmly spitting blood across the man’s well-shined shoes. “Consider that drink an advance payment,” had been Logan’s only response to Leszek before he’d slammed his own tightened fist into Earl’s jaw, making sure to add a little extra force behind it for all the men on night shift.
It’d boiled into an all out brawl from there, three against one. Logan had fought under worse odds before.
One of Earl’s goons tackle him into the counter, painfully pinning his side against the Bar. Bar stools scatter in their wake, clattering loudly against the floor. He slams a heavy fist into the man’s back, but he only ducks his head and clings tighter. Logan curses, looking back up just in time to catch his empty glass from earlier being slammed into his temple.
The glass shatters, shards cutting into his cheek and brow and the hand of his attacker. The blow concusses him, blood from his brow blinding his eye with an almost startling immediacy. He blinks harshly, trying to clear his vision, trying to gather his thoughts.
Earl is cursing wildly in front of him, clutching his hand to his chest and Leszek was—
Logan had looked blearily to his friend as his healing factor kicked in, glass pushing itself from his skin, bloodied shards plinking softly against the counter.
Leszek was staring at him with— eyes the color of oil slicks, his usual blue a startling black that stretched from pupil to sclera— a color as dark as the drink he’d offered Logan only minutes before. And Leszek’s mouth, partly opened like an animal scenting the air, revealed a mouth of deadly, shark-like teeth. He’d pressed himself into the wall behind the bar at some point, like he was keeping himself as far as he could from the fight— from the scent of blood—
Logan wasn’t the only one to notice.
“D-demon,” Earl stutters, his face paling to a deathly shade of white. “Demon!”
Logan had never believed in demons— only in people like him, like Victor, like Anna.
He slams his elbow into the man still holding him against the counter and that, at least, seemed to be enough to get him off long enough for Logan to haul himself bodily over the bar.
Leszek flinches away like he’d been dealt a physical blow, but Logan only grabs his arm and hurriedly drags the mutant towards the back door. “Run!” he bellows.
There’s yelling behind them, calls of demons, of witchblood— of the devil having infiltrated Edmonton.
He and Leszek had spent the following night in the woods, watching from a far distance as the bar had been set ablaze.
Seeing the fire, Logan hadn’t been able to help but remember Anna.
There had been many times throughout the last 170ish years that Logan and Victor had gone their separate ways. Five years here and there were nothing— 10, 15 years only a blip in time for two brothers who would live forever. Twenty-seven years, however, was by far the longest Logan had gone without seeing the other man.
Logan doesn’t miss Victor. He thinks they must’ve outgrown missing one another some hundred years back. But Victor had been the only person of consistency throughout the entirety of Logan’s life— the only one he could count on to still be alive at the turn of every decade from here until the world itself gave out.
“Something seems to have been troubling you the last few days,” Charles says, watching as Logan raided his liquor cabinet. “What’s on your mind?” They’d come to a deal of sorts with it after his theft a few days back. Charles assuring he would keep the cabinet stocked so long as none of it left the office. Which meant any drinking Logan was to do would have to be done within the confines of the room.
He forgoes a glass for an entire bottle of Jack Daniels, lamenting that the man had nothing stronger on hand. Hell, he would’ve taken another glass of that last drink Leszek had offered him in Edmonton at this point.
“Can’t ya read it?” Logan replies sourly, cracking open the seal on the bottle. He settles into a spot on the couch, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. To Charles’ credit he doesn’t appear outwardly bothered by any of it.
“You know I wouldn’t unless asked, Logan.”
Logan grunts, feeling only a little sorry for his words as he presses the bottle to his lips, drinking deeply.
There was a lot on his mind— too much honesty, which is where the drinking came in.
Memories of Anna and Leszek. Thoughts of Victor.
They were two brothers, preserved in time, yet so different from the people they’d started as. They had known they couldn’t die by their twenties, had trekked off to war, put their abilities to proper use, emerging from the battlefields as folktales meant to scare the opposition, or as drivel from the shattered minds of wartime survivors.
It wasn’t until later, however, that they realized they didn’t age either.
Unaging bodies, immortal flesh. It was the kind of fantastical tale that drove countless adventures to their deaths searching for ways to obtain it for themselves.
Logan hadn’t yet understood the implications of living forever then. Victor hadn’t either.
Some days Logan wonders if Victor ever had understood the implications, or if his brother simply didn’t care that, for them, living meant leaving everything else behind. Perhaps that was one of the unspoken reasons Logan had always sought him out at his lowest. Not because Victor could understand, but because he understood and hadn’t cared— as if by spending time together Logan might perhaps learn some of that perfect apathy he always seemed to have.
The whiskey gives a softer edge to the memories.
Logan had never liked war. Even now, he remains haunted by the sights and sounds of battles a hundred years past. But Victor, he had always thrown himself at wars with the gusto of a man with something to fight for, or perhaps with the gusto of a child given free reign of a candy store. Logan thinks it’d leaned more and more towards the latter as the years had dragged on.
Logan, despite his distaste for it, had followed Victor into every war he fought. At first because mercenary work was good enough money for two men who couldn’t die. But Logan knows Anna’s death had changed things for him.
He takes another long, deep drink. But no amount of whiskey would be enough to dull the bladed edges of those memories.
One had little time for idle thoughts of self-pity in the midst of war. It’s why he’d found himself seeking it out time and time again. Because while people and places disappeared within the passage of time, the memories of them never did. No, those clung like the reek of cheap cigarettes.
“Is it the cure?”
Logan pauses, bottle hovering midair. After a moment he brings it the rest of the way to his lips, taking only a small mouthful. He settles the bottle at his side, studying the way the sun streams through the office window, golden and warm. “You could say that.”
A cure like the one they’d announced would’ve solved many of the problems Logan had had throughout his life. It wouldn’t’ve saved Anna, but it would’ve spared him having to live long with the burden of it. It wouldn’t’ve spared Leszek the shit he received for being born somewhere else, but it would’ve kept Logan by his side instead of running off to war. Because he was scared he’d get too attached— because he knew he already was.
A cure would’ve spared him the constant battles and nightmares and heartbreak that war and faked apathy never had. He presses the bottle to his lips again, it might’ve just spared his liver too.
Logan had tried to kill himself only one time. It hadn’t worked for obvious reasons. Only hurt a hell of a lot and made him feel a little guilty about the young kid that’d unintentionally witnessed it.
The boy had gaped at him, Logan’s body still pulling itself back together as he’d stumbled up. “Are you God?”
It was 1952 and this had been his first time back to Chicago since 1893. A lot had changed since then: about the city, about Logan, about the world as a whole.
“An angel,” Logan forced out dryly, coughing up a glob of blood that tries to interrupt him. He spits it against the pavement.
Despite the display there’s only wonder to be seen on the boy’s face. He pulls the cap from his head, holding it tight between his hands. In an awed whisper he asks: “Really?”
Logan hesitates at the question, swiping away a trickle of blood from an already healed wound before it can reach his eye. He’d kinda dug his own grave here. “Yeah, kid…” Logan continues stiltedly, trying to think quick, “God told me ta… ta tell you to be good to your mother.”
The kid’s eyes widen, they’re as clear of a blue as Leszek’s had been. “Yes sir, Mr. Angel, sir.”
“Don’t follow me,” he warns, pointing a finger at him, cutting off any more comparisons before his mind can make them. He turns on his heel then, heading the opposite way down the alley.
“Are you going back to heaven now, Mr. Angel?” The kid had called after him, curious in a way that turned his stomach.
The question had struck a raw nerve. Heaven or hell, Logan knew there wasn’t anywhere he could go to escape living.
“—seems the world wishes to keep you yet,” Leszek’s words had echoed hollowly in head even after so long apart. Leszek would be in his fifties’ at that time. The face Logan remembered likely deepened by wrinkles, brown hair peppered with gray, growing old in the only way it seemed Logan never would.
“No,” is Logan’s only reply to the kid.
He’d hunted down Victor after this, had willingly followed him into what might’ve been their last war together. Because if he hadn’t Logan thinks he would’ve gladly given himself over to the government if it meant they could’ve just found a way to kill him.
“What do you think of it?” Rogue asks quietly, “The cure.” There’s a tentative nature to the question, like she’s not quite ready to hear his possible answer— scared of a firm ‘no’ from the one person whose opinion mattered the most to her. They’re on a bench overlooking a large swath of the school grounds, in the distance they can see a group of kids sprawled out on the grass by the pond.
“I don’t trust whoever’s behind it,” Logan responds plainly, toeing around the real question he can sense at the core of it. It’d been a week now since the cure had been announced and Logan remained far from the only one still dwelling on it.
Nightmares, memories, they worked in tandem to keep Logan from forgetting no matter how often he’d raided Charles’ liquor cabinet.
Rogue pulls her jacket a little tighter around herself. “What if that wasn’t an issue?” she presses carefully, “What if… what if it worked without any negative reactions or anything? !You’d be exactly the same just—” she hesitates, “normal.” She allows a moment of silence before asking: “Would you take it?”
He would’ve taken it when Anna died— would’ve tested it with a bullet in his skull. He would’ve taken it alongside Leszek during their hike across Canada— would’ve liked growing old in good company, settling somewhere without tales of black-eyed demons or undying men. He would’ve taken it in Chicago, if only to feel something, if only to have had a proper chance to escape a world where everyone always died before him.
It’s why he couldn’t allow himself to get too close to the people here. It’s why he couldn’t afford to care. Because Charles would die before him, just as Storm and Cyclops and Jean all would.
And Rogue, young as she was, would be no different.
It’s the same reason he’d abandoned Leszek to search for Victor when rumors of a second world war had begun taking shape— Victor who could never die— Victor who had disappeared— Victor who had never quite been enough.
“Would you take it?” the question repeats itself in his head.
When he eventually answers, his voice seems like a distant thing: “Yeah.” A breeze winds its way across the school grounds. “I would.”
He won’t, however. Not now, not under their current circumstances. Because there were people that counted on him now, loath as he was to admit it. Because for the first time since Anna had died, he had something he was willing to live for.
He doesn’t dare to look at her, keeps his gaze set towards the treeline, expression impassive. He can feel Rogue looking at him before her gaze follows his to the trees. After a moment she reaches gently for the hand at his side, gloved fingers clenching around his palm, holding it like a lifeline.
“Me too.”