Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The thing about being happy, Logan decided, was that it had a sound. Not the big stuff—bar room laughter, engines redlining, bones knitting with a soft fizz under his skin. His brand of happiness lived smaller, under the skin: the hiss of a kettle in a clean kitchen; the scrape of a butter knife over toast; the ancient bathroom fan that only worked if you smacked it twice with the flat of your hand. Slippers on hardwood, because his boyfriend—Evan, plain as bread and two times steadier—hated cold floors. The soft click of a mug on a coaster, because Evan never put anything down without a barrier, "to respect the wood."

Logan didn’t think he cared about wood being respected. He found himself reaching for the cork coasters anyway, because it made Evan smile like he’d just been seen.

They had a rhythm as easy as breathing. Evan woke first and filled the kettle. Logan pretended to be asleep until the smell of coffee got mean enough to drag him upright. He pretended because Evan liked to "wake him" with a kiss to his hairline, then act surprised when Logan muttered something rude and pulled him closer.

“This is very unprofessional,” Evan would murmur into Logan’s temple, even though he didn’t work from home, and Logan’s profession existed in a gray zone of military contracts and the occasional private message that amounted to We could use a hand with this. “Sir, are you aware you’re being cuddled without a permit?”

“Gonna write me up?” Logan grumbled because he could play along when it didn’t cost him anything. When it was just the two of them and no future pressed hard against the edges.

“Depends,” Evan would say, mouth curving. “How do you feel about community service?”

The sound of happiness this morning was water rattling as it reached a boil and Evan humming under his breath, tuneless, chopping something green for an omelet he’d prepped the night before. Logan had told him a hundred times he didn’t need to cook, that he’d eat whatever was there, that his metabolism didn’t care if the eggs were fluffy or rubber. Evan kept cooking.

“It makes the day feel like it has edges,” Evan explained once, dicing peppers into precise little squares, as if corners could keep the world tidy. “I like knowing we started it on purpose.”

Logan didn’t say that kind of thinking got you hurt. But he sat at the little kitchen island and watched Evan stir eggs in a bowl, watched his wrists move, those narrow, capable hands. He was ordinary and beautiful in a way that didn’t demand anything. Not even admiration. Just… notice. Be here with me.

“I’m thinking about getting the gutters done,” Evan said, still humming. “Hardware store guy told me if I let it go any longer, the trim could rot.”

“You want me to call a guy?” Logan asked, and then grimaced, because he always had a guy. Evan didn’t like that, not because he had a problem with favors but because “you shouldn’t have to owe someone on account of me.” He’d say it with that stubborn set to his mouth that said he’d fight you in a parking lot if you tried to make his life bigger than he thought he deserved.

“Nah.” Evan flicked water off the whisk and poured eggs into a pan. “I’m feeling brave. And we own a ladder.”

“We own a ladder ‘cause you found one on Craigslist and said ‘it’ll come in handy’ right before you dragged me into a stranger’s garage.”

“A perfectly nice stranger! He had a cat named Rhonda.” Evan slid him a pleased look. “Also, you didn’t hate it. You bartered him down fifteen bucks, and you were proud.”

Logan hid a smile in his coffee. “I’m always proud when I win.”

“My champion,” Evan laughed, light as the onions hitting the heat. “Will you be home for dinner tonight?”

Not likely. There was a briefing later, the kind that came stamped with Stryker’s clipped voice and the smell of aircraft fuel. Logan had a knack for those jobs. The work wasn’t pretty, but it cleaned something inside him the rest of his living seemed to fog up.

“Don’t wait up,” he said. “I’ll text.”

Evan nodded—simple as that—and brought over a plate. Omelet folded just so, toast cut on the diagonal because triangles tasted better in his head. He sat beside Logan, hip to hip on the barstools, and they ate with the window cracked to let in April. The world was waking up. Somewhere, a neighbor tested a lawnmower and gave up. A dog barked once, offended by a leaf.

“You should take my car,” Evan said around his toast. “I noticed you need an oil change.”

“My bike’s fine.”

“Mm. I meant your car.”

“It’s fine.”

“It’s not. You’re very brave, but your ‘check engine’ light has been on since New Year’s.” Evan’s tone was gently teasing, the way you talked to someone who didn’t know what was good for them and you loved them anyway. “I already made the appointment. Quick Lube by the grocery store. They have free stale donuts.”

“You trying to fatten me up?”

“Is it working?”

No. Yes. None of it mattered. He drank more coffee and let the morning fold itself into something that would be forgotten if he didn’t hold onto it. The only sign he was leaving soon was the bag by the door—duffel, nondescript, smelling like leather and steel, journey itinerary already tucked inside. Evan’s shoes were lined up neatly on the mat, laces tucked in. His coat hung on the hook, a silly yellow thing with toggles that made him look like a fisherman in a children’s book. Logan couldn’t picture it in a hallway that smelled like bleach. 

They rinsed their plates. Evan stole a quick kiss at the sink, cool fingers on Logan’s wrists, and then it was the lightest of goodbyes. They didn’t make a meal out of leaving each other. The first time Logan had to go, Evan had tried to do the whole clingy send-off— what if I never see you again? —and Logan had felt something sour coil under his sternum. He’d said, too sharply, that’s not how I do this, and Evan had gone pale and nodded and never did it again. He learned fast. That made it easier to come back.

Logan zipped his jacket. “Gutters, huh?”

“Or,” Evan said, wiping the counter, avoiding eye contact like he did when he was about to put something tender into the world and hope it got to stay, “we could do something else with the weekend.”

“Like what?”

Evan shrugged, too casually. “I don’t know. Driving upstate. Walking by the water. Talking about—” He broke off and laughed at himself. “I sound like a brochure. It’s nothing. Just us time.”

“Us time,” Logan repeated, cautiously. “Are you sick of my kind of ‘us time?’ Because my kind involves not talking about—” He gestured vaguely, the horizon where conversations died before they got names. Future stuff. Forever stuff.

“No.” Evan finally looked at him, eyes soft and steady in that way that refused to be a demand. “I like your kind. I like waking up and arguing about toast geometry and the ethics of coasters. I’m not… pushing. I just want to make sure we’re not stagnant.”

“We’re not.”

“Okay,” Evan said, and let it go. He always let it go, which made Logan both relieved and uneasy. Leashes felt like freedom until you noticed the hand at the other end.

He left with coffee on his tongue and spring crisp against his face. He took Evan’s car, because he could already hear the disappointed hmm if he didn’t. The old sedan coughed awake, and he—alone again—went.

The briefing room was a steel shoebox that smelled like jet fuel and stress. Stryker stood at the head of the table in his crisp uniform, edges sharp enough to cut, voice even sharper as he clicked through slides on a projector that buzzed like a fly. Windowless building. Fence. Guards with more confidence than training. "In and out," Stryker said, like it was a prayer, and when the prayer didn’t work, you brought a different god.

Team X spread around the table in various states of attention. Zero sat back with arms folded and a smile that never reached his eyes. Fred Dukes occupied too much chair and tapped a steady rhythm against the metal leg, bored already. Bolt rolled a coin over his knuckles so fast it was a blur. John Wraith leaned in a corner like smoke. Wade Wilson played with a pen and twirled it until it became a threat.

Victor, big as a bad decision, slouched with theatrical indifference until he wasn’t indifferent at all. He cut Logan a sideways look that said you alive? and prove it at the same time.

“Objective is clean,” Stryker said. “Retrieve the asset. Minimize exposure. Be professional.” He let the last word hang as his gaze skimmed Wade, then Victor, then Logan in a way that suggested you, specifically. “Questions?”

Wade raised a hand. “Is it considered ‘exposure’ if I show them my good side?”

“Wilson.” Stryker’s voice could peel paint.

“Sir, that’s me,” Wade said agreeably, saluting with the pen. “I will be very professional. Which is to say, I will only talk when it is strategically advantageous to irritate the enemy into making mistakes.”

A muscle flickered in Stryker’s jaw. “You will talk when spoken to.”

“Copy that,” Wade said, utterly unbothered, and went back to twirling the pen like it was loaded.

Stryker clicked the projector off. “Gear up. Wheels up in twenty.” He looked at Logan, gaze narrowing, reading the micro-flinch he hadn’t made. “Everything alright, Howlett?”

“Fine,” Logan said.

“Good. I need you sharp.”

Logan nodded and stood with the rest. As the chairs scraped and bodies moved, the room’s scent shifted: gun oil, sweat, cordite ghosts. Under it all, his stomach rolled in a way that had nothing to do with adrenaline. He swallowed. The taste of coffee crept back cruel. He forced his body into the familiar machine of action—hands flex, claws ready; feet plant; lungs steady—and the nausea slid under the gears and waited.

In the armory, Wade slung an arm around Logan’s shoulders and then immediately took it back like he’d remembered not to do that without permission. “You look like a mixtape of ‘I’m fine’ and ‘I might be on fire,’” he said under his breath. “On a scale from one to ‘do I need to stare at you like a concerned golden retriever,’ where are we?”

“Don’t.” Logan checked magazines, counted by habit. “I’m good.”

“Copy,” Wade said, then dropped his voice even further. “You smell different.”

Logan’s hackles tried to lift. “Mind your nose.”

“Always.” Wade backed off easy, no push. “Just—don’t be a hero today. Be a cooperative participant in a group activity. We can put it on a T-shirt.”

Victor appeared like a wall that had learned to walk. “Group therapy later,” he said, bumping Wade with a shoulder big as a door. “Move.” He looked down at Logan. “You gonna puke on my boots?”

“Maybe.”

Victor’s mouth curved, sharp. Concern wore teeth with him. “I’ll kick you for ruining the polish.”

“Try it.”

They loaded. The plane’s belly swallowed them whole, engines whining. The flight wasn’t long enough to nap. Stryker did not believe in comfort, or perhaps he did and had decided they didn’t need it. Logan stared at the ribbed metal ceiling and let the thrum under his spine beat him into a steady rhythm. Across from him, Bolt closed his eyes and flipped the coin through his fingers by touch alone. Agent Zero pretended to sleep; his breathing never changed. Fred cracked his knuckles like gunshots. John Wraith watched nothing with a quiet that made Logan’s skin itch. Wade mouthed the words to a song that had never been on the radio. Victor tossed a knife, caught it, tossed it again, as if gravity existed just to amuse him.

When they hit dirt, the night wrapped them. The target squatted beyond a fence: square, mean, practical. It smelled like bleach from here. Logan rolled his shoulders. His stomach gave a warning lurch. He put a hand against the side of the truck, just for a second, and took the breath that usually fixed everything.

“That the coffee?” Victor asked, not looking at him.

“Shut up.”

They moved. The team flowed into their familiar choreography, learned ugly and refined uglier: Wraith slipping ahead, Victor and Logan on breach, Agent Zero watching lines with eyes that loved a scope more than people. Wade hummed low and off-key as he slapped a charge on the lock—more for the rhythm than for the noise—and then they were inside, tile and hard light and the smell of a place that had convinced itself it was clean.

The hallway felt too long. The alarms weren’t singing yet, but somewhere on the edge of hearing, Logan’s bones knew it was coming. He tasted metal. The sour wave rose suddenly. He planted a hand on the wall as his vision pixelated.

“Runt,” Victor hissed. “Focus.”

“I am.” The words were clipped. He took two steps, three, and then veered into an empty doorway without permission from his pride and folded at the waist. The first heave was dry and violent. The second brought up coffee in a line of acid that burned his nose. His eyes watered. He breathed through it because he refused to make sounds in a place that could hear him.

Victor’s hand landed between his shoulder blades. “Easy,” he said, the word worn blunt, like he’d used it before on beasts rather than his brother. “Get it out.”

“Don’t—” Logan managed, then had to brace as his body made the decision for him. When it passed, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spat, ashamed and furious.

“Food poisoning?” Wade’s voice drifted from the hall, light and precisely placed to be ignored if needed.

“Bad coffee,” Logan said, because the lie had already gotten legs.

“Copy,” Wade said, and didn’t push. “On me.”

They hit the first door—equipment. The second—empty. The third—asset: a girl in a paper gown, eyes flat as lake ice, arm bruised where a needle had won a fight. She didn’t scream when the door came off its hinges. She didn’t scream when Victor shrugged his jacket over her shoulders. She looked up at Logan like an animal that had learned silence as a language and moved when he gestured.

They turned the hallway around and made it shorter by pretending it owed them. The alarm finally found its voice and told the building a lie about control. Agent Zero’s rifle sang. Wade laughed once, bright and mean, not because he found this funny but because the sound unsettled men with guns. Wraith ghosted a camera. Bolt took the lights and gave them darkness.

Logan kept pace until his legs forgot what pace was. The floor rolled like a bad boat. He stumbled. Victor’s fingers clamped around his elbow and squeezed hard enough to bruise. “Don’t,” Victor growled. “Not here.”

“I’m fine,” Logan said, because the words were a reflex, and then the corridor bucked and he was on his knees. The tile was cold and very real. He wanted to claw the world open and step out of it.

The moment lasted three heartbeats, and then Victor made a decision. He hooked an arm under Logan’s, dragged him up with the kind of efficiency that doesn’t ask for permission, and kept them moving with the other arm full of the girl. Wade slid in front, made a door where a door hadn’t been planned to be. Agent Zero covered the rear and muttered something in another language that meant keep up. Fred loomed like a living barrier. Wraith did something tricky that made one camera think they were somewhere else.

They spilled into the night and the air that didn’t taste like inside. The truck yawned open. Wade shoved the girl in with a gentleness that would’ve surprised anyone who didn’t know him, then turned and helped Victor manhandle Logan onto the bench. The world was sound and swing and the slam of doors, then motion. Tires bit dirt. The engine complained. Someone laughed—the hysterical kind that comes when you get away and realize your body is still in the place you ran from.

“Stay with me,” Victor barked into Logan’s face, more command than comfort.

“I am,” Logan said, and then the floor rose in a black tide, and he let go.

He came back to light that made his eyes ache and the antiseptic chill of Stryker’s infirmary. The ceiling tiles were speckled like a winter sky. An IV tugged at the back of his hand when he flexed. He became aware of the cuff biting his bicep, the beep-prickle of a monitor, the weight of eyes.

“Hey,” Wade said, quietly like speaking a secret. He was perched backwards on a chair beside the bed, chin on the rail, katannas off. “Welcome back. You fainted in the truck. Very glamorous.”

“Get out of my face,” Logan rasped, which was the closest thing he had to thank you for being here when he was still clawing his way up from black.

“Wilson,” Agent Zero warned from the far wall, as if Wade needed help remembering how to be appropriate. Zero’s arms were folded, expression the kind you had to train into your muscles. “Give him space.”

“I’m literally five feet away,” Wade said, not moving. “I measured with my heart.”

The curtain scraped back and Stryker step-clicked into view, uniform crisp, impatience crisper. The medic at his shoulder was one of the quiet ones—trained not to ask questions, even when the answers were obvious. Stryker looked at Logan the way you looked at a weapon that had misfired. “Howlett.”

“Sir.” Logan tried to sit up. The room swayed. He gripped the sheet with his free hand and rode it out.

“You passed out in the field,” Stryker said, as if informing him of a disciplinary action. “You never do that.”

“Hydration.” Logan’s voice came gravel. “Fixed.”

Stryker’s gaze flicked to the bag of fluid, then to the medic. “Status.”

“Vitals stable, sir,” the medic said. “Transient hypotension likely secondary to dehydration and exertion. We’ve drawn labs. We’ll know more in a few hours.”

“Do that,” Stryker said, as if it had been the medic’s idea all along. He turned back to Logan. “I need to know if you’re going to compromise the unit.”

“I don’t compromise the unit,” Logan said, because he needed that to be true.

Stryker’s mouth did a small satisfied thing at the corner, like Logan had given the right answer on a test with only one acceptable outcome. “See that you don’t.” He let his gaze pass over Wade, Agent Zero, the curtain as if Victor loomed just beyond it, which he did. “I want a report on the asset within the hour.” Then he was gone, his wake smelled like shoe polish and bureaucracy.

The medic adjusted the drip and pretended not to be a person. Agent Zero checked a watch he didn’t need to check. Wade’s eyes did a careful circuit of Logan’s face, charting the slopes and divots.

Victor slid around the curtain with a predator’s indifference. He took up the space at the foot of the bed and crossed his arms. “You going to die?” he asked, conversational as a bartender.

“No,” Logan said. “Not today.”

“Good. Be inconvenient to drag you to the incinerator.” Victor’s eyes were too sharp, though, too intent. His nostrils flared. He went still the way he did when the wind shifted in the woods. “You smell—”

“Don’t,” Logan said, too fast, too sharp. The medic glanced up. Wade’s eyes flicked to Victor like a knife leaving a sheath.

Victor’s mouth curved. Concern tried to wear a joke. “Like bad coffee.”

Logan stared him down until Victor rolled his shoulders and backed a step.

Agent Zero pushed off the wall. “If you’re going to vomit again, do it somewhere that isn’t the flooring I’m responsible for.”

Wade flattened his mouth, which for him was the equivalent of a scream. “What an empathetic king you are.”

“Shut up, Wilson,” Zero said automatically.

“Gladly. Already doing it. Watch me.” Wade made the universal mime for zipping his lips and tossing the key, then stayed, unzipped in spirit.

The medic finished fussing and took his tray. “We’ll have results soon,” he repeated to the air. He left without a goodbye.

“Don’t like being a lab test,” Logan muttered.

“Then stop bleeding mystery,” Wade said, softer than the words read.

“Don’t you have a report?” Logan asked Agent Zero without looking at him.

“I have many things,” Zero said. “One of them is time to stand here and ensure you don’t code on my watch. You’re valuable, Howlett. Try not to make me prove it.” He left with the last word.

Victor lingered. Wade refused to be shooed. The curtain whispered and the room was just the three of them and the drip that counted seconds like a metronome.

“You need anything?” Wade asked.

“ Silence ,” Logan said.

Wade nodded and gave it to him. Victor attempted to give it and failed; his kind of silence came edged, blade-out. He shifted his weight and the floor complained. He breathed and the air took notes. He watched Logan and that was its own noise.

“Get out,” Logan told him finally, because the shape of Victor’s stare rubbed his nerves raw.

Victor’s gaze flicked to Wade, then back. “You call me if you stop pretending this is coffee,” he said, which passed for concern in a language both of them understood. “I don’t want to carry you again.”

“You didn’t carry me,” Logan said.

“I did,” Victor said, and left before Logan could contradict physics.

The drip ran. Wade settled, the picture of a man who could sit on a grenade and crack jokes about the shrapnel. He didn’t ask the obvious. He didn’t try to fill the air with anything. He existed in it and let Logan do the same.

When the bag was down to a tail, Logan said, “I’m leaving.”

“Love that for you,” Wade said lightly. “Do you want me to smuggle you past an infirmary full of professionals who will absolutely tattle?”

“I’m not asking.” Logan pulled the tape with a brief savage satisfaction and slid the IV out like he’d done it a hundred times, which he had. The puncture sealed before a drop could bless the sheet. Wade pretended to be impressed. Logan swung his legs over the side and the room bent, considered, and chose not to spin. He took that as courtesy.

Wade was already on his feet, body placed in the space between Logan and the curtain like a buffer. “We’re going to your bunk?”

“No.” Logan stood. He grabbed for the shirt folded over the rail—clean, scratchy cotton that belonged to the base and no one person—and shrugged into it because the one he’d arrived in smelled like bleach and fear. “I’m not staying where Stryker can count my breaths.”

“Bold choice,” Wade said. He didn’t say stupid, which is why Logan was here instead of anywhere else. “Then where?”

“Your room.”

Wade’s brows ticked up. “Best choice you’ve made all day.” He held the curtain like a gentleman with a door. “Come on, cowboy.”

They ghosted the corridor with the practiced invisibility of men who’d broken more rules than they could remember. Base life moved around them: boots on tile, voices held low by habit, the cough of a vending machine swallowing a dollar. No one stopped them because no one ever wanted to stop Wade when he moved like this and because Logan’s face in a mood was not a thing people volunteered to meet.

Wade’s quarters looked like a bomb had gone off and arranged the shrapnel into a nest. Weapons on every surface, magazines fanned like playing cards, gear in piles that made sense to him and to no one else. The air smelled like gun oil and laundry detergent– a mercenary brand of domestic. Wade snagged a hoodie off the back of a chair and flung it at the foot of the bed in an absent motion that read as for later in a language Logan didn’t want translated yet.

“Sit,” Wade said, then caught himself and gestured instead. “Or stand. Or pace trenches into my floor. Dealer’s choice. You want water? Tea? Something crunchy you can chew anger into? I have pretzels that could sand a deck.”

“Water.” Logan tugged Wade’s spare hoodie closer with his boot and didn’t spare a thought as to why.

Wade brought the water without further commentary, passed it over, then sat on the floor at Logan’s feet instead of on the bed or the chair, putting himself lower by instinct or practice. He rested his elbows on his knees and didn’t look up. 

“I think I’m pregnant,” Logan said into the quiet.

Wade inhaled, a soft oh that didn’t sharpen the charged air anymore. He kept his eyes on a scuff in the floor, then lifted them, face open in a way Logan had never seen on anyone who’d lived Wade’s life. “Do you want me to be happy?” he asked carefully. “Do you want me to be mad? Do you want me to say it’s going to be okay even if it isn’t? I can do any of those. Or none. I can also Google quiet affirmations and then throw my phone into the sun.”

“I want–.” Logan’s voice cracked on the last word. The rope he’d been holding all day had burned his hands.

“Okay,” Wade said. He reached toward the coffee table where his katanas lay half-cleaned, paused, and set his hands palm-up on his knees instead. “I’m here.”

Logan told him. He told him about the morning and the kitchen and the stupid coasters. He told him about the past missions and Victor’s attitude, about the truck and the black and the cold brightness of the infirmary. He told him about Stryker’s eyes and the lab draw and the way his body had decided to tell his secrets without asking permission. He told him about Evan’s face and the way light had moved through it when the word ‘Pregnant’ had finally jumped out of his mouth and made itself at home.

Wade didn’t interrupt. He didn’t make a single joke about immaculate conception or storks with knives. He nodded in the right places and, when Logan’s voice ran out, he let the silence be a place to put the rest down.

“Okay,” Wade said at last, voice steady enough to stand on. “Do you want to rant some more, or do you want solutions?”

“Both.” Logan swallowed. “I want both.”

“Great,” Wade said. “We can do both. We can do them in whatever order doesn’t make you want to set my bed on fire.” He angled a thumb over his shoulder. “Please don’t set my bed on fire.”

Logan drifted an inch toward a smile and then didn’t. “Rant.”

He did. He ranted ugly and honest. About his body, a traitor. About birth control that failed despite the ritual of counting and swallowing and checking wrappers against light. About the indignity of morning sickness sounding quaint when it felt like being trapped in an elevator with a dying fish. About choice and how you could do everything right and still lose because fate cheated. About Evan’s smile and Victor’s aggressive gentleness and Stryker’s eyes like a ledger and the way everyone around him had suddenly become kind, like he’d turned into something breakable and holy at the same time.

Wade let the words hit him. He didn’t deflect. He didn’t pick apart the logic looking for weak points. He sat and took it.

When Logan ran out of words, Wade reached for the hoodie at the foot of the bed, shook it out, and laid it over Logan’s knees, efficient and casual, as if this were standard operating procedure when a man had yelled the day out of himself.

“Solutions,” Wade said quietly. “Step one: we confirm. You decide who you want to do that with—a lab rat who won’t ask questions, a pharmacy test you steal on the way back from pretending to buy gum, or we break into Stryker’s files and use his toys. I’m kidding about the last one. Unless you want to. Then I’m not kidding.”

Logan huffed, which was dangerously close to a laugh. “No Stryker.”

“Copy.” Wade held up a hand, palm out, a vow. “No Stryker. Step two: we decide who gets to know. Victor already suspects. Zero suspects everybody of everything, so that’s a wash. Wraith probably knows because he knows everything. Dukes wouldn’t notice if you sprouted a third arm unless you used it to steal his lunch. Stryker cannot know. So I run interference. I’m large, obstructive, and have the kind of conversational style that makes colonels walk away.”

“True,” Logan said.

“Step three: you decide what you want. Not what Evan wants. Not what Stryker would want if he could bottle you and sell you by the ounce. You. If you want to carry and then place, I learn the paperwork side of the apocalypse and get very good at waiting rooms. If you want to carry and keep, I become a very annoying wall that other people have to get through to touch you. If you don’t want to carry, I am still a wall.” He tilted his head. “And I hold your hand so hard you break a few fingers. It’s fine. Occupational hazard.”

Logan stared at the hoodie stretched over his knees. He thought of the empty bathroom, the tile cool under his palms, the smell of spring pushing through the apartment window. He thought of a yellow coat and a ladder on a balcony and a man who had said I won’t make it harder. He thought about the way his body felt already different, center of gravity shifted by a truth he hadn’t wanted.

“Step four,” Wade said, brisk like a mercy, “I get you crackers. Internet says salt plus carbs equals less fish-elevator nausea. I can also open a window and threaten to punch the smell of bleach if it comes back.”

“You can’t punch smell.”

“Watch me.” Wade got up and rummaged in a drawer. He returned with a box that promised gourmet and delivered cardboard and offered it like a sacrament. “They are stale. They are also vaguely edible.”

Logan took one. His stomach didn’t lurch. He counted that as a miracle.

“You can crash here,” Wade said, as if he’d been waiting for Logan to need him and had rehearsed not making a fuss. “Couch, bed, nest of tactical hoodies—dealer’s choice. I will be rude to anyone who knocks.”

“The team will think—”

“The team will think I’m a loud idiot who likes you,” Wade said cheerfully. “Which is accurate. But they’ll keep their mouths shut because you can eviscerate them with a look and because Zero hates gossip unless he’s the one doing it.”

Logan tipped his head back and let the ceiling give him something to look at that wasn’t a problem. The fatigue crept in like fog. Wade moved around him, adjusting the hoodie, setting the water where Logan’s hand would find it, kicking a duffel out of tripping range with the careless grace of a man who’d learned his room by heart.

“You should know,” Logan said, words drowsy but necessary, “I told Evan.”

Wade paused. The air didn’t change. “How’d he take it?”

“He smiled before he could stop himself.” The memory was a hook; it caught Logan’s chest. “Then he apologized for smiling.”

“Both things can be true.” Wade came back to the floor and leaned his shoulder against the bed where Logan could feel him without seeing his eyes. “You didn’t owe him the telling. You did it anyway. That’s… you.”

“I asked him if he touched my pills.” The confession crawled. “Or the condoms.”

Wade let out a breath. “And?”

“He swore he didn’t.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Yes.” Logan shut his eyes. “I hate that I had to ask.”

“You didn’t have to,” Wade said. “But you did. Because you live in a world where people make choices for you if you let them. I’m not defending the question. I am defending you.”

Logan didn’t answer. The room had gone quiet in a way that let sleep sneak up on him. Wade took the box of crackers away before Logan could knock it over. He reached for a katana and then, deliberately, didn’t. He let his hands rest on his knees, empty and obvious.

“You rant more,” Wade said softly, as if he could feel Logan drifting. “Or you sleep. I’ll go fuck with your lab results. An when you wake up, we go to a drugstore like teenagers who made poor choices, and we steal a stick that tells us what your body already knows. Or we don’t steal it, because I have cash and a moral compass that spins erratically. Then we make a plan.”

“You getting sentimental on me, Wilson?”

“Constantly,” Wade said. “Just never where anyone but you can see.”

Logan slept. He didn’t mean to. He meant to watch the door and catalog weapons and rehearse arguments he would never have. But the bed took him and the hoodie kept him warm and Wade’s breathing found a frequency that told Logan’s nervous system it could stand down. The world didn’t need him for a few hours. The world would be fine.

Before he went under completely, he felt motion—Wade lifting the edge of the hoodie to tuck it properly around his shoulders, a neatness borrowed from someone gentler than either of them. The room creaked as Wade shifted on the floor, then stood walking with his back towards the bed and one hand on the hilt of a sword, because he meant to use it if it meant getting what he wanted.

He woke to base noise: muffled boots, a radio too low to parse, a laugh from a throat that didn’t know it was being cruel. The light in the room had shifted. Wade was sitting with his back against the bed, legs folded, head tipped back against the mattress, eyes closed. He was not asleep. He was listening to the hall the way some men listen to prayer.

“Hey,” Wade said without opening his eyes. “How’s the apocalypse?”

“Quieter,” Logan said. His voice sounded better. His stomach… settled. The cold spot behind his sternum had warmed, if not to comfort, then to something like the absence of immediate threat.

Wade cracked an eye. “Inventory check?”

“I can stand without falling.” Logan pushed the hoodie back and immediately tugged it higher again because his skin missed it. “I will punch you if you make a joke.”

“Promising,” Wade said solemnly. He unfolded himself and stood with a lot of creaks for a man his age. “Drugstore?”

“Yeah.” Logan rubbed a hand over his face. “Not base.”

“Obviously.” Wade snagged a cap off a hook and rammed it down over his hair. “We take the back way. Wraith owes me. He can pretend not to see us.”

“He always pretends not to see you.”

“Because he finds me emotionally overwhelming,” Wade said. “It’s one of my charms.”

They ghosted the corridors again. Wraith materialized at the corner like smoke and raised an eyebrow that asked ten questions. Wade pointed at Logan, then at his own mouth, pinched it shut, and threw away an imaginary key. Wraith rolled his eyes and stepped aside with a sigh that said you two will get me killed one day and I will be bored while it happens.

Outside, the air had the flat taste of late night on a base—fuel, old coffee, concrete. Wade had a truck that existed in a legal gray zone. He drove with the careful recklessness of a man who refused to get pulled over for anything less than a righteous cause.

The pharmacy was one of those strip-mall affairs that stayed open until two and then closed because even insomnia had standards. Fluorescents hummed. A bored teenager at the register scrolled his phone like it was oxygen. The aisle with the tests was a canyon of plastic promises.

Wade studied the boxes like he was choosing a weapon. “Do we want early detection, digital, analog, midstream, brand name, off-brand that will accuse you of crimes you didn’t commit?”

Logan picked the one with the least words. He added a second brand because redundancy was religion. Wade grabbed a third because he believed in overkill. They paid cash. The teenager didn’t look up long enough to form a memory.

Back at Wade’s quarters, the bathroom was much cleaner than the rest of the room, in the way of men who made peace with chaos as long as there was one rectangle of tile that didn’t lie to them. Wade handed Logan the boxes without commentary and retreated to the far side of the door.

“Do you want me to… narrate from outside?” Wade asked after a beat. “I can read the instructions in a bedside manner voice. ‘Remove test from pouch. Do not panic. Pee on the business end.’”

“Shut up,” Logan said, because the alternative was gratitude.

He did the thing. He watched the clock on Wade’s phone because time had to be measured or it bled. Wade leaned against the hall wall and did not play a drum solo with the fingers he had to shove in his pockets to keep still.

The first test answered. Then the second. The third just agreed with a little extra smugness. Logan looked at the white plastic truths and closed his eyes until he saw stars.

Wade’s voice came quiet through the door. “Logan?”

“It’s real,” Logan said. The words made the floor differently solid. “It’s… yes.”

A beat. He could hear Wade breathe that in. Then, just as carefully: “Okay.”

Logan opened the door. Wade waited with his hands visible, as if approaching a skittish animal. He did not look for the plastic in Logan’s hand. He looked at Logan’s face and took his cue there.

“What do you want to do?” Wade asked.

Logan had been braced for a speech, even from Wade; everyone had a future they wanted to loan you. The question cut him off at the knees in a way that didn’t hurt. He gripped the doorframe. “Carry,” he said, surprised at himself and not. “Carry to term. Place for adoption.” The words came with their own gravity. “I can do that.”

Wade’s eyes didn’t change. He didn’t flinch, didn’t brighten, didn’t sag. He nodded once, a bow to a choice. “Okay. We do that.”

Logan waited for the part where it felt like losing. It didn’t. It felt like naming the thing he’d already decided in the dark. “I don’t want Stryker knowing.”

“Then he won’t,” Wade said. “We keep it need-to-know. Base medics are not need-to-know. We take you off anything that will hurt you.” He paused. “And we figure out how to keep you from puking on Victor’s boots. Although I support puking on Victor’s boots for morale.”

“Don’t make me laugh.” Logan scrubbed his hands over his face again. He felt tired in a way even his body couldn’t immediately fix. He felt, also, oddly steady. “Evan—” He stopped.

“Wants things,” Wade supplied when the silence stretched without turning to breaking. “And you already told him some of the truth.”

“He smiled,” Logan said, and the hook bit again. “I can’t make a family with him. I can’t give him what he wants to take from this. Not like that. Not now. Maybe not ever.”

Wade nodded, slow. “Then you can’t. Which is an answer. You don’t have to make your body a treaty with anyone.” He tilted his head. “Do you want me to go get your stuff?”

Logan blinked. “From his place?”

“From his place,” Wade said, like it wasn’t a thing that could get them both in particular kinds of trouble if anyone followed the string back to Stryker’s wall. “So you don’t have to be the one to look at the coasters and the yellow coat while you try to be brave. I can be tactless on your behalf.” He paused. “Or I can sit here and not talk and let you do it yourself. Your call.”

Logan thought about walking into that apartment, about the kettle and the fan and the rhythm that had made it possible to pretend. He thought about Evan’s hands, about the way ordinary had felt like a miracle until it didn’t. “I’ll do it,” he said. “I have to—” He gestured, helpless, at the shape of goodbye. “I can’t leave it to the wind.”

“Okay,” Wade said. He didn’t say do you want me with you. He didn’t need to. He simply stood and went hunting for his keys like a man who had already decided to go and was waiting for Logan to ask him aloud so it didn’t feel like pressure.

Logan sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the three white pieces of plastic like they were runes from a language he’d never wanted to learn. He put them back in the boxes and slid the boxes into Wade’s drawer because he didn’t want them in his hands anymore.

“Wilson,” he said.

Wade looked up, keys on one finger. “Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

Wade’s smile twitched, small and feral. “Anytime.”

They drove back into town like ghosts without names. Logan watched the night for ambushes that didn’t come. Wade kept his hands at ten and two and the engine between idles, quiet. The street where Evan lived was sleepy and respectable, lights off at a reasonable hour, every car parallel-parked with the kind of care that comes from HOA bylaws and neighborly shame.

Evan’s windows were dark. Logan stood on the sidewalk for a long minute and stared up like the building might blink first. Wade hung back by the truck with the posture of a man pretending he wasn’t ready to move very fast.

“I’ll be ten,” Logan said.

Wade nodded. “I’ll be two. Holler if you want me to be one.”

Logan went up. The key turned. The air smelled the same: detergent and onions and a thread of Evan’s cologne that didn’t fit on Logan’s skin and never would. The lamp on the side table cast a small circle when he clicked it on. He stood in it and listened to the rest of the apartment not care that he was there.

Evan came out of the bedroom in sweats, hair flattened on one side, eyes wide and exhausted. “Logan?” His voice caught on the sleep left in it. “Are you—” He stopped when he saw the bag on Logan’s shoulder. “Oh.”

“I’m here to get my stuff,” Logan said. He could’ve dressed it in apology. He didn’t. “I can’t—” He gestured, an ugly tired motion that meant everything and nothing. “I can’t do both. You and this.”

Evan’s mouth twisted. He didn’t nod this time. “You make it sound like you didn’t have a choice.”

Logan’s eyes narrowed. “Didn’t I?”

“I mean…” Evan rubbed the back of his neck, looking anywhere but Logan. “We’ve talked about it. You knew how I felt.”

“We talked about not having pups,” Logan said, voice flattening into something dangerous.

Evan’s gaze finally met his. There was a heat in it now, not shame, not regret—something sharper. “I’m an alpha, Logan. I’m supposed to have a family. You—you’re strong, healthy… it just made sense.”

The world in Logan’s head went still in a way that meant trouble. “What did you do?”

Evan flinched, then shrugged like it wasn’t the worst confession a man could make. “Stopped filling the prescription. Figured with the condoms too, we’d probably still be fine. But…” He spread his hands, as if the laws of biology were an excuse. “Guess not.”

Logan’s fists clenched. “You figured .”

“It’s not like it’s only my fault!” Evan’s voice rose, desperate and defensive. “You’re the one who kept sleeping with me. You knew I wanted this, and you kept—hell, you enjoyed it. Don’t act like you’re some innocent victim here.”

“I didn’t give you consent for this ,” Logan growled, low enough to vibrate the walls. “Don’t confuse sharing my bed with giving you my body to do whatever the hell you want.”

Evan’s jaw worked, but he didn’t back down. “You’ll see. Once she’s here, you’ll change your mind. You’ll thank me.”

The breath that came out of Logan was almost a laugh, but it had no humor. “Not a chance.” He slung the duffel over his shoulder without looking away from Evan. “You ever try to find me, you better pray I want to be found.”

He turned, walking out into the hall, boots heavy on the floor. He’d made it three steps when Evan’s voice cracked across the space—loud enough to wake the neighbors, loud enough to carry all the way to the street.

“You can’t just walk away from your own kid, Logan! What kind of omega does that?!”

Logan stopped dead. The duffel strap creaked under his grip. Behind him, a door across the hall cracked open and then shut again fast.

Evan wasn’t finished. “You think any alpha’s gonna want you after this? After you ditch a pup that’s yours?!”

The hallway seemed to narrow, his pulse thudding in his ears. He didn’t turn around—if he did, he might not stop walking until he’d put Evan through a wall.

At the curb, Wade had gone statue-still, head tilted toward the open door. His voice, when it came, was a blade drawn slow. “Logan.”

Logan stepped into view, eyes hard, jaw tight. Wade clocked the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands wouldn’t unclench, and then he glanced past him toward the apartment.

Evan had followed to the landing, still running his mouth. “You hear me? You owe me this—”

Wade moved. Just one step forward, enough to be seen in the glow from the stairwell. His stare locked with Evan’s, and the grin he gave wasn’t friendly. “Buddy, if you’ve got even a shred of self-preservation, you’re gonna shut that hole in your face before I come up there and make it ornamental.”

Evan froze. Wade didn’t raise his voice, but something in it promised follow-through.

Logan yanked the truck door open and got in without a word. Wade waited until the sound of the apartment door slamming reached the street before he followed.

They drove away in silence, the kind that hums with unspent violence. Wade didn’t fill it with jokes or comfort—just kept his hands steady on the wheel.

By the time they rolled past the gates of the compound, the duffel was still in Wade’s grip. He carried it all the way down the hall to his own quarters before Logan even realized they hadn’t gone to his bunk.

“Couch is clean,” Wade said, dropping the bag against the wall. “Blanket’s somewhere under the pile of not-dirty-enough laundry.”

Logan gave him a look. Wade shrugged, unapologetic. “You want quiet, I can do quiet. You want to talk, I can… attempt talking. Your call, pal.”

Logan didn’t answer right away. He just lowered himself onto the couch, elbows on his knees, staring at the scuffed floor. Then he leaned back, closed his eyes, and exhaled slow.

Wade let him be. The katanas stayed on the table, untouched. For once, the Merc with a Mouth didn’t say a damn thing.

That was how the night ended: Logan in the dim, wrapped in a silence he didn’t have to defend, with Wade standing sentry a few feet away—no orders, no questions, just there.

Chapter Text

Morning at the compound had its own weather. Not outside—the sky over the tarmac was a flat piece of metal, dawn filed thin by jet wash—but inside the corridors, where air moved in measured drafts, smelled of coffee grounds and solvent, of floor wax and the ghost of cordite. The building woke the way soldiers did: already listening.

Logan woke with it.

He was on Wade’s couch, which was less a piece of furniture and more a padded confession. His neck hurt in that honest way couches had. The blanket over him was the same hoodie Wade had thrown there sometime in the dark, weight familiar now, scent wedded to the room—detergent with ambitions, gun oil, the clean bite of oiled steel, and underneath it the warm-edged note that was just Wade. He breathed once, slow, and felt the night before roll back like surf.

Evan’s door. Evan’s voice going sharp in the hallway.

What kind of omega does that?

Logan’s jaw remembered the clench before his mind did. He uncurled his fingers one at a time and sat up. The room made no fuss about it. Wade was on the floor by the coffee table, back to the couch, legs folded in that boneless posture that meant he’d slept in sessions, if at all. One of the katanas lay across his lap like a sleeping animal. He wasn’t touching it. Guard-dog posture, open palms.

“You pretending to be dead?” Logan asked. His voice was gravel but alive.

Wade didn’t start. He opened his eyes as if he’d been resting them for a beat and tipped his head back enough to see Logan. “Only on the inside,” he said. Then, softer, “You want coffee or water?”

“Coffee.”

“Reckless,” Wade said approvingly, and stood with a stretch that cracked a vertebra or three. He moved around the small room like he knew every squeak of the floorboards and how to avoid it. The electric kettle he’d liberated from a British base somewhere hissed to life. He spooned grounds into a press with the kind of care he usually saved for explosives. “You get any sleep?”

“Enough.”

“Lies,” Wade said, not as accusation but as inventory. “Okay. We’ll upgrade you to ‘some’ later.”

Logan scrubbed a hand over his face. The headache behind his eyes had backed off, ceding territory to something less acute but no less present: an ache of hollowness that would pass or wouldn’t, depending. His stomach stood at parade rest, not thrilled, not mutinous. The nausea had the sense to stay curled up and pretend to be a thought instead of a wave. He could work with that.

Wade poured, waited, pressed, poured again. No chatter. He put the mug into Logan’s hand and let his fingers leave last like a baton pass. “Sugar?”

“Black.”

“You and your choices,” Wade murmured, but he didn’t argue. He leaned on the desk, cradled his own mug, watched the steam.

The quiet between them wasn’t empty. It was storage. Logan let it hold him. When the first swallow burned down, he could feel himself slot back into the outline of his day, if not his life. Get up. Move. Keep moving. If he didn’t have somewhere to put his body, his head chewed itself raw.

“We’ve got PT,” Wade said, like a weather report. “Zero bumped it to oh-eight because he likes to see us suffer in good light.”

“I’ll be there.”

Wade’s mouth twitched. “I figured you’d say that. I also figured I should say out loud that you don’t owe anyone your spine today.”

“Keeping it anyway,” Logan said. “Helps with posture.”

“Good for your brand.”

They drank in fresh silence. On the far wall, a paper calendar Wade had acquired from a vet clinic was still flipped to last month. Someone had circled three dates in red. One of them was today. Logan tried not to do the math. He failed. The numbers didn’t add up to anything he could use yet, so he let them go.

He stood, the hoodie slipping from his lap, and hesitated long enough to pick it up and toss it across Wade’s bed. He didn’t put it away. He didn’t analyze that, either.

“Shower’s yours,” Wade said. “Use the middle dial. Left is ‘cold mountain stream,’ right is ‘boil a lobster.’”

Logan grunted and obeyed. The water pounded the night out of his shoulders. He let it do as much work as it could, then braced his hands on tile and shut the water off before his brain offered him any small, stupid kindness like stay. He towel-dried, pulled on a clean T-shirt from his duffel and the same cargo pants, and stepped back into Wade’s room feeling more like a person-shaped weapon and less like a bruise.

Wade had made the bed. He would deny it if asked; the lines weren’t crisp enough to pass inspection. But the blanket was pulled smooth and the pillow wasn’t sulking at the corner. The small act landed like a note: this space will hold you. Wade was combing his hair with his fingers, which had limited success but made him look like he’d made an effort to be less of a feral raccoon.

“Ready?” Wade asked.

“Yeah.”

They walked the corridor together. The compound’s morning rhythm closed around them: the slap of boots, the flat clatter of cutlery from the mess, a door banging somewhere a hallway away. Logan carried the ache from last night the way he carried old break-lines in his bones. He didn’t plan to show it to anyone.

They cut through the mess for a quick pass at food. Fred Dukes was already there, occupying the space of three men and the appetite of five. He was halfway through a stack of pancakes that approximated architecture. He lifted his fork at them like a salute.

“Morning, tiny people,” Fred said. “Wilson. Howlett.”

“Strong breakfast,” Wade said, eyeing the stack. “Planning to wrestle a tractor?”

“Planning to wrestle my feelings,” Fred said happily. “Syrup helps.” He peered at Logan’s tray as Logan grabbed eggs and a piece of toast without looking. “That’s it? The hell, Howlett, you trying to blow away in a stiff breeze?”

“Leave him,” Wade said, too quickly and too easy for it to be a joke. “He’s got a delicate ecosystem today.”

Logan stabbed the eggs and gave Wade a look that meant shut up. Wade shut up. Fred’s smile turned low and speculative; even he knew when to let a thing go because it was barbed.

Agent Zero stalked in like the idea of a man pretending to be human. He took coffee like it was a punishment and stood at the end of their table without asking because he did everything without asking. “PT in ten,” he said. “Try not to embarrass yourselves.”

“Don’t worry,” Wade said. “I left my jazz hands in my other pants.”

Zero’s eyes slid to Logan, took in the half-eaten eggs, the paler-than-usual skin, and logged it without comment. “Hydrate,” he said instead. Which was his way of saying I see you without making it an event.

“Copy,” Logan said. He washed the eggs down with coffee because he couldn’t afford for his stomach to have opinions in front of this audience. The toast stayed untouched. Wade didn’t push it back toward him. He just nudged a sealed pack of saltines onto the corner of Logan’s tray like it had fallen there.

Victor appeared last, late on purpose, a shadow with shoulders and a mouth that liked problems. He glanced over the room and chose their orbit because of course he did. “Rise and grind,” he said, voice sandpaper. His eyes flicked over Logan, over the tray, over Wade’s too-casual stillness, and his nostrils flared once like a scent had crossed wires. “We doing laps or funerals?”

“Both,” Wade said pleasantly. “You run, I bury.”

“Dream big,” Victor said, not looking at him. His attention was a hovering hand on the back of Logan’s neck that didn’t touch. “You good?”

“Fine,” Logan said, the lie so worn it didn’t catch on his teeth.

Victor’s lip curled but he let it stand. “Don’t throw up on my boots.”

“Not aiming,” Logan said. He stood before anyone could ask him to, dumped the tray, and walked toward the doors. Wade fell in on his shoulder without being asked. Victor loomed a half-pace behind. Between them, Logan found his feet, which had been threatening to think about floating.

PT wasn’t complicated: laps around the perimeter, drills that made bodies into habits, pairs work that looked like fighting and sometimes was. The morning air gritted the lungs. The sky stayed that flat metal, scratched with jet trails. Zero took an unholy pleasure in whistle blasts. Fred ran like a freight train, slow to start and impossible to stop. Wraith didn’t sweat—which wasn’t true, but he made it look like it was.

Logan ran because running had always been the way to shut his brain up. The first lap ate the awkward heat in his legs. The second found the right gear. The third got greedy; his stomach clenched and sent up a flash of warning. He throttled down, smoothed his breathing, and let the pain become a low hum instead of a siren. Wade drifted to his outside like a sheepdog, corralling without touching. Victor paced him a stride back, eyes on the ground ahead, watching for holes.

Zero’s whistle shrieked. “Pairs!”

They broke and re-formed. Wade bounced on his toes in front of Logan, too bright to be safe. “Want me or do you want the human bear?”

“Wilson,” Zero called. “With me.”

Wade clutched his heart. “He does love me.” He jogged away with a wink over his shoulder. “Try not to let Creed eat you. I’m saving you for a snack.”

Victor stepped into Wade’s place, weight settled, hands loose. He didn’t grin. He didn’t need to. “Come on, runt,” he said, less challenge than invitation. “Let’s make Zero regret cardio.”

They moved. The first couple exchanges were polite—gloves on, a rhythm that let joints wake up. Then Victor pushed, as he always did. Logan met him, as he always did. The world pared down to footwork and timing, to the moment just before contact when you made a choice and the next three choices bloomed from it. Victor’s style was a map of violence; Logan had memorized the roads. They could do this without words. They had done it when words were a luxury.

The heat rose. The noises of the field narrowed to the sound of their feet. Victor feinted, and a sharp twist of nausea upended Logan’s balance. It wasn’t bad—just enough to flick his timing a fraction off. Victor’s eyes narrowed. He pulled the next hit, let it land soft where it would have caused a cracked rib. Logan snarled anyway, angry at the gift, and returned a clean shot that made Victor grunt and grin.

“Better,” Victor said. “Angry looks good on you.”

“Eat me,” Logan said.

“Later,” Victor said, and bumped him with a shoulder. Affection, in a language that pretended not to know the word.

Zero’s whistle cut again. “Break. Hydrate.”

Logan’s bottle was in his hand without him remembering lifting it. Wade had tossed his own to Victor and pressed a fresh one into Logan’s without fanfare. Logan drank. The water went down like silk. He realized his hands were shaking just a little and put the bottle down before anyone else did, as if that could undo it.

Wade looked like he was about to say something inadvisable. He didn’t. He tipped his head toward the barracks instead. “Mess has oranges. I am a great thief of citrus. Meet me after and we commit felony vitamin C.”

“Felony oranges,” Fred muttered, delighted. “Count me in.”

“Not you,” Wade said. “You’re on a list.”

“What list?” Fred asked, genuinely baffled.

“The one where you’re not allowed sharp peels,” Wade said. “You weaponize everything.”

Fred considered and did not deny it.

They finished PT without Logan throwing up or passing out or doing anything else undignified. He counted that a victory. His skin felt too tight, but the hum under his ribs had turned to something more manageable—a buzz, not a saw. The team bled toward the facility showers and the mess. Wade drifted with them, orbit unwavering around Logan like a moon that hadn’t decided its tides yet. Victor ranged ahead and back, restless, a shepherd that bit wolves.

Stryker intercepted them near the armory. He looked at Logan first and the rest second, which he rarely did and never meant anything good.

“Howlett,” Stryker said. “My office after chow.” The words were balanced between request and order. He didn’t wait for agreement. “All of you—debrief at fourteen hundred. Report from last night has holes. I don’t like holes.”

“Sir, holes are where the light gets in,” Wade said. “Leonard Cohen. Poet. Canadian.”

“I prefer my Canadians quiet,” Stryker said, not looking at him.

“Rude,” Wade murmured, but he shut up and watched Stryker’s back recede like a threat.

“Don’t let him smell a secret,” Victor said, low for Logan alone. “He collects them.”

Logan’s mouth went tight. “He won’t.”

“Say it again.”

“He won’t.” He didn’t know if he believed it, but he knew how to say a thing like he meant it until the world got tired of arguing.

Mess again, thinner crowd now. Wade made good on his citrus crime, palming two oranges and a lemon like a clown with a grudge. He rolled one orange to Logan without looking, turned the other over in his palm with absurd delicacy, then peeled it in one long spiral that he draped over Fred’s head like a laurel.

“King of Breakfast,” Wade announced.

Fred preened, then ate the peel. “Fiber.”

Logan’s stomach considered and decided not to revolt. He plucked a segment, sucked it dry, and pretended not to notice Wade not watching him do it. The acid cut the cotton taste in his mouth. It felt like getting away with something in a small, bright way.

After, the team scattered. Some people healed by working; some by pretending to. Logan took his tray back to Wade’s room, because his feet did it without asking him. Wade didn’t make a noise about it. He just propped the door open with a boot and let Logan in first.

Denial, Logan had decided, was a tool like any other. He could use it until it dulled. He could use it until something better came along. He did not, however, confuse it with ignorance. He knew what the tests in Wade’s drawer would still say if he took them out and asked and asked again.

So he didn’t ask. He cleaned his knives instead.

On Wade’s table, oil, cloth, a small kit of stones lived like a shrine. Wade gave a tiny, genuine sound of relief when Logan took a seat and set his blades out. Ritual was the closest thing either of them had to faith. Wade took the other side of the table with his own steel and the room settled into a click-and-drag rhythm, bright little chimes of metal meeting stone. They didn’t talk. It didn’t feel like avoiding. It felt like enough.

An hour slid by that way. The corridor outside did its noises: the distant bray of Fred laughing, the low-carried burr of Wraith telling a story to no one in particular, Zero’s boots being mad at the floor. Victor’s tread came and went like weather.

Logan finished the last blade and aligned it with the others. He caught himself over-scanning the room, eyes snagging on corners, on the low shelf under the window, on the missing piece of wall where a poster had been and wasn’t. He imagined—without meaning to—what it would look like if the shelf had a folded blanket on it. If the empty spot on the wall had a hook and the hook had something of his hanging from it. The thought shot through him like cold, turned to heat, and then to irritation at himself for having it.

“Stop,” he told his brain, out loud.

Wade didn’t look up. “Stopping.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Noted.” Wade set one blade aside, picked up another, considered its edge with a kind of fond pride, and said nothing else.

By noon, the repetitive motion had worn down the sharp corners inside Logan. He took a shower, put on a fresh shirt, and went to Stryker’s office because avoidance only worked when you weren’t on a leash. Wade didn’t ask to come. He took up a post in the hall instead and looked like furniture that would bite you.

Stryker made Logan stand. He didn’t offer a chair. The office was a collection of sharp edges—desk corners that had never met a thigh they didn’t want to bruise, a row of file cabinets whose locks gleamed like teeth. The blinds were angled to cut the light into ribs. Stryker stood behind his desk and looked like he liked the effect.

“You were down in the truck,” Stryker said, no preamble.

“I was up in under a minute,” Logan said.

“Under a minute is long enough to get men killed.” Stryker said it the way other men said good morning. “You sick?”

“No.”

“Lying to me is not a survival strategy.”

“Neither is telling you everything.” The words were out before Logan had a chance to smooth them. He didn’t apologize.

Stryker’s eyes did the small interested thing a cat’s did when a mouse showed unexpected teeth. “You are an asset, Howlett. I need assets that don’t fail. If you are compromised, I will know.”

“I am not compromised.” Logan held the man’s gaze. He did not blink. “You have my word.”

“Do I.” Stryker let the words hang until the weight of them should have bent the floor. When it didn’t, he shifted to the next tool in his kit: bureaucracy. “Your labs from the infirmary were… unusual.”

Logan didn’t move. “I heal fast.”

“And you have a talent for avoiding obvious answers,” Stryker said, almost admiring. “Stay sharp. I can’t afford a variable right now.” He let the dismissal be implied, then added, “Tell Wilson to keep his mouth shut in my briefings. The jokes make the men soft.”

“I’ll pass it along,” Logan said, which he would not.

Outside, Wade uncrossed his arms and read Logan’s face like a map he’d made himself. “We good?”

“We’re not bad.”

Wade nodded once. “I’ll take ‘not bad.’” He fell in beside him and didn’t ask what had been said. He didn’t make a show of not asking, either. It was oxygen to breathe.

Debrief at fourteen was long and precise. Zero ran it like an exorcism. Fred doodled a tank on the corner of his notes and shaded it in with somber care. Bolt spun his coin and caught it without looking; Wraith didn’t pretend to take notes. Wade contributed only when pressed; then he delivered a surgical strike of detail, all the jokes cut off at the neck. Victor spoke in short, bright facts, like teeth flashing.

When it was over, the afternoon lay in front of them. He went to the range and put rounds through a paper silhouette until the paper gave up any pretense of being a person. Wade didn’t shoot. He leaned on the doorframe and kept count in his head like a prayer. Victor appeared behind them halfway through a magazine, as if he’d followed the thread of Logan’s smell down the corridor without meaning to.

“You eating,” Victor said. Not a question.

“Later.”

“Now,” Victor said.

Wade raised an eyebrow. “Look at you, parenting.”

“Shut up, Wilson,” Victor said without heat. “He gets mean with no food.”

“I am mean on principle,” Logan said, but he set the pistol down because fighting Victor on a sentence that simple took a kind of energy that didn’t feel useful. He followed them to the mess like he was following his own shadow.

Lunch was stew that had once known a cow and rice that had never known a field. Logan took small portions; Wade took medium and pushed half onto Logan’s tray the way a man might move chess pieces. Victor loomed at the end of the table and ate with the delicate neatness of a man who had once starved and had decided food would not see him weak again.

Fred thumped down opposite with a tray that looked like a dare and grinned at Logan through steam. “You look less like warmed-over death,” he observed cheerfully. “Progress.”

“Thanks.”

“Welcome,” Fred said, then shrugged at his own manners as though surprised by them. “You want my bread?”

Logan shook his head. Wade took it and tore it in half and put one of the halves on Logan’s tray without looking. Victor watched this without comment. Zero, drifting past with a different timetable, watched everything, then pretended he had not.

The afternoon came on with weather that couldn’t decide. The sky went sullen, then mean, then decided it would rather be tired. The compound matched it. Someone had wrenched a hinge on one of the exterior doors; every time it opened, it made a noise like a small animal in a trap. Wade got a screwdriver and fixed it on his way to the gym, because it was easier to do the thing than to listen to it suffer. Logan did not say thank you because it was not his door and Wade did not say he was welcome because it had not been a favor. They both felt better anyway.

By late afternoon, Logan found himself back in his own bunk for the first time since last month. The room smelled like dust and laundry and the faint leftover of his own scent pressed into the mattress—territory he’d never bothered to defend because there’d never been a reason to. He stood in the doorway longer than he meant to, looking at the bed, at the shelf, at the locker whose door didn’t shut unless you hit it just right.

He told himself he’d only come to grab a book and a spare shirt. He knew it for a lie, even as he walked inside.

Nest-building wasn’t a thing he did. Not a thing he let himself do. That was for omegas more honest with themselves, or less jaded, or less stubborn about how far a man could get on denial alone. He’d trained his instincts into a tight little box and left them there to nap.

Which did not explain why his hands went to work on the bed without waiting for permission.

He pulled the sheet tight, hospital corners that would’ve passed even Zero’s inspection. He shook the thin blanket out, then went to Wade’s room and, without a word, took the hoodie from the bed where he’d left it and brought it back and set it on the pillow like it belonged there. He stood looking at it, then huffed at himself and pulled it into the bed instead, laid it in the hollow where his chest would go like a stand-in for a heat he refused to name.

He stepped back. The room felt less raw. He refused to examine why.

“Nice,” said a voice from the doorway.

Logan turned, claws a thought away, and found Victor leaning on the jamb with all the access of a cat.

“What,” Logan said flatly.

Victor’s gaze did a slow sweep of the room that took in everything Logan had done and everything he had not allowed himself to admit to doing. His mouth curved, not unkind. “You always were a tidy little animal when you stopped pretending to be furniture.”

Logan rolled his eyes. “Get out.”

“Mm,” Victor said, which wasn’t no but wasn’t any other word either. He stepped in instead, circled the bed once like a predator evaluating a den, and then, because he was Victor and had never learned the softer verbs, he took two steps and put a rough hand on the back of Logan’s neck.

The touch wasn’t a grab. It wasn’t a threat. It was weight and heat, a heavy palm against the hairline, fingers splayed, pressure steady. Claim without cage. Quinn—one of the handlers they’d had for a month in a different life—had called it a reset button for wolves. Victor didn’t call it anything. He just held, like a man bracing a beam so the wall didn’t bow.

For one beat, two, Logan wanted to fight him. For the third, he let himself have the stillness. The ground under him stopped humming. His shoulders dropped a fraction.

Victor released him like you released a lever—slowly. He stepped back with the same lack of noise. “Better,” he said.

“You try that again and I’ll bite you,” Logan said, but the heat in it had been bled off.

Victor shrugged, unbothered. “You would’ve already.” He tilted his chin at the hoodie. “Wilson know you took his stuff?”

“It’s not-”

“It is when he wears it.” Victor’s teeth flashed. “He’ll pretend not to notice so he doesn’t scare you. He’s good at that.”

“Stop reading me.”

“Stop being loud,” Victor said. Then, almost lazy, “They call you yet?”

“No.”

Victor’s face went thoughtful in a way that looked odd on it. “You want them to?”

“No,” Logan said. Then, honest without wanting to be, “Not right now.”

Victor nodded once like a general who had just seen his lines hold. “Come find me if you smell 'em anywhere near the fence.”

“He’s not suicidal,” Logan said.

Victor’s eyes went flat. “You are an optimist. It looks bad on you.” He left on that, like a door swinging shut.

Logan sat on the edge of the bed he’d made and put his elbows on his knees. He did not bury his face in the hoodie. He let his fingers catch on the seam and then released it like it was hot. He breathed. The air smelled like him and Wade in a ratio that calmed his skin. He stood before he could think about that, took the book he’d come for, and went back to Wade’s room like the corridor was a river he knew by heart.

Evening found them the way afternoon had left them: at the table, steel in their hands. Then the light shifted and Wade put the oil away and dug under the bed and came up with a cardboard box that rattled like old screws.

“Cards,” he announced.

“You playing me for money?”

“Please,” Wade said. “I’m playing you for the honor of making Fred cry.”

“I don’t cry,” Fred said from the doorway, appearing with the stealth of a parade. “I leak.” He shuffled in, saw the box, and gleamed. “What are we playing?”

“Something with rules that are very flexible,” Wade said. “Victor, you in?”

Victor’s shadow darkened the threshold before his body did. “I don’t sit,” he said, then sat in Wade’s desk chair like a king slumming it. Zero appeared with a cup of something colorless and stood like he had better things to do and was doing this as charity to their social development.

“Wraith?” Wade called down the hall.

“Pass,” came the voice of a man already halfway through a cigarette in a place they weren’t supposed to smoke.

They played something that started as war and ended as a hybrid of blackjack and ritual humiliation. Wade narrated like a sports announcer with a head injury. Fred cheated like a man who believed that if you didn’t get caught it didn’t count. Zero did not cheat and still seemed offended by everyone else’s methods. Victor didn’t bother with cards; he watched faces, won more often than not, and when he lost he did it with the air of a man indulging children.

Logan got worse as the game went on because his attention drifted in and out, resting on the doorway, the window, the places a threat might come from. The old habit was worse today, the edges of his senses flaring and dying back like fish under the surface. Wade noticed that, too, because of course he did. He didn’t mention it. He just swapped seats with Logan under the pretense of “better light” so he could take the angle facing the door.

“Protective much,” Zero murmured, more observation than insult.

Wade smiled without showing teeth. “Only of the good ones.”

Victor’s eyes flicked between them, reading a book he had pretended not to want to open. “Play,” he said, and the night went softer around the edges of that word.

They broke for dinner, which was worse than lunch in exciting new ways. Logan ate enough to count, then put his fork down and ignored Fred’s wounded look. The team dispersed to whatever called to them—gym, rack, roof. Wade stood in the doorway like he’d forgotten where he’d meant to go and then remembered and decided it had been here all along.

“Walk?” he asked.

Logan considered. A lap of the outer fence in the dark meant air and a chance to put the world back into columns. He nodded.

They walked the perimeter. The fence buzzed its low, stupid song. The night was fifty shades of military: the red wink of a tower light, the washed-out moon, the smell of fuel and grass cut too short. Wade didn’t try to hold the conversation up by himself. He let silence do most of the lifting and, when he did talk, it was about nothing—a joke about Fred’s peel crown, a grumble about Zero’s whistle, a dumb story about a dog that had once tried to steal his boot in a village that no longer existed.

Halfway around, Logan stopped for no good reason and put a hand on the fence, feeling the hum up his arm. Wade stopped with him and leaned his shoulder to Logan’s without trying to. The point of contact was a match head. Logan didn’t move away.

“I’m not—” Logan started, then broke it and tried a different door. “This doesn’t have to be anything you don’t want it to be.”

“Everything I want it to be,” Wade said lightly, then, gentling, “and nothing you don’t.” He took his shoulder away so Logan could have the choice to miss it.

They finished the lap and went back inside. The hallways had gone quieter. Even men who had outgrown sleep at least practiced it. Wade’s door shut with a snick that sounded like privacy.

Night came with boots toed off under the table and a blanket tugged down from the bed and draped over the couch without comment. Logan took his book, flipped three pages without reading them, and let it fall to his lap. Wade sat on the floor again, back to the couch, the pose that had become something like a promise.

“You don’t have to babysit me,” Logan said. It had to be said, even if it got ignored.

“Good,” Wade said. “I hate kids.”

“Liar.”

“Not about that part,” Wade said, voice almost a yawn. “I like you, though.” He tipped his head back until it bumped Logan’s knee and left it there a beat before he shifted forward so it wouldn’t feel like he was trapping him against the couch. “You tell me if you want me gone and I’ll stage a very dramatic exit. I’ll set off a smoke bomb. Everyone will clap.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Copy,” Wade said, and stayed.

Logan read three lines and forgot them. His eyes felt dry. His body felt used in the good way and frayed in the new way. A quiet itch under his skin told him to drag something soft toward himself and build a wall with it and breathe behind the wall. He had made a bed in his room that would do, eventually. He was here.

Wade shifted once, twice, a man finding comfortable in a body that had never quite agreed with him. He reached up without looking and pulled the blanket higher over Logan’s knees the way a man might do if sleep had already cast its first rope. It was a small, intimate motion. It didn’t ask. It just… did.

Logan let his eyes close.

Somewhere at the edge of sleep, footsteps came down the hall and paused outside Wade’s door. The moment stretched. Wade’s hand went to the hilt of the nearer katana, casual as a breath. Then the footsteps passed on—Zero’s gait, precise even when tired.

Logan slept without dreams he could remember. If he woke at some edge of the night with his hand fisted in the fabric of Wade’s blanket where it lay over his chest, no one mentioned it in the morning. The room didn’t tattle.

Morning would come and Stryker would have more orders and the team would make an art of pretending to be normal. But in the first month, in the first quiet stretch after the break—denial did its job, nesting crept in around the edges, and Wade’s orbit stayed steady. Victor watched from the doorways and from the edges of drills, and when Logan stumbled he was there, a hand on the back of the neck again for the briefest second, a push, a promise:

Get up. You’re not alone.

The compound respected nothing softer than steel. They made their own softness, hidden like contraband, treasured like ammunition. And for now—for this moment—that was enough.

Chapter Text

Two months had passed in Stryker’s compound, though Logan could’ve sworn it was years. The place didn’t measure time by calendars or seasons, not really. It measured it in drills, in the grating bark of orders at dawn, in bruises collected and healed before the next set. The winter outside deepened, but inside the compound there was only steel and fluorescent light, humming generators, and the constant scrape of boots across concrete floors. Even silence here had teeth.

Every morning started the same: cold air biting at bare skin, the low buzz of fluorescent lights, the metallic tang of recycled heat. Orders came early, before the sun had even cracked the frost. “Up. Move. Train.” Those words were the pulse of the compound.

For Logan, every dawn was a private war. Getting vertical meant bracing against the floor so it wouldn’t tilt under his boots. His stomach had turned against him weeks ago, and whatever this sickness was, it went beyond “morning” sickness. It didn’t care for hours or mercy. The nausea lingered all day, an undertow that pulled at his strength no matter how tightly he gritted his jaw. He would drag himself upright, chest heaving like he’d already gone a round, sweat cooling before breakfast. And then came the drills: sparring until his knees wobbled, running until his lungs threatened mutiny, holding his blade steady while his stomach threatened to betray him.

He still fought. He always fought. But each movement took more out of him than he wanted to admit. Some mornings, tying his boots felt like dragging barbed wire through his veins.

And Wade noticed.

Wade had been watching from the very first week, the way a guard dog noticed a shift in the air. At first, it was all jokes — the classic Deadpool defense mechanism. Quips about Logan’s complexion, wisecracks about how he was “bringing pale chic back into style,” comments that maybe Logan was allergic to Stryker’s bullshit and should be excused from duty on medical grounds. Logan responded with grunts, curses, or a fist to Wade’s shoulder, but none of it discouraged him. Wade never shut up.

But eventually, the humor started to wear thin, like old paint cracking on rusted iron. Jokes gave way to gestures. A mug of tea shoved across the table, no commentary attached. A protein bar slipped into Logan’s locker before drills. Toast appearing in his hand when he passed the mess line too quickly to grab food himself. Wade’s way of saying what he wouldn’t risk in words: I see you. I know something’s wrong. You don’t have to white-knuckle through it alone.

Of course, Wade being Wade, sometimes his caretaking was a battlefield of its own. He decided one morning to cook. Earnest effort, genuine intent… catastrophic result. The eggs came out rubbery, his oatmeal congealed into gray sludge, and the pancakes — God, the pancakes — were a weaponized horror. He presented them proudly, as if he hadn’t just created a crime scene on a plate. Logan, too tired to argue, ate anyway.

The next attempt ended with Wade setting off the fire suppression system. The mess hall rained foam like chemical snow, alarms blaring, while Fred nearly choked from laughing and Zero snarled loud enough to shake the steel beams. Wade stood in the middle of it, covered in white foam, spatula in hand, declaring, “Nailed it!” Logan, against all reason, still ate what he could salvage. That was all Wade wanted.

And Logan hated how much it mattered. Hated that Wade’s sharp eyes tracked him like he was waiting for something to snap. Hated that the attention dug under his skin. But there was a strange safety in it too, one he didn’t want to name.

The secrecy, though — that was the hardest part.

Stryker’s compound wasn’t a place where softness survived. Vulnerability here was blood in shark-infested water. Logan knew how to hide it; hell, hiding was his first instinct. He pulled his shoulders tighter, kept his temper sharper, kept his eyes on every exit. But the strain grew visible in ways he couldn’t control. His grip slipped on weapons. His body lagged half a beat. His voice carried more gravel than usual, frayed edges showing through.

And in a place like this, every sparring match was an interrogation. Every too-loud laugh in the mess could shift into mockery. Every stumble risked exposure.

Wade wasn’t subtle when he finally broke.

It was late one night, the lull between training cycles. Logan had finally sat down, shoulders aching from drills that had wrung him out, when Wade dropped a pack of cards onto the table between them. Only — he didn’t deal. He just leaned back in his chair, body loose but eyes too sharp, and studied Logan with a silence that was too careful.

Then he said, quiet but cutting, “We should get out of here. Just you and me. We’ve got the cash. We find a place. Somewhere no one’s looking over your shoulder.”

Logan’s refusal was fast, sharp, too certain. “Ain’t happenin’.”

Wade didn’t push — not with words. He just nodded once, leaned back further, shuffled the pack without playing. But his eyes said it wasn’t finished.

And Logan knew it wasn’t.

The gym smelled like sweat, gun oil, and old mats that had soaked up too many fights. The heating system barely reached this wing, so the cold bit at Logan’s skin as he rolled his shoulders, claws itching just under the surface. Sparring with Victor wasn’t training — it was survival. Every session carried an edge, a half-played-out war that never really ended between them.

But today, Logan felt it before the first strike. His body was dragging, lead-limbed and sluggish in ways that made his instincts scream. He forced his stance solid, forced his breath steady, but every motion came a half-beat too late. He blocked when he should’ve countered, ducked when he should’ve pressed forward.

Victor noticed. He always noticed.

The first few exchanges were easy for him — too easy. Logan’s jabs lacked their usual weight, and when Victor caught his wrist and twisted, Logan’s growl lacked bite. His stomach lurched, nausea dragging across his gut, and for a moment the gym tilted sideways.

That’s all Victor needed.

The takedown came brutal, efficient. Victor slammed him into the mat hard enough that the breath blasted out of Logan’s chest. A meaty hand pinned him by the collarbone, claws pricking just close enough to remind him who had the upper hand.

Victor leaned close, breath steaming in the chilled air. “What the hell’s your problem, runt? You’ve been dragging your ass for weeks.”

Logan snarled, tried to shove him off, but the push lacked power. “Drop it.”

Victor’s yellow eyes narrowed. He wasn’t buying it. He pressed harder, his weight a wall Logan couldn’t throw. “You don’t get sloppy. Not you. So what’s the game? You sick? Injured?”

“Back off.” Logan’s voice cracked more than it growled. His chest heaved with the effort of holding his mask in place. The panic was rising, sharp and hot, bubbling under his skin.

Victor’s nose twitched, sharp, predatory. He inhaled, then stilled. His grip loosened, not in pity but recognition. The silence stretched a beat too long before he muttered, low, almost disbelieving: “…Oh.”

Logan froze under him. His claws unsheathed with a shink, more instinct than threat. “…What?”

Victor leaned back, eyes narrowing, the predator studying prey that wasn’t prey at all. His voice dropped, steady and sure. “You’re—”

“Don’t.” The word shot out of Logan before he could cage it, raw and ragged like a wound. His heart slammed against his ribs. “Don’t say it.”

Victor’s mouth curled, not in cruelty but grim acknowledgment. “Pregnant.”

The word detonated in the air, louder than a gunshot, heavier than the steel beams overhead. Logan flinched like it had hit him physically. His chest locked up, his breath faltered.

“Shut the fuck up,” Logan spat, voice breaking around it. He shoved again, harder this time, and scrambled free when Victor let him. His boots squeaked against the mat as he staggered up, chest heaving, eyes darting toward the gym doors like someone might’ve heard. “Shit—shit, I shouldn’t have—”

Victor crouched back on his haunches, big hands braced against his knees. For once, he didn’t sneer. He didn’t lunge. His voice came low, almost steady. “Easy, runt. Breathe. Nobody else heard. Just me.”

Logan’s hands trembled as he pressed them to his thighs, trying to ground himself, trying to breathe. His body was betraying him — heat in his chest, nausea clawing up his throat, the thrum of panic that refused to settle. “If Stryker—”

“He won’t.” Victor cut him off like the words were knives. His voice was hard, certain, lethal. “Not from me. Not from anyone. I’ll rip out throats before that happens.”

Logan’s head snapped up, eyes wide, searching for the lie. But there wasn’t one. Not in Victor’s posture, not in his eyes, not in the way his claws dug into the mat. For once, the panic eased a notch, not gone but no longer crushing.

Victor’s mouth tugged, the ghost of something that might’ve been a smile. “We need to get you outta here.”

Logan barked a laugh, too raw to sound like humor. “Wade’s been sayin’ that.”

“Then I’m in,” Victor said, standing with the slow, deliberate ease of a predator who knew he wasn’t in danger. He loomed over Logan, broad-shouldered and certain. “No way that loudmouth alpha’s takin’ my little brother omega anywhere without me.”

The words landed heavier than Victor probably meant them to. Brother. Omega. They tasted strange on Logan’s tongue, grounding and infuriating all at once. His first instinct was to snarl, to reject the label, to shove it back down into the dark. But his body was too tired, his chest too raw, and some part of him — the part that remembered when Victor’s shadow used to mean safety instead of rivalry — held onto it.

“You’ll blow this wide open if you keep talkin’ like that,” Logan muttered.

Victor tilted his head, eyes glinting. “Then we keep it quiet. But don’t think you’re handling this alone anymore. You can growl, you can snap, you can pretend you don’t need it — but I’m not leaving you in this compound’s jaws by yourself.”

Logan wanted to fight him on it. He really did. His pride bristled, his instincts snarled. But standing there, lungs still ragged, his brother’s promise heavy in the air, he couldn’t. He didn’t have the strength.

Victor must’ve seen it. His gaze softened — as much as Victor’s ever did — and he grunted. “C’mon. Let’s get you outta here before anyone comes sniffing.”

Logan swallowed hard, shoved his claws back in, and nodded once. Just once.

The conspiracy began the way most dangerous things did in the compound: quietly, with more instinct than plan.

Wade wasn’t built for subtlety, but he tried. His first overture was small, an almost-clumsy attempt at restraint—less banter, fewer eyes lingering too long on Logan in the mess. Victor, on the other hand, had never trafficked in subtlety at all. His brand of secrecy was sharp-edged, silent, a wolf circling without announcing its hunt. Where Wade smothered with jokes and poorly timed care, Victor hovered like a stormcloud, steady, promising violence without needing to spell it out.

The two of them orbiting Logan in the same direction was a strange sight. Stranger still was the fact that neither tore into the other. They had a common enemy now: time. Stryker’s gaze. The risk of discovery.

The first night they shared words about it, Wade was still awake at two in the morning, sitting cross-legged on his bunk with a deck of bent cards in his hands. Victor walked past, the silence of his boots almost unnatural for a man his size. He paused.

“Go to sleep, Wilson,” Victor muttered.

“Sleep is for people who aren’t secretly plotting high-risk jailbreaks,” Wade shot back, voice pitched low.

Victor’s head turned, eyes narrowing in the dim light. Not a denial. Not even a surprise. Just the quiet acceptance of someone who had been circling the same thought.

Logan, restless across the room, shifted in his sheets but didn’t wake. Wade gestured toward him with a flick of the card deck. “He’s not going to last here. You see it. I see it. Stryker will see it, and then…” He let the sentence bleed out. Everyone knew what “then” meant.

Victor leaned against the wall, folding his arms. “You’ll spook him if you push too hard.”

“I spook him if I breathe too hard,” Wade said, lips quirking, but his eyes were serious. “Doesn’t change the fact that we have to move.”

Victor’s silence was assent. The first crack in the wall between them.

Within a week, the rest of the squad had caught wind. It wasn’t intentional. Wade was incapable of shutting up, and Victor’s looming watchfulness was its own kind of broadcast. Fred picked it up first, his laugh too sharp one breakfast when Wade shoved burnt toast into Logan’s hand.

“You’re gonna starve him or smoke him out, Deadpool,” Fred rumbled. “One or the other.”

“Or both!” Wade said brightly, earning a low growl from Logan.

But Fred didn’t miss the way Logan ate the toast anyway. He didn’t miss the faint tremor in Logan’s hands when he thought no one was watching. Fred’s grin faded into something quieter, and by the time lunch rolled around, he’d started dropping portions of his oversized meals onto Logan’s tray, grumbling excuses about “extra calories” like it wasn’t obvious.

Bolt followed. Wraith wasn’t far behind.

By the end of the month, the compound’s mess line was full of sideways glances, jokes that weren’t quite jokes, and a collective unspoken truth: they were building something. A plan, a shield, maybe even a home.

The practical side of things came first. Wade started pulling property listings off shady back channels like he was window-shopping on a lawless version of Zillow. His taste leaned absurd: glass-walled penthouses, infinity pools hanging over cliffs, futuristic cubes of concrete and steel.

Victor rejected them all with snarling disdain.

“We’re not buying a death trap,” Victor said, stabbing a finger at a glossy photo of a high-rise loft Wade had spread across the mess table. “One sniper and he’s gone.”

“Or one thunderstorm and you’re all bored to death!” Wade argued. “He deserves a view. And a pool. And one of those giant showers with like fifteen nozzles. C’mon, don’t you want him pampered?”

Victor growled, low and long. “He needs walls. Quiet. Somewhere no one can see him coming or going.”

They bickered so loudly in the dinner line that Zero finally barked at them, “Shut the hell up or I’ll end both your house-hunting careers with a bullet.”

It didn’t stop them.

Fred joined in, insisting that wherever Logan ended up, there had better be a kitchen big enough for “real food,” not Wade’s culinary war crimes. Bolt pushed for helipads and garages. Wraith, deadpan as ever, suggested multiple safehouses, backup generators, and three separate escape tunnels, as if he were casually proposing a grocery list.

The absurdity of it all would have been laughable—if it weren’t deadly serious beneath the noise.

The strangest part was when they actually asked Logan what he wanted.

One night, after another round of arguments, Wade slammed a folder onto the table in front of him. “Alright, sunshine. Pick one. Victor’s already vetoed everything fun, but maybe you can be the tie-breaker before we strangle each other.”

Logan stared at the papers, unimpressed. “Walls. Roof. Quiet. That’s it.”

Victor snorted. “That’s not a choice, that’s survival. Try again.”

Logan’s hand shifted, unconsciously brushing against the flat of his stomach. His voice dropped, softer than he meant it to. “Somewhere to grow. Not just for me.”

The air in the room changed. Wade went still, his grin flickering out at the edges. Victor looked away like the words had been too sharp to face head-on. Even Fred, for once, didn’t joke.

It was the first time Logan admitted—even accidentally—that he wanted something beyond the compound. Something that sounded dangerously like hope.

Of course, whispers traveled fast. Too fast. For all their attempts at secrecy, the noise grew, the jokes got bolder, and Wade never could keep his mouth shut. By the time word reached command, it was less rumor and more certainty.

Stryker’s response was swift and absolute. “No.”

The word landed like a hammer. No discussion. No reasoning. No acknowledgment of the storm already circling his prized asset. Just denial, sharp and final.

But Victor and Wraith weren’t deterred.

Wraith came armed with logic and bureaucracy, spinning arguments about operational efficiency, long-term stability, and the need to keep Wade’s chaos from blowing holes in the compound walls. He framed relocation as discipline, not mercy. Strategy, not sentiment.

Victor, on the other hand, used fewer words. More volume. More threat. “You want control of this unit? Fine. Then you let us move, or you’ll have bigger problems than logistics.”

Stryker’s jaw worked like stone grinding against stone. He looked between the two of them, weighing their leverage, their loyalty—or at least the illusion of it. Finally, with a dismissive flick of his hand, he gave the rope.

“Fine. Whatever.”

That was all they needed.

The conspiracy solidified overnight.

Fred drew up menus and swore he’d cook “as long as it meant not choking down Wade’s burnt offerings.” Bolt ordered amenities off black-market catalogs, half-serious, half because it amused him to picture Logan playing pool in some secure bunker. Wraith made spreadsheets with escape routes and contingency plans. Victor stalked property records, searching for land so secluded even satellites would struggle to pin it down.

And Wade… Wade threw himself into logistics with a manic energy that made everyone nervous. He joked louder, argued harder, and kept Logan in his orbit like he couldn’t risk him slipping away.

It became the compound’s worst-kept secret. Not because anyone said it outright, but because secrets couldn’t stay quiet where fear and hope tangled together. Everyone felt it: something was shifting.

For Logan, the weight doubled. Every day was a tightrope between dread and something dangerously close to relief. On the one hand, secrecy was survival. On the other, the conspiracy itself was proof he wasn’t alone anymore—and that was terrifying in its own right.

Nausea and exhaustion still dogged his steps, but Wade’s constant presence, Victor’s steady growl, Fred’s unexpected softness, even Wraith’s dry assurances—they built a net under him. Fragile, makeshift, but real.

And though he’d never say it aloud, Logan caught himself leaning into it. Trusting it. Letting himself imagine, in rare, reckless moments, what it would mean to live beyond these walls.

It was madness. It was dangerous.

It was hope.

The week shrank to numbers on a whiteboard: 7, 6, 5. The compound’s clocks never mattered before—drills ruled more than hands sweeping a dial—but suddenly time had weight. It lived in Wraith’s neatly printed timetables and in the smeared notes Bolt scrawled on the back of his hand. It lived in Fred’s grocery lists and in the extra sets of keys Victor kept patting like talismans. Mostly, it lived in Logan’s ribs, beating louder the smaller the numbers got.

Day Seven was for “nonessentials,” a word that meant anything you could explain away. Wade and Victor started with the obvious: weapons crates that were technically range overflow and technically not anyone else’s business. Bolt signed out a dolly with a straight face and a forged signature that looked like a doctor’s or a deity’s; no one questioned it because he argued like gravity. Wraith logged the movement in three different systems with the exact amount of clerical mediocrity that made auditors glaze over.

It rained slush and dirty light that morning. Wade whistled as he worked—off-key, persistent, a noise that sounded like calm if you didn’t know him. He stacked the crates with a showman’s flourish and then, when no one was watching, ran his thumb along the edge to make sure the latch had truly caught. Victor carried everything heavy as if to prove a point to the floor.

Logan watched from the edge of the bay door with his hands sunk in the pockets of a jacket that wasn’t warm enough. There was a cramped, private ache under his sternum—anxious and anticipatory at once. The baby rolled low and slow, that strange, unavoidable proof that his body had been doing work without his permission. He didn’t touch the curve; he wasn’t ready to make it a gesture someone could read. He watched Wade instead—the broad back under a flannel Logan recognized from his own nest—and told himself he was tracking exits.

“Cold,” Victor said without turning, which was how you knew he’d noticed Logan shiver.

“Thought I’d try it,” Logan said.

Wade shot him a grin over his shoulder. “Bold new experiment: temperature. Next week we tackle soup.”

“Try pancakes again and I’m moving without you,” Logan muttered, but his mouth tilted.

Day Six belonged to domestic camouflage. Fred declared a stew emergency and turned the mess into an aroma factory. Onions hit the hot pan and wept; garlic followed, then meat browned until the air tasted like iron and rosemary. Fred stirred with a spoon the size of a canoe paddle, guarding the pot like a dragon. He ladled samples for anyone with a pulse, including the gate crew and the bored second-shift techs. By the end of the day, the corridor by the service entrance smelled like home and cumin, which meant it didn’t smell like fear.

“Needs salt,” the gate guard said, smacking his lips.

Fred handed him a shaker and a look. “You need taste buds.”

Bolt made the camera hiccup exactly twice, exactly six minutes each, precisely when the halls were loudest. The hiccup registered on a log rife with similar hiccups; it had always been a building with ghosts. Wraith stayed visible when he needed to be—the clipboard, the pen, the hold please—then gone the rest of the time, a seam the compound forgot to stitch. Zero squinted at the bustle and barked twice about “mission readiness,” and Wade agreed so enthusiastically that Zero’s suspicion tripped over its own feet.

Day Five wore thin. Tension ran its teeth along the edges of the plan. Stryker prowled more; the air changed when he did, the way thunderheads change light. He caught Victor outside the armory and asked one question too many in a voice too mild. Victor gave him answers that were all bone and no meat. Wraith left an innocuous folder on Stryker’s desk at the perfect moment—a budget sheet full of acronyms and rows that added up to boredom. Stryker flipped two pages, grunted, and let the scent of chili lure him back to the mess.

That night, Wade found Logan in the laundry room because he’d run out of places not to find him. Spin cycles thumped like a heartbeat through the floor; fluorescent lights buzzed like flies. Logan had a white undershirt in his hands he wasn’t folding. It hung there limp between his fingers, his knuckles pale.

“You hiding from Fred’s stew?” Wade asked gently.

“Hiding from your face,” Logan said, and didn’t move. The humor didn’t land. He looked exhausted down to the tendon. “How many more crates can we sneak from before someone notices they’re lighter?”

“Two a day, three if Bolt does his magic words,” Wade said. He propped a hip against the useless folding table. “We’re on pace.”

Logan’s jaw worked. “Feels like the tide’s higher every hour.”

“That’s because it is,” Wade said, and for once didn’t bring a joke to a knife fight. “We ride it. We don’t drown.”

“Stop sayin’ drown,” Logan said, but the edge in his voice had worn itself out.

Wade took one step closer, then caught himself—don’t crowd the animal that’s backing itself into a corner. He angled toward the machine instead, pretended to watch the clothes rotate. “I could give you a list of things that are going right. It would be long. It would be boring. It would lull you into a nap.”

“Give me one,” Logan said.

“Fred got the gate guard to talk about high school football for nine minutes while Victor forgot his paperwork in plain sight and went back for it.”

“That doesn’t sound right.”

“It is. In the annals of espionage, it shall be known as The Great Paperwork Oopsie.” Wade tapped the washer with a knuckle. “And Bolt found a route through the pines that won’t rattle your teeth out.”

“Didn’t know I was going,” Logan said, too quick, too sharp.

“You are,” Wade said, just as quick, just as sure. “You’ll pretend not to. Then you will. That’s the dance.”

Logan closed his eyes. The washer hummed. His hand finally moved, origami-folded the shirt with the kind of precision he reserved for knives and delicate missions. “You talk like the thing already happened.”

“That’s how you stop your hands from shaking,” Wade said.

Day Four, Wraith switched to a smaller clipboard. It was the kind of change no one saw unless they were looking for the shape of a lie. Victor began carrying a duffel even in the mess, because a man like him always looked like he had somewhere to be. Bolt replaced a flickering hallway bulb with one that flickered exactly the same amount; familiarity breeds blindness. Logan sat through a briefing with Stryker and didn’t flinch when Stryker’s gaze dragged across him like sandpaper. Wade sat at Logan’s shoulder and didn’t blink when Stryker’s gaze landed on him for one extra beat, a silent how much of this mess is yours.

“All of it,” Wade could have said. He didn’t. He smiled like a man who didn’t know how to keep a secret and then kept the biggest one anyway.

Day Three cracked something loose.

The team ran drills in the south field; wind knifed through their layers and found the skin under. Logan’s breath plumed too fast in the cold. He kept moving because motion was safer than any confession. He took a hit he shouldn’t have taken and rolled with it because the roll would read as skill not fatigue. Victor stalked the perimeter like a rumor with teeth. Wade played the clown: too loud, distracted, getting reamed by Zero for a sloppy reload that wasn’t sloppy so much as a tableau. Bolt tripped a switch in the comms shack that made someone swear forty yards away. Wraith marked a time on his schedule with a pencil sharpened to a needle.

That afternoon, Fred cornered Logan by the coffee urn and pulled a Tupperware out of nowhere like he’d conjured it. “Eat this or I’ll chew it for you,” he said, only half-joking. Inside: rice, chicken, something green chopped into sincerity. Logan made a face. Fred held his ground. “Protein. Salt. don’t argue.”

“How do you know,” Logan asked, because sometimes a fight is a way to say thank you.

Fred’s eyes softened but his mouth stayed stubborn. “Because I’ve made stew for people who needed it and you smell like a man who needs it.” He thrust the fork into Logan’s hand. “Eat. Or I tell Wade you prefer his pancakes.”

Logan ate. He didn’t thank him. Fred didn’t need it. That was the point.

Day Two, the cabin keys exchanged hands for real. Wraith passed them to Victor in a corridor that smelled like bleach and old sweat. The keys were on a ring with a piece of green cord frayed from use. It looked like nothing. It felt like a door.

“Utilities are on by accident,” Wraith said, which meant he’d paid cash and somebody had lost a line item in a ledger. “Stove’s temperamental. Turn the front left burner with patience.”

Victor took them like they weighed something valuable. “Perimeter?”

“Ice crust on the back trail. Motion lights on low sensitivity. Two cameras disabled, one left as a pet.”

“Pet?” Wade asked.

“I needed to let something see us,” Wraith said. “If everything is blind, someone gets suspicious. If one thing blinks, they blame that thing.”

Bolt popped his head out of a supply closet just in time to catch that and grin. “He’s saying leave crumbs in the wrong kitchen.”

“Exactly,” Wraith murmured, and ghosted away.

The Night Before had edges.

The plan calcified at dinner like bones setting: first load at dawn—no rush, no panic, two crates and a duffel and a man who looks like he forgot coffee. Victor drives. Wade rides. Bolt hovers near the east corridor with a wrench and a frown. Fred stations himself at the gate with soup and opinions about cumin. Wraith wears the clipboard like a crown.

They didn’t say Logan’s name. They didn’t have to. He sat in the noise and let it move around him like weather. The baby shifted and stuck a foot under his ribs, insistent. He put a palm to the ache through his shirt. Wade saw the gesture; pretended he didn’t; shifted his chair half an inch closer like gravity had demanded it.

When the plates were cleared and the mess returned to stainless quiet, the house of the compound stacked itself into night. The corridors narrowed; the vents hummed lullabies made by machinery. Boots thudded and then stopped. Doors sighed.

Logan tried his bunk and found sleep was a rumor. His body was tired; his brain made lists. He got up, sat down, got up again. The room had collected Wade’s scent in hairline cracks: flannel left too long on a chair back, the memory of a laugh in the corner. He pulled that scent toward him without touching anything, a habit he hated and needed. He was standing at the sink throwing cold water on his face when the knock came—soft, the way people knock when they’ve learned you have a temper you aim at mercy.

“Yeah,” Logan said, because refusing Wade the door hadn’t worked even when he wanted it to.

Wade slid inside sideways, because he always entered a room like a joke he hadn’t figured out the punchline to yet. Tonight, he didn’t hunt for one. He held up a thermos like a peace offering. “Chamomile. Don’t make a face, it’s legally tea.”

Logan took it because the cup was warm. The steam loosened something in his sinuses, and the lavender Fred had snuck into it worked like a hand on the back of his neck. “You got the keys?”

Wade tipped his chin toward his chest. The ring hung on a thin piece of black cord under his shirt; he pulled it out with two fingers. The keys clinked. Logan stared at them. The sound traveled through him more than to him.

“You ready,” Wade asked, soft.

“No,” Logan said, honest.

Wade nodded like that was an answer that solved a problem. “Yeah. Me neither.” He slid down the wall and sat on the floor with his knees up, arms around them—a posture he’d perfected to look casual and make himself smaller around people who needed the space. He took a breath like he’d practiced even breathing to keep other people calm. “You want the speech or the silence.”

“Speech,” Logan said, surprising himself.

Wade considered his hands. When he spoke, the words were sanded down, plush at the edges. “Tomorrow morning will feel normal. That’s the point. Fred’s gonna bully the gate guard with stew. Bolt’s going to be offended by a vending machine. Victor’s going to scowl so hard the cameras look away. Wraith’s going to make boredom feel like a religion. You and me? We’re going to walk through the hall and pretend we don’t know each other better than we do. If your stomach turns on you, we stop. If your hands shake, we stop. If you say no, I listen.”

Logan stared at him. The thermos burned his palm in a way that felt good. “And if I say yes.”

“Then I drive like the road owes you an apology,” Wade said. Something caught in his mouth and he let it go. “We do the first run. We come back. We do another. We don’t do all of it tomorrow. We just break the world into pieces you can pick up.”

Logan set the thermos on the footlocker. It made a hollow sound. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Wade the way you look at a sunrise you refuse to name in case it hides. “When did you decide you were in charge of the weather.”

“I’m not,” Wade said, surprising them both. “I’m just bringing you an umbrella.”

“Romantic,” Logan said, which was safer than thank you.

“Functional.” Wade rested his head against the wall and let his eyes slide shut for a second, then opened them because that was too vulnerable. He took the hoodie off the back of Logan’s chair—the one that had been back-and-forth between rooms enough times to have dual citizenship—and folded it once, twice, a third time. He didn’t hand it over. He set it at the edge of the bed like an offering. “If you want it.”

Logan didn’t move for a long heartbeat. Then he reached, pulled the hoodie into his lap, and let his hands fist in the fabric. The scent rose and threaded through his lungs: Wade, soap, iron, the metallic hint of gun oil that had seeped into the knit and never left. His shoulders dropped an inch. The baby turned again, calmer this time, as if the world’s gravity had shifted a degree in their favor.

“Victor’s on the porch,” Wade said, not looking away. “He’ll be there till dawn because he likes the cold and because he’s making a promise to himself he doesn’t know how to say out loud.”

“Wraith?” Logan asked, because if they were counting, he wanted to know where every piece was on the board.

“Writing an email to no one that says everything’s fine in words that mean nothing,” Wade said. “He’s good at that.”

“Fred,” Logan said.

“Left a loaf of bread in your locker with a note that says ‘eat or I will find you,’” Wade said. “His handwriting looks like a murder confession but the sentiment’s sweet.”

Logan’s mouth curled. It wasn’t a smile. It was a surrender to the idea of one. “You forgot Bolt.”

“Bolt is sitting on top of the dryer in the laundry room because the floor is lava and also because it’s a better vantage point for the east corridor,” Wade said. “He’s humming off-key on purpose to make the camera wobble. He says it works. I don’t know. I believe him.”

Silence did the work then. It was a good one—the kind that didn’t weigh on the ribs but held them. Logan’s breathing synced to the heater’s hum, then to Wade’s, then to whatever rhythm the building’s heart kept. He leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees, hoodie under his forearms. Wade stayed put on the floor. They were two men holding a door between them without touching it.

After a while, Victor’s shadow darkened the gap at the bottom of the door and moved on like a tide. Wade heard it without looking; Logan felt it without listening. They both exhaled.

“Tomorrow,” Wade said, because a vow was easier to keep if you said it when the world was quiet.

“Tomorrow,” Logan repeated, tasting the word, finding it less bitter than it had been.

“Last question,” Wade said, and he spoke like a man laying down his last card but smiling anyway. “You want me to shut up on this side of the door or the inside.”

Logan didn’t look at him when he answered. “Inside.”

Wade stood. His knees popped. He didn’t cross the threshold until Logan had angled his body to make room and the room had agreed to hold both of them. He sat at the foot of the bed, not touching. The hoodie stayed in Logan’s lap. The keys glinted against Wade’s chest. The plan breathed under the floorboards like a winter thing waiting to move.

They didn’t sleep much. They didn’t need to. It was enough to count the beats together and know that, when morning came, the numbers on the whiteboard would finally stop shrinking and start becoming miles.

Dawn found the compound the way it always did—hard and pale and unforgiving. But the air in Logan’s room was warm, and the steam from the thermos still curled in the cup, and Wade’s shoulder cast a new shape on the wall. Outside, Victor’s footprint on the frost was a promise. Somewhere down the hall, a loaf of bread made a threat.

They stood. Wade put on his grin the way a soldier shoulders a pack. Logan rolled his shoulders like a man finding where the armor ended and his own skin began. The keys clicked.

“Ready,” Wade asked again, gentler.

“No,” Logan said again, honest.

Wade nodded, opened the door, and made room for the truth to walk through first.

Chapter Text

The compound wasn’t much to look at from the outside. Weathered siding, sagging gutters, the kind of rural isolation that made you wonder if civilization had forgotten it existed. But to a team of mercenaries-turned-pack, it was enough . Inside, it smelled faintly of pine and old woodsmoke, dust stirred up from years of disuse. The place wasn’t warm, not yet—but it had walls, a roof, and room enough for everyone to stop pretending they weren’t living on borrowed time.

They carried boxes through the door in mismatched loads: Fred grunting under an entire mattress, Bolt balancing a precarious tower of electronics, Wraith gliding silently with nothing but a single duffel. Logan brought only one box himself, boots heavy on the old floorboards, eyes scanning every corner like the house might bite.

Wade, naturally, was everywhere at once. “Call it, boys and girlies! This is Casa Deadpool! Well, Casa Deadpool-And-Friends, but you’ll get used to the branding.” He clapped his hands, sending dust motes into the air. “First order of business—dibs on rooms. Second order of business—figure out where the beer fridge goes. Third—” He broke off as Bolt nearly collided with him in the hall. “Okay, third is not dying during move-in. Priorities!”

Fred lumbered off, muttering, dragging his mattress behind him like a sulky bear. Bolt disappeared into the small room nearest the kitchen, mumbling about “easy access to repairs.” Wraith vanished upstairs without a word, claiming a space with spectral certainty.

That left the big one at the end of the hall: the master bedroom. Wide enough for more than one bed, closet that didn’t reek of mothballs, window looking out over the pines. Everyone lingered a little, waiting. Logan, as always, was the first to step back.

“Someone else take it,” he muttered, already angling away.

“Ha!” Wade popped up behind him like a bad penny, hands landing square on Logan’s shoulders before he could retreat. “Nope. This one’s yours. Boss wolf gets the den. Pack rules.”

“I ain’t your boss,” Logan growled, trying to shrug him off.

“Sure, sure. And I’m not devastatingly handsome,” Wade chirped, digging in.

Before Logan could argue further, Victor’s presence filled the hall like a wall. He didn’t say much—he never needed to. Just crossed his arms, golden eyes steady, and let the silence do the work.

“You’re taking it,” Victor said simply.

Logan scowled. “Don’t need space. Don’t need—”

“What you need ,” Wade cut in, “is to stop pretending you’re gonna sleep on the damn couch forever. Old bones like yours deserve an actual bed.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “Plus, let’s be real: you snore. Better you’re down here at the far end where you won’t rattle us all awake.”

From down the hall Fred’s voice carried: “He does.”

“See? Democracy!” Wade clapped Logan’s back, steering him toward the door.

Victor didn’t move out of the way. He pushed the door fully open instead, a final gesture: step in, or else.

Logan stood there caught between Wade’s relentless cheer and Victor’s silent insistence. His throat worked like he wanted to argue, to bare his teeth. But the fight drained out of him in a low growl, and he stepped into the room.

The floor creaked beneath his boots. The air smelled like dust and disuse. A wide window let in slanted light through the trees. Empty, waiting. His.

Victor nodded once, picked up his box, and walked off without another word. Wade grinned like he’d just refereed a prizefight.

“Congrats, champ. You’re officially king of the cabin!” Wade announced, then ducked down the hall before Logan could toss something at his head.

Logan stood in the quiet room a moment longer. His single box of clothes sat awkwardly on the bedframe, dwarfed by the space. He didn’t want it, didn’t need it—but he left the box where it was.

The rest of the evening passed in the uneven rhythm of settling in. Furniture scraped across floorboards. Fred swore as his mattress stuck in the stairwell. Bolt got the electricity in the back wing sputtering. Wraith reappeared only long enough to point silently at a box of cookware before vanishing again.

And Wade—Wade floated everywhere.

He checked the locks twice, muttered about fire exits, trailed after Logan like an overgrown shadow. When Logan carried a box to the main room, Wade was already there to intercept it. When Logan fetched kindling for the fireplace, Wade appeared at his elbow with a lighter and a grin.

“You don’t gotta hover,” Logan warned after the third time Wade blocked his path.

“Hovering? This isn’t hovering. This is flourishing ,” Wade corrected, spreading his arms dramatically. “Like a cape. A very handsome, bullet-riddled cape.”

Logan gave him a look sharp enough to cut steel. Wade just smiled wider.

The fire caught eventually, popping and crackling as warmth spread through the room. Logan sat back in the old armchair, box still unopened at his feet. For once he let his weight settle, claws curling idly against the worn fabric. Around him, the team settled in their own ways—Fred sprawled across his mattress like a felled tree, Bolt tinkering at a corner table, Wraith somewhere in the shadows, Victor leaning against the wall like he owned the place.

And Wade, of course, sprawled across the rug with his back to the fire, chin propped on his hands. Every so often his gaze flicked up, cataloguing Logan like he might vanish if not checked on every thirty seconds.

Logan noticed. He always noticed. But for the first time in a long while, he didn’t tell Wade to stop.

The compound settled into its first rhythm like an animal learning how to breathe. Days bled into nights with a kind of wary routine—Bolt forever tinkering, Fred forever eating, Wraith forever slipping through walls like she owned the silence. Wade was… Wade. No one questioned how he could both disappear for hours and still somehow be underfoot every time Logan turned around.

And Logan, despite himself, fell into the pattern too. Chop wood. Fix hinges. Patrol the treeline when sleep wouldn’t come. He told himself it was duty, instinct, not belonging. But there were always eyes on him—sometimes Wade’s chatter, sometimes Victor’s steady weight. Always watching, always waiting for him to stumble into the truth he refused to name.

It came to a head one evening when the fire burned low and the others had drifted off. The house creaked in its old bones, the pines outside swaying in the dark. Logan sat at the table with a beer, silent, shoulders hunched like he could fold in on himself.

Victor walked in without a word, boots echoing, and dropped into the chair opposite. The silence stretched long and taut.

“You’re sulking,” Victor said finally.

Logan snorted. “I don’t sulk.”

“You do,” Victor countered. He leaned back, the picture of lazy menace, golden eyes glinting. “You’ve been pacing this place like a caged dog since we got here. Acting like the walls are closing in when all anyone’s trying to do is give you a damn roof.”

Logan’s jaw tightened. “Don’t need anyone giving me anything.”

“That so?” Victor’s smile was sharp, humorless. “Funny, considering you’re sleeping in the master bedroom like a king.”

Logan bristled. “That wasn’t my choice.”

“No,” Victor said, voice dropping low, steady. “It was ours. Wade and me. Because you’re too damn stubborn to claim anything for yourself. Too used to clawing scraps instead of taking what you deserve.”

The words cut deeper than claws. Logan’s throat worked, but no reply came.

Victor leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. His voice lost the edge of mockery, grew quieter. “You keep acting like this place ain’t yours. Like we ain’t yours. But whether you like it or not, we chose you. Wade runs his mouth about it, sure, but the truth is—this pack don’t move without you at the center. Even Fred knows it. Even Wraith.”

Logan shook his head. “I ain’t—”

“You are .” Victor’s voice was iron now, no room for denial. “You’ve been carrying the weight of everyone around you your whole life. Bleeding yourself dry to keep them breathing. But when someone tries to shoulder you for once? You bare your teeth. You push back like it’s a fight to the death.”

The silence between them burned hotter than the fire. Logan’s claws flexed against the glass bottle, leaving shallow grooves in the label.

Victor didn’t move, didn’t blink. “So tell me, brother—why’s it so hard to believe you could be worth the effort?”

The question landed like a blow. Logan felt it reverberate in his chest, raw and dangerous.

He looked away first, jaw set, the scarred lines of his hands tightening on the bottle. “Don’t want anyone wasting their time.”

Victor exhaled, slow. “It ain’t wasting. It’s living. It’s what a pack does. You watch each other’s backs, even when the one in front’s too damn stubborn to admit he wants it.”

For a moment Logan hated him for saying it out loud. Hated the mirror Victor always held up, showing him truths he didn’t want to face. But under the hate was something heavier. Something he couldn’t name without breaking.

Victor stood finally, pushing the chair back with a scrape. His hand landed heavy on Logan’s shoulder, grounding, immovable.

“You don’t gotta say it,” Victor muttered. “Not tonight. But stop fighting us every time we try to keep you standing. You’re not alone here. Not anymore.”

The weight of his hand lingered after he was gone, echoing down Logan’s spine.

Logan sat there a long time, the fire dying low, the night pressing close around the compound. The beer went warm in his grip. For once, though, he didn’t get up to pace.

The snow started in soft, indecisive flakes that afternoon, the kind that hovered in the air like they were asking permission to fall. Logan watched them from the porch steps with his elbows on his knees, boots planted on the lower tread, the cold sinking through old leather into older bones. The pines along the drive filtered the wind down to a whisper; every so often the cabin let out a relieved little creak, like it was settling around them instead of over them. He could taste woodsmoke on the air. He told himself that was all he needed.

Wade came out without the door complaining, which meant he’d oiled the hinges when no one was looking. He eased down beside Logan and tucked his hands into the pouch of his hoodie, the same one Logan had “borrowed” more than once. Wade didn’t speak right away. He just pitched his shoulder against Logan’s like he always had, a casual pressure that somehow mapped exactly where Logan was fraying. The flakes landed in Wade’s hair and didn’t melt.

“Doc appointment,” Wade said finally, tone quiet enough to be mistaken for the weather. “Let’s set one up. Make sure you and the kid are solid.”

Logan stared at the trees until they blurred. Pride had a flavor; it tasted like iron. “Yeah,” he said after a beat, voice sanded down. “Okay.”

“Tomorrow morning. Low-traffic clinic, old lady at the desk who thinks I look like a ‘nice young man.’” Wade lifted his eyebrows. “Should be an easy con.”

“You don’t look like a nice young man.”

“Exactly. Bulletproof cover.”

Logan huffed; it was almost, almost a laugh. The flakes thickened, softening the world. For a long time they just sat and breathed in the same cold air, and Wade’s shoulder didn’t move.

The clinic lived on a sleepy side street where the traffic lights took their time changing and the same two cars seemed to orbit the block all day. Inside, everything was tidy in that old-fashioned way—printed flyers in plastic holders, poinsettia someone tried to keep alive near a window, a heater ticking in the baseboard like it had opinions. The waiting room smelled faintly of antiseptic and peppermint tea. Wade sat next to Logan with his leg bouncing, a metronome for nerves he pretended were about parking.

“Name?” the receptionist asked, peering over her readers.

“James,” Wade said smoothly, before Logan could open his mouth. “New patient. Headaches. Nausea. Mild cantankerousness.”

Logan gave him a sideways look that promised future violence. The receptionist smiled like she’d heard worse and slid a clipboard across. Wade filled it out with a fake neatness he saved for lying to authority; Logan watched him write and pretended he didn’t appreciate the small, stupid comfort of someone else steering.

The exam room had that same sterile calm. Cabinets stocked with gauze and tongue depressors. A poster of the human muscular system that was technically accurate and spiritually ridiculous. Logan sat on the paper-covered table with his arms crossed in his habitual armor. Wade pretended to read the poster and then pretended worse to hide that he wasn’t reading at all.

The doctor was brisk, kind, small-boned, and entirely unflappable. She asked questions in a voice that didn’t assume answers and listened the way good doctors do—with her eyes as well as her ears. When she said, “Lift your shirt for me?” she made it a request, not a directive.

Logan hesitated. He hadn’t looked—really looked—in weeks. He tugged the hem up. Cool air kissed his skin. The fluorescent light made everything too honest, but honesty was unavoidable: a faint swell, not much to anyone else’s eye, enough to rearrange Logan’s. His breath caught. His hand hovered and then settled, palm shaped to a curve that hadn’t been there before.

The sterile room fell away. In its place: the steady hum of his own pulse, the quieter rhythm underneath—imagined or real, it didn’t matter. It anchored. It unmoored. It split him down the middle.

“You’re measuring right on track,” the doctor said, warmth folded into professionalism. “Everything looks healthy.”

He swallowed. Nodded once. Tugged his shirt down like he could tuck the moment away with the fabric and save it for when it wouldn’t split him to look at it.

“Good,” he said, voice gravel over glass.

Wade didn’t say anything. He didn’t make a joke. He watched Logan’s hands afterward—how they were steadier and not, how the knuckles were pale where he held himself together—and then he pocketed the discharge papers like he was afraid a gust would take them.

On the drive back, the truck’s heater wheezed and the wipers squeaked and the world outside went by in bands of gray and white. Logan leaned his forehead against the cold glass until the temperature ceased being a sensation and became an argument he was losing.

“He smiled,” he said finally, voice cracking like ice. “He smiled, Wade. Like it was a gift. Like I should thank him.” His nails dug crescents into his palms. “He knew I didn’t want this—not like this. And he took it anyway. That’s not just betrayal—that’s theft.”

Wade’s hands tightened on the wheel until the leather complained. “Logan—”

“I can’t stop thinking about it.” The words sped up, stumbled. “Every time I’m sick, every night I can’t sleep—it’s like he’s still here, deciding for me. And it’s in me. I can’t just—” His breath broke. For a second his shoulders went rigid, the old instinct to lock it all down. Then it shuddered loose, and the sound that came out of him was half-sob, half-snarl, and entirely human.

Wade didn’t hesitate. Gravel hissed as he eased onto the shoulder, idled the engine, clicked the hazards without looking. He unbuckled, slid across the cracked vinyl, and got both arms around Logan with the kind of surety that made refusal irrelevant. One hand came to the nape of Logan’s neck, warm and broad and not demanding; the other bracketed shoulder and ribs like a brace.

“Hey,” Wade said, voice low and steady, a voice you use to hold back storm-damage. “This isn’t your fault. He took your choice. That’s on him.”

Logan’s laugh was wet and furious. “Then why am I the one paying for it?”

“Because you’re the kind of man who pays for things other people break,” Wade said, not unkindly. “But you don’t have to pay alone.”

They sat there in the warmed, fogged cab, hazards blinking feeble red into the snow, engine humming a body-temperature lullaby. Logan’s breathing ragged and then less ragged. Wade didn’t fill the silence with quips or comfort he couldn’t cash. He just held until the tremor in Logan’s shoulders eased and his fists uncurled. Then Wade eased back an inch and left a palm on Logan’s shoulder like a marker: here. Here you are. Here I am.

They drove home slower, like the road might have teeth.

Victor was smoking on the porch when they pulled in; the ember made a dull star against the afternoon’s blue-gray. He flicked ash without looking away from the tree line. Wade stepped up beside him, shoulders squared down into something that wasn’t a fight until it needed to be.

“He’s not doing great,” Wade said.

Victor’s jaw twitched. He took one last drag and stubbed the cigarette against the banister in a gesture that deserved the word final. “Then we make sure he gets through it,” he said, like reading off a mission brief. “End of story.”

The door creaked as Logan went inside. Victor’s eyes tracked the movement and then returned to the trees. “He eat?”

“Little,” Wade said. “Doc says everything’s on track.”

“Good,” Victor said. The word sounded like a warning to the world at large.

They didn’t high five or clasp forearms like brothers in a movie. They existed in the same space with the same decision and let that be enough.

Support arrived in the form of food first, because Fred believed, with a zealot’s faith, that most problems could be out-stubborned by three square meals and a skillet you could brand cattle with. He didn’t announce his new project; he simply changed the numbers. Where there were four strips of bacon, there became six. Where a steak had a sensible partner on the plate, it suddenly had a twin. When Logan reached for the pan to serve himself, Fred’s massive arm slid in, casual as a drawbridge.

“One plate,” Fred grunted, eyes on the food. “Then another. No argument.”

Logan opened his mouth and closed it. That counted as compliance.

The next morning, Fred knocked with the too-gentle knuckles of a giant trying not to dent the world and handed over a plate piled with eggs and bacon and a toasted slab of bread glossy with butter. “Eat before I change my mind,” he said, already turning away, as if eye contact might curdle the eggs.

Logan leaned against the door and ate half without thinking and realized, to his annoyance, that hunger had a way of hiding behind anger until you set a plate down in front of it. He ate the rest too, and the knot behind his ribs loosened a fraction.

That night at dinner, conversation drifted like the steam from plates—lazy, directionless, circling back on itself. Fred slid the biggest steak onto Logan’s plate with a grunt of “Protein,” and didn’t look up again. No one called it out. No one needed to. Logan cut into the steak and found it perfect, because Fred never missed the center of a thing he could control.

Bolt clocked the short fuse first because provocation was, for him, a form of breakfast. In the training room he danced in and out of Logan’s range like a mosquito in love with danger, smirking just enough to make it etiquette-appropriate to try and punch him.

“You’re slow today,” Bolt sang, weight on the balls of his feet.

“Keep talking,” Logan said, and did not miss the next swing.

Bolt’s grin widened. They moved faster. They quit faster. Logan’s breath stuttered a hair’s breadth sooner than it used to; Bolt filed it under Not For Public Use.

Later that evening the step outside Logan’s door ceased its throaty complaint. The tools were put away, a coil of wire sat neatly wound, and the dust was swept into a pile the size of a coin. When Logan paused and toed the step—testing, challenging—Bolt’s voice floated from down the hall without looking up from the magazine he was not reading.

“Annoying step,” Bolt said. “Needed it quiet. For me. Not you.”

“Uh-huh,” Logan said, dry.

Bolt’s mouth tipped. “You’re welcome.”

They left it there. See it, name it, and then tuck it back under the rug where it belonged.

Wraith made a science of not being seen until the precise moment being seen would matter. He watched Logan excuse himself from whatever room had collected a crowd five minutes before most people would. He watched the way Logan’s eyes tracked air—the open window, the doorway, the slice of porch visible from the kitchen sink. He watched and then he moved.

One afternoon as Logan came back from the kitchen with a glass of cold water clinking faintly in his hand, Wraith ghosted past and pressed something into his palm. A sealed packet rustled there, the paper cool and clean.

“Helps with nausea,” Wraith said, not breaking stride. He didn’t make it a gift. He made it a fact.

Logan stared down at the tea like it might explode. When he looked up, Wraith’s back was already vanishing into the next room, no expectation trailing behind him like a string.

Logan tucked the tea into his pocket and told himself it would stay there until he got around to throwing it out. That night, when the turn in his gut threatened to drag him under, he made it. The steam curled up and made the kitchen smell like something gentler than survival. He didn’t tell anyone. The packet disappeared from his pocket all the same.

Victor handled care like he handled violence: with precision, without witnesses. It was the little structural things first. Firewood appeared by the door in tidy stacks as if delivered by a liner-note crew. The axe got sharpened. The draft-stoppers moved to the bottoms of doors before the temperature dropped the extra ten degrees. When Logan moved to pick up an armful of wood, Victor’s bulk occluded the doorway and his eyebrows did a slow, expressive arc.

“Go sit down,” he said, voice pitched at Don’t. It thrummed the floorboards.

Logan’s hackles lifted on instinct. “I can carry wood.”

“Not asking,” Victor said, and took the load one-handed like it was laundry. He was gone before Logan could craft a retort worth the breath.

For every obvious block, there were quiet assurances. The path to the truck salted before dawn. The porch shoveled. The knife Wade kept tucked in the couch cushions for “movie night emergencies” relocated to a more sensible place. Victor’s shadow moving along the porch long after the house went quiet.

No speeches. Just the kind of attention that says: I see where the world could cut you. I’m sanding it down.

Wade’s help came in bursts, the way fireworks do—some loud and ridiculous, some barely a crackle and a soft falling light. He knocked at odd hours with flimsy pretexts and stayed with better ones. “Need to borrow your…uh…opinion on something,” he’d say, leaning in the doorway until Logan’s scowl lost a blade or two. Sometimes he brought tea. Sometimes a blanket. Once he came with an armful of clashing throw pillows he’d scavenged from three rooms and the trunk of Bolt’s car.

“Figure you might as well be grumpy in comfort,” he announced, dropping them like surrendered weapons.

Logan tried to glare and failed with dignity. “These are ugly.”

“They’re on your side,” Wade said cheerfully. “Like me.”

There were days Wade left him alone to pace it off. Wade learned the shape of those silences. He also learned the kinds of noise that helped: talking about nothing, about a movie he swore was “so bad it came around to good,” about Fred’s doomed flirtation with sourdough, about Bolt’s unholy plan to retrofit the water heater. Words poured out of him and filled a room the way steam did, softening edges you didn’t realize were cutting you in passing. He didn’t push. He just stayed.

On the worst day, when Logan couldn’t put one foot in front of the other without thinking too hard about it, Wade didn’t ask if he wanted help; he bent, got an arm under Logan’s knees and another behind his shoulders, and lifted like he’d trained for this particular fire drill all his life.

“Put me down,” Logan growled, affronted instinct hilariously intact.

“Absolutely not,” Wade said, already moving. “This is a carry-only zone. Complaints to management may be filed on Tuesdays, never.”

He set Logan down on the couch with ridiculous care, tucked a blanket over him (one of the ugly ones), put a glass of water within reach, and then sat on the floor with his back against the couch like the most stubborn, talkative guard dog ever issued by an angel with a sense of humor.

Logan meant to kick him out. He didn’t. When his hand drifted to the blanket’s edge and curled there, Wade didn’t look down. He just kept up the running patter until Logan’s eyelids lost the fight.

Evenings in the cabin found their own ritual. Mismatched mugs. Feet on tables to which none of them had a moral claim. Fred gesturing with utensils as if they were batons, orchestrating an argument about whether a grilled cheese sandwich was a melt or a separate class of food. Bolt providing footnotes that were not helpful. Wraith reading, head bent, occasionally offering one-word verdicts that ended debates like a guillotine. Victor leaning back in the armchair nearest the fire in a slouch that said he was comfortable but not off-duty. Wade sprawled on the rug like gravity owed him money.

Logan sat in the corner of the couch and let the sound roll over him. He told himself he was conserving energy, not participating. He didn’t notice the first time his head tipped against the cushion and his hand went unconsciously to rest over the soft swell of his belly. He didn’t notice Wade noticing. He did notice, later, that the room had become that rarest of weather systems: safe enough to close his eyes for a minute.

Somewhere between second mugs and half-watched movies, a truth settled in as quietly as snow: the conspiracy to keep him upright had become a habit. A structure. A home. Not because anyone said the word. Because every person in that house made the same small decision in a hundred different ways— him, first —and then refused to explain themselves.

Logan didn’t thank them. The thanks lived in the simple, dangerous ways he stopped guarding his back. In the way he let Wade talk him down from cliffs without naming them. In the way he took a steak without argument or drank the ginger tea or didn’t force the issue of carrying wood. In the way he let Victor’s shadow be a comfort instead of a challenge.

He went to bed that night with the tea’s ghost still on his tongue and the memory of Wade’s palm on his nape still in the skin. The master bedroom was warm for once. The wind nosed at the window and found no way in. He lay on his side and listened to the house breathe: floorboards settling, pipes ticking their small language, a fragment of laughter from the hall, a footstep that was Victor’s weight, and—farther, softer—the rumble of Wade’s voice talking to no one, or to himself, or to the dark.

“End of story,” Victor had said earlier, eyes flint, voice iron.

It wasn’t an end. It was an after. And for the first time in a long time, Logan let himself believe in the possibility that “after” could be a place you stayed.

Chapter Text

It started with the sound of the stairs creaking—faint, but distinct enough to pull Wade out of his half-doze.

He was sprawled across the couch like a man who’d fought gravity and lost, long legs tangled in a blanket that had slipped mostly to the floor. The flicker of the television washed over him in cool blue tones, painting the living room in ghost-light. A survival show droned on about filtering water through moss; Wade had tuned it out three beers ago.

The cabin at night always had its own rhythm.
Wind whispering in the pines outside. The occasional pop from the wood stove. Fred’s soft, earth-shaking snores from down the hall. Wade had just about synced his breathing to it when the sound came—slow, deliberate steps.

Logan appeared in the doorway, all silent scowl and hunched shoulders. His eyes flicked once toward Wade, then away, as if checking the weather before deciding whether to go outside. He crossed the room in a few easy strides and stopped beside the couch.

Wade tipped his head back against the cushion to look up at him. “Evenin’, Sunshine. You here to—”

In one swift motion, Logan hooked his fingers into the hem of Wade’s hoodie and yanked.
The garment slid over Wade’s head before he could protest, leaving him blinking in the sudden cool air. Logan slung the hoodie over his arm like stolen loot, turned on his heel, and padded toward the stairs.

Wade sat there, hair static-frizzed, staring at the space Logan had just vacated. “That’s one way to say ‘I missed you.’” His voice was light, but something about the determined set of Logan’s shoulders stuck with him.

“Hey!” Wade called after him. “That was custom-fitted to my manly contours!”

Logan didn’t answer. The sound of his steps faded upward, swallowed by the hush of the cabin.

Wade grinned slowly.
Well, now. That was interesting.

Wade gave it five minutes before curiosity won out.

The cabin was quiet as he padded upstairs, socked feet whispering against the wood. The floorboards had that faint give underfoot that made the whole place feel alive, like it was paying attention. A few doors were cracked open to reveal messy rooms—Bolt’s with tools scattered across his desk, Fred’s with an unmade bed and the faint smell of last night’s chili.

Logan’s door was barely ajar, just enough for a sliver of lamplight to spill into the hallway. Wade nudged it open with the edge of his knuckle.

He stopped cold.

Logan was already out, curled on his side in the middle of the bed. The hoodie was balled up in his arms, clutched so close it might’ve been the only thing tethering him to sleep. The faint rise and fall of his breathing lifted the fabric with each exhale. The lamplight caught on the curve of his stomach—subtle, but there. Four months in, and the signs were getting harder to hide.

Wade leaned a shoulder into the doorframe, gaze fixed on him. Normally, Logan’s sleeping face still carried traces of tension, like his mind was ready to spring awake at any second. Tonight, though… he looked lighter. Not unscarred, but softened at the edges.

For reasons he didn’t care to unpack just yet, Wade didn’t want to disturb that.

He crept forward, careful not to let the floorboards groan under his weight. Reaching for the blanket at the end of the bed, he shook it out once and draped it gently over Logan’s legs. The man didn’t stir. The hoodie stayed in place, his hands locked around it like a shield.

Wade lingered a moment longer than necessary, eyes on the small bump that the blanket didn’t quite disguise. A low, quiet thought pressed in:
Not just protective anymore, Wilson. You’re in deep.

He eased back, pulling the door until it clicked softly shut behind him.

It started small.

A pair of Victor’s thick wool socks went missing from the laundry line. He assumed they’d been swallowed by the same dimension all lost socks went to and didn’t think much of it—until his leather gloves vanished the next day.

Fred lost one of his favorite mugs, a hideous green ceramic thing with World’s Okayest Cook scrawled across it in fading paint. He searched every counter, sink, and shelf in the kitchen before grumbling something about “gremlins” and stomping off.

Bolt misplaced a multi-tool. Wraith’s hoodie disappeared off the back of a chair. A throw blanket from the couch vanished overnight. The cabin seemed to be quietly consuming their belongings, and no one could quite catch it in the act.

At first, the complaints were scattered and half-serious.
“Who the hell took my hoodie?” Wraith asked one morning, holding up the empty hook where it had hung.
“Not me,” Fred mumbled around a mouthful of toast. “But I’m missing my coffee mug, so I’m open to forming an alliance.”

Victor snorted. “You two are sloppy. Keep your stuff where it belongs.”

By the third day, the pattern was too obvious to ignore. Wade was the only one who didn’t complain—though he seemed to be losing things at the fastest rate. Two of his t-shirts, a beanie, and one of his favorite flannels had all vanished in the last forty-eight hours. He didn’t say a word, but there was a knowing spark in his eye whenever someone else brought it up.

The rest of them grumbled in the kitchen over coffee one late morning, voices low but heated. Fred was poking through the cabinets again for his mug, muttering curses. Bolt paced near the counter, flipping a butter knife between his fingers. Wraith leaned in the corner, arms crossed, expression narrowed in calculation.

Victor was the first to snap.
“Alright, enough. We’re not losing this much crap by accident. Somebody in this house is taking it, and I’m gonna find out who.”

He turned and stalked toward the stairs. The others followed—part curiosity, part desire for entertainment—coffee mugs in hand. Wade, of course, trailed behind with the kind of casual saunter that said I already know where this is going.

Victor didn’t knock. He strode down the hall like a man who owned the place, heavy footfalls rattling the pictures on the wall. The rest of the crew trailed behind in a loose, noisy cluster. Fred grumbled about wasting his morning; Bolt was clearly hoping for a fight; Wraith looked like he was collecting intel for some future operation. Wade brought up the rear, hands in his pockets, grin twitching at the corner of his mouth.

Logan’s door was shut.

Victor stopped in front of it, crossing his arms. “If I find my gloves in here, runt, I’m taking it out of your hide.”

He didn’t wait for permission—just twisted the knob and shouldered the door open.

The smell hit them first: woodsmoke, cedar, and underneath it, the deep, grounding scents of both Victor and Wade. The room was dim, curtains half-drawn, sunlight striping the floor in gold. And in the far corner, sprawling over a low pile of blankets and clothing, was the nest.

It was… substantial. Layers of fleece throws, comforters, and pillows formed the base. Draped over the top like trophies were clearly stolen items: Victor’s leather gloves, Wade’s flannel, Fred’s ugly mug tucked into the edge like it belonged there, Bolt’s multi-tool gleaming faintly near the pillows. Even Wraith’s hoodie was folded with surprising care along one side.

And in the middle, curled on his side, was Logan—dead asleep, hoodie hood half over his face, one arm draped protectively over the growing swell of his belly.

The group froze.

Victor’s scowl softened, almost imperceptibly. The sharp line of his shoulders eased as his eyes swept the pile, taking in the sheer amount of stolen belongings. Wade’s grin turned into something quieter, warmer—his gaze lingering on the way Logan’s fingers curled in the fabric of his hoodie. Wraith, usually unreadable, tipped his head slightly, eyes narrowing not in suspicion, but thought.

Fred blinked. “…Is this—did he—steal my stuff to… sleep on it?”

Bolt leaned toward him. “Looks like it.”

Fred scratched his beard. “Huh.” His tone held no malice—just mild confusion, like someone explaining a recipe they didn’t fully understand.

Victor stepped forward, voice dropping to a low rumble. “He’s nesting.” It wasn’t a question. “And if any of you touch that pile, I’ll break your hands.”

No one argued. Even Fred nodded slowly, as if physically filing away the warning.

Wade shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, a faint smirk pulling at his mouth. “Guess we’re not getting our stuff back for a while.”

“Guess not,” Wraith said, already backing out of the room.

One by one, they filtered away, leaving Victor to pull the door nearly shut—just enough to keep the warmth in, not enough to trap. The protective weight in the air lingered long after they’d gone.

Logan came downstairs just shy of noon, hair still mussed from sleep, wearing an expression like the world had personally wronged him. He had one of Wade’s old t-shirts on under an unzipped hoodie—also Wade’s—which hung loose except where the fabric stretched faintly over his stomach.

He paused at the bottom of the stairs when he saw Wade leaning against the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, eyes fixed on him with an unreadable expression.

“What,” Logan muttered, already sidestepping toward the coffee pot.

“Nothing,” Wade said, too easily. Then, after a beat: “Just wanted to let you know… the gang’s aware of your little crime spree.”

Logan’s shoulders stiffened. “What crime spree?”

“The one where you’ve been liberating personal property for… alternative use.” Wade tilted his head. “They saw the nest, Dear.”

Logan froze mid-pour. “You went in my room.”

“I didn’t drag ‘em up there,” Wade said. “That was all Victor. But yeah—they know you’re nesting. They don’t know why.”

The coffee stream hissed to a stop. Logan gripped the counter, jaw tight. “They don’t need to know.”

“Maybe they do.” Wade’s voice softened. “You’ve been chewing yourself up over Stryker finding out. You can’t keep doing that alone.”

Logan glanced at him, eyes sharp. “And what? Risk one of them slipping up?”

“They won’t,” Wade said, steady enough that it didn’t sound like reassurance—it sounded like fact. “But you should tell ‘em before the truth trips over itself.”

For a moment, they just stared at each other, the kitchen clock ticking loud in the pause. Logan broke first, muttering, “Fine. Tonight.”

Wade nodded, satisfied, but didn’t move as Logan brushed past him toward the couch. Just before he sat down, Wade added, “By the way, Fred’s still mourning his mug.”

“Good,” Logan said flatly, curling into the cushions.

By the time night fell, the cabin had settled into its usual rhythm—voices drifting from the kitchen, the low hum of the TV in the living room, the smell of dinner still lingering in the air. Logan lingered in the hallway, leaning on the banister like it was a lifeline. He was good at facing danger, at charging into a fight with claws and fury, but this—this was different. This was exposure. This was vulnerability.

His hand flexed against the wood rail, knuckles whitening. Every part of him told him to shut the door, keep it inside, let the world guess and never know. But then Wade came up beside him, casual as ever, bumping his shoulder with a nudge that was small but grounding.

“You call it,” Wade murmured, his voice carrying none of its usual edge. “I’ll get ‘em in one place.”

Logan gave the smallest nod, throat tight, and stepped back while Wade whistled low and sharp, the kind of sound that cut through whatever anyone was doing.

“Kitchen. Now,” Wade said, loud enough to carry. “Family meeting.”

From the dining table, Fred groaned. “If this is about my mug again—”

“It’s not,” Wade cut in. “But if you bring it up, I’ll steal another one just to prove a point.”

That at least earned him a snort from Bolt, who shoved his chair back with a scrape and muttered, “Better be good.”

One by one, they filtered in. Victor leaned against the counter, arms folded, watching like a sentinel. Fred sat at the table, already reaching for the last of the bread. Bolt slouched into a chair, spinning a butter knife in his fingers with restless energy. Wraith stood near the doorway, posture deceptively casual but eyes sharp, like he was already weighing every possible outcome of this gathering.

Logan stayed standing, shoulders set like he was preparing to take a hit. Wade parked himself at his side, close enough that their arms brushed.

“I’m not gonna drag this out,” Logan said, voice low but clear. “You’ve probably noticed… things. Me taking stuff. Sleeping more. Getting sick.” His jaw worked once, hard, before he forced the next words out. “The reason for that is… I’m pregnant.”

The words landed like a dropped weight. Silence rippled outward, thick and heavy, broken only by the faint creak of the house settling.

Fred blinked. Bolt’s spinning knife slowed to a stop. Wraith’s head tilted slightly, eyes narrowing as if confirming a theory.

Victor straightened from the counter, gaze sweeping the group. “If any of you tell Stryker, I will personally remove your tongues,” he said. His voice was low, barely carrying, but sharp enough to leave no doubt.

Fred raised both hands. “Hey, I’m not stupid.”

“Good,” Victor said, tone flat but edged with steel.

“No one’s telling Stryker,” Wraith added, and though his voice was calm, there was iron underneath it. “Not unless they’ve got a death wish.”

Bolt shrugged, knife balanced between his fingers. “Not my business to spread. Besides—kinda explains the hoodie theft.”

The tension in Logan’s shoulders eased just fractionally, but he still kept his gaze fixed on the floor. Wade, sensing how fragile this was, kept quiet, letting the others fill the silence.

Then Fred leaned forward, brow furrowed. “Can I… see it?”

Logan’s head snapped up. “What?”

“The belly,” Fred clarified. “My sister’s pregnant. She sends me pictures every week. I’ve never seen—y’know—one in person.”

Logan stared at him, caught between disbelief and embarrassment. “You’re serious.”

Fred nodded, almost sheepish. “Kinda curious, I guess.”

With a muttered curse, Logan tugged up the hem of Wade’s hoodie just enough to reveal the curve beneath. It wasn’t huge, but it was unmistakable—a solid, gentle swell. The room went quiet in a different way then, softer somehow. Fred’s expression shifted into something unexpectedly tender.

“How far along?” he asked quietly.

“Four months,” Logan said, tugging the hoodie back down quickly.

Nobody laughed. Nobody made a joke. The air in the room shifted, warmer somehow, closer. They didn’t say the word family , but Logan felt it settle around them anyway, unspoken but solid.

The kitchen emptied slowly, the way campfires burn down—one log at a time until only embers glow.

Bolt was the first to leave, muttering something about fixing the lock on his window, though everyone knew he’d just disappear into his workshop and tinker with something until dawn. Wraith followed without a sound, vanishing as if he’d never been there. Fred lingered only long enough to snag another piece of bread before Victor shoved him toward the hall with a gruff, “Go to bed before you eat the whole damn kitchen.”

Even Victor eventually retreated, muttering about checking the perimeter, though Wade suspected it was just an excuse to give Logan space.

And so Logan ended up on the couch without meaning to, sunk deep into the corner, knees drawn up just a little. Wade’s hoodie bunched under his chin like armor. He was staring at the muted TV, but Wade knew he wasn’t really watching.

Wade padded in barefoot, two mugs in hand. He handed one over and flopped down at the opposite end of the couch, legs stretched long so his heels almost brushed Logan’s thigh.

“Tea,” Wade said. “Don’t make it weird.”

Logan accepted it without looking away from the screen. “You make everything weird.”

“Flattering,” Wade replied, settling back. “You okay?”

Logan snorted. “You were there.”

“Yeah, but that’s not an answer.”

The pause stretched until Wade figured he wasn’t getting one. And that was fine—he could be patient when it counted. He sipped his tea, watching Logan over the rim. The hoodie had ridden up just slightly, the soft curve of his stomach visible above the waistband of his sweats. Wade caught himself looking, then looking away, then looking back again.

He didn’t think about it like that—not out loud, anyway—but there was something about seeing him like this: small, tired, wrapped in Wade’s clothes and carrying something that was his and not his at the same time.

“Quit staring,” Logan muttered without heat.

Wade grinned, slow and easy. “Make me.”

Logan shook his head, but his mouth twitched—just a little—and he let his head tip back against the cushions. Within minutes, his breathing evened out. He’d fallen asleep mid-sip, the mug resting precariously on his thigh.

Wade leaned forward, gently taking it before it could spill, then sat back and just… looked at him. Really looked. The hard edges smoothed out in sleep, the faint lines at the corners of his eyes softening. Wade felt that unfamiliar ache in his chest again—the one that wasn’t just about keeping him safe.

He didn’t touch him, didn’t say anything. Just sat there like a sentry, the low hum of the TV filling the space, until the weight of his own eyelids started to match Logan’s.

The air outside had that late-night stillness where even the wind seemed to be holding its breath. The cabin’s porch light cast a warm circle on the steps, everything beyond fading into black pines and frost-slick shadows. Somewhere far out in the woods, an owl hooted—three notes, lonely but steady.

Wade stepped out first, hands buried in his hoodie pocket, bare feet silent on the wood. He expected the night to be empty, but instead found Victor already there, leaning against the railing with a cigarette smoldering low between two fingers.

“Thought you quit,” Wade said, his voice low to match the hush of the forest.

Victor didn’t look at him. “I quit telling people about it.” He took a slow drag, exhaled into the cold. The smoke curled upward, dissolving into the star-heavy dark. “You get him settled?”

“Yeah. Out like a light.” Wade jerked his chin toward the living room window, where a faint flicker from the muted TV still glowed. Logan’s silhouette was faint, just visible through the glass, curled against the couch cushions.

Victor grunted, flicking ash over the edge. “Good. He needs it.”

They stood there for a long beat, the quiet between them heavier than usual but not uncomfortable. Wade shifted his weight, back to the post, eyes roving the tree line as if expecting trouble even here, in the thickest quiet of the night.

“You know,” Wade said finally, “I’m not an idiot. I know Stryker would chew him up and spit him out if he found out.”

Victor’s gaze slid over, sharp even in the dark. “Then you know we’re not letting that happen.”

It wasn’t a question.

Wade nodded once, serious for once. “Yeah. I know.”

Victor’s jaw worked like he wanted to say more, but instead he ground out the cigarette and straightened from the railing. The glow at the tip dimmed, then died. “That belly of his—doesn’t matter if it’s his or not. It’s part of the pack now.”

Wade huffed a quiet laugh, but it didn’t have teeth. “Glad we’re on the same page, big guy.”

They didn’t shake hands or clap each other on the back. Neither of them needed it. The agreement was already there, thick in the cold night air.

Victor headed inside first, boots heavy against the porch boards. Wade lingered a moment longer, staring out at the treeline, before turning back toward the warm glow of the cabin.

Inside, Logan slept on.

At least, that’s how it looked from across the room. But his dreams were thin, fragile things that shattered at the smallest shift of air. He stirred when Wade passed by, though his eyes didn’t open. The hoodie still smelled faintly like Wade’s shampoo, like cedar and something sharp underneath. It helped. Not enough to erase the gnawing coil of tension in his gut, but enough to keep him tethered to the couch instead of pacing until dawn.

He dreamed in fragments. Heat against his side. A hand catching his wrist. The faint echo of a hospital corridor, long ago. He turned over, muttering low, and clutched at the fabric bunched under his chin like it could ward the images away.

When he woke, it was to silence. Wade was gone from the room. The TV still hummed, showing static-snow at the edges of an old rerun. Logan shifted upright slowly, pressing a hand to the faint curve of his stomach, thumb tracing a restless line across the fabric. Four months. Still time. But not enough. Never enough.

He pushed to his feet, padded toward the kitchen, poured the dregs of the coffee pot cold into a mug and drank it without flinching. Bitter sat easier than fear.

He wasn’t used to being… seen. And tonight, they had all seen him. The thought pressed against his ribs like claws.

Morning broke crisp and pale, sunlight knifing through the trees and laying sharp bars of light across the floorboards. The cabin stirred slowly—Fred stumbling into the kitchen first, hair sticking up like a haystack, muttering for coffee. Bolt followed with a half-assembled contraption clutched in his hand, barely glancing at anyone before sitting and tinkering at the table.

Logan was already there, sitting with arms crossed, jaw set. He looked like he dared someone to bring up last night.

Fred didn’t. He poured himself coffee, yawned, and after a minute said only, “You want the last piece of toast?”

Logan blinked at him. “…What?”

“Toast.” Fred waved at the plate, where one half-burned slice waited.

Logan hesitated, then shrugged. “Sure.”

Fred slid it across without comment. That was it. That was the whole exchange. But Wade, leaning in the doorway, saw the way Logan’s shoulders eased just slightly, like the absence of judgment mattered more than the toast itself.

Bolt, for his part, didn’t even look up from the gear assembly in his hands. “Don’t think you should be chopping firewood anymore,” he said casually, as if it were logistics and not concern.

Logan scowled. “I can handle an axe.”

“Yeah, but why bother? We’ve got four other sets of arms.” Bolt twisted something with a screwdriver, then added, “Don’t make us babysit your stubborn ass.”

Logan opened his mouth, closed it again, and muttered into his coffee.

Wraith appeared like a shadow out of the hall, silent until he spoke. “I’ll take his watch shifts for the week.”

Victor entered last, eyes flicking across the room, cataloguing positions and tensions. He didn’t say anything about last night either. Just moved to the counter, poured coffee, and leaned back against the sink, arms crossed. The unspoken statement was loud enough: Business as usual, with adjustments.

Wade watched it all with a grin tugging at his mouth. No one said the word family, but the pack had already shifted to make room.

Later, when the kitchen had cleared, Wade found himself drifting back to the couch where Logan had slept. The blanket still held the faint dent of his body, the hoodie abandoned in a crumple of fabric. Wade picked it up, turning it over in his hands, thumb brushing the faint stretch marks at the seams.

It was ridiculous, really. He’d fought mercenaries, mutants, mad scientists. He’d crawled out of burning wreckage more times than he could count. But the sight of Logan curled small and stubborn under a blanket had rattled him more than any battlefield ever had.

Not protective anymore. Something else. Something deeper.

And Wade wasn’t sure if that was terrifying or inevitable.

Logan didn’t talk about it the next day. Or the day after.

He worked harder instead. Carried in armloads of firewood even though Bolt had already stacked enough to last the week. Hauled crates from the truck when Fred offered to help. Cleaned his knives at the table with a precision that made the others choose their words carefully.

He thought if he pushed his body hard enough, maybe he could outrun the weight pressing in on him. But the truth was never far. Each time he bent over, there was the faint tug in his abdomen. Each time he stood too long, there was the ache across his lower back. The body doesn’t lie.

And Wade—damn him—noticed everything.

“You’re overdoing it, bub,” Wade said one afternoon as Logan dropped a bundle of logs by the stove.

“Mind your business.”

“This is my business,” Wade shot back. He was leaning against the counter, arms folded, watching with that infuriating grin that somehow wasn’t really a grin anymore. “Pack business. Dad business. Surrogate cool-uncle business. Take your pick.”

Logan glared at him, chest heaving, but the sting of the words didn’t land the way he expected. Instead, it settled somewhere low, almost warm, and that made him even angrier.

“You don’t get it,” Logan muttered, turning away.

Wade pushed off the counter, voice softening in that way that always caught Logan off guard. “Then help me get it. ’Cause what I see is you grinding yourself down like the world’s not already heavy enough. You can’t carry this alone. Not anymore.”

Logan’s hand tightened around the back of a chair. The urge to snarl, to shut it down, rose sharp. But behind it, something else pushed—the memory of Victor’s voice, flat and final: It’s part of the pack now.

He didn’t answer. Not yet.

The shift started small, but it was impossible not to notice.

Fred, normally oblivious to everything that wasn’t food or sleep, started cooking more. Big portions, heavy stews, enough leftovers to fill the fridge. He grumbled about “feeding a small army” but always made sure Logan’s bowl got set in front of him first.

Bolt adjusted the locks on Logan’s door, reinforced the hinges. “Don’t want Stryker’s goons kicking through it like it’s made of cardboard,” he said simply, as if it were just another maintenance job.

Wraith—mysterious, calculating Wraith—began taking longer patrols at night. He didn’t announce it, didn’t ask permission. He just vanished into the woods and returned with silent reports of cleared perimeters, tracks observed, nothing out of place.

Victor stayed the most obvious, shadowing Logan’s movements in that quiet, looming way of his. He never said the word protection, but it hung in the air like his scent—earth, smoke, steel.

And Wade… Wade was everywhere. Teasing, hovering, showing up at Logan’s side like an annoying echo that refused to fade. He had a joke for every sharp edge Logan tried to throw, a grin for every scowl. And when Logan’s energy finally cracked, when exhaustion caught him so suddenly he had to sit down mid-task, Wade was the one who wordlessly pressed a mug into his hand and sat shoulder to shoulder with him until the shaking eased.

Logan hated it. Needed it. Both at once.

It came to a head one evening when the others had scattered—Fred asleep in front of the TV, Bolt buried in his tools, Wraith vanished, Victor patrolling. Logan sat at the kitchen table, head in his hands, shoulders tight enough to snap. The low hum of the fridge filled the silence.

“You’re spiraling,” Wade’s voice came gently from the doorway.

“Leave me alone.”

“Not happening.” Wade crossed the room, dropped into the chair across from him. “Talk to me.”

Logan’s eyes lifted, tired and sharp all at once. “What do you want me to say? That I’m scared? That every time I close my eyes, I see Stryker’s face? That this thing inside me is gonna paint a target so big we’ll never make it out alive?” His voice cracked, just faintly, before he forced it steady again. “You happy now?”

Wade didn’t flinch. Didn’t joke. He leaned forward, forearms on the table, and said quietly, “No. I won’t be happy until you believe you don’t have to fight that alone.”

Logan looked away, jaw locked. His throat worked like the words were there, trapped behind his teeth. Finally, he muttered, “I don’t… know how.”

Wade reached across, slow and steady, and set a hand on his wrist. Not gripping, just resting there. Warm. Present. “Lucky for you, I do. So you can just… let me.”

For a long moment, Logan didn’t move. Then, almost imperceptibly, his shoulders loosened. Not all the way—never all the way—but enough.

It wasn’t surrender. It was trust, fragile and dangerous.

And Wade treated it like it was made of glass.

The following days were threaded with moments that didn’t look like much on their own, but stacked together, they built something solid.

Fred caught Logan napping at the table one afternoon, head pillowed on folded arms. Instead of making a joke, he draped a dish towel over him like a blanket and tiptoed away.

Bolt left a small toolkit on Logan’s nightstand with a note: For fixing the chair you keep kicking. Logan never admitted it, but the gesture pulled something tight in his chest.

Wraith returned from patrol one night and silently handed Logan a sprig of pine needles, fresh and sharp-scented. No explanation. Just a small offering from the woods, something alive and green.

Victor said nothing at all. He didn’t have to. His presence was proof enough.

And Wade—always Wade—filled the spaces with noise and warmth. He teased, he hovered, he gave Logan a thousand reasons to scowl and a thousand more to breathe easier.

The nest upstairs grew larger. No one questioned it anymore. Items disappeared and reappeared, tucked into Logan’s hoard like the cabin itself was conspiring to keep him safe.

Logan still bristled, still fought the instinct to bare his teeth. But the edges were dulling, little by little.

Because for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t holding the weight alone.

The cabin quieted again as night settled heavy across the trees. Dinner dishes had been washed and stacked, Fred had collapsed in his room with a groan about being “too full to move,” and Bolt had retreated to his workshop with a muttered warning not to touch his projects. Wraith slipped outside at dusk and hadn’t returned yet, though nobody worried—he was always more shadow than man anyway. Victor paced the perimeter like a sentry until the frost glittered silver on the ground.

And Logan—Logan sat on the couch again, arms crossed, hoodie zipped halfway up. The television’s glow painted his face in shifting colors, but his eyes weren’t focused on the screen. He was somewhere else, tucked inside his thoughts, jaw tight.

Wade wandered in barefoot, as he always did, two mugs in hand. The tea steamed faintly in the low lamplight.

“Round two,” Wade announced softly, plopping onto the opposite end of the couch. He stretched his legs out until his heels brushed Logan’s thigh. “Doctor’s orders. Drink it or I start humming Disney songs until you cave.”

Logan grunted but took the mug anyway. “You’d do it too.”

“Oh, I’d commit. Full performance. Jazz hands and everything.”

That earned the smallest huff from Logan, barely a ghost of a laugh. It was enough.

They sat in silence for a while, the kind that wasn’t empty but thick, warm. The crackle of the fire carried from the stove. Outside, the wind threaded through the trees like distant waves.

Wade sipped his tea and let his gaze wander, eventually landing on Logan. The hoodie stretched just slightly over his stomach now, enough to be noticeable even in low light. The sight sent that same strange ache through Wade’s chest, sharp and steady.

“You ever think,” Wade said quietly, “that maybe this isn’t the curse you keep telling yourself it is?”

Logan’s head turned, eyes narrowing. “Don’t start.”

“I’m serious.” Wade’s voice didn’t rise; if anything, it softened. “Look around you. Victor’s guarding like a wolf on watch, Fred’s cooking like we’re all starving orphans, Bolt’s fortifying doors, Wraith’s haunting the treeline. They didn’t flinch when you told ’em. Not one of ’em. They adjusted. They made space.”

Logan stared at him, the muscle in his jaw ticking. “That doesn’t mean it’s safe.”

“Nothing’s ever safe,” Wade countered. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “But you’ve got a whole pack ready to bleed before they let anything touch you. Before they let anything touch that.” His gaze flicked briefly to Logan’s stomach, then back to his eyes. “Doesn’t that count for something?”

For a long moment, Logan didn’t answer. His hands curled around the mug, knuckles pale. Finally, his shoulders dropped, just slightly, and his voice came low. “I don’t know what to do with it.”

“Then don’t do anything,” Wade said, matter-of-fact. “Let it be what it is. Let us be what we are. Claim the space. It’s yours.”

The words hung in the air, heavy and true.

Logan looked away, but his throat worked like he was swallowing something sharp. Slowly, he set the mug down on the table and shifted, easing back into the couch cushions. The hoodie bunched under his chin as he exhaled, long and low, a sound more surrender than defeat.

“You make everything sound simple,” he muttered.

“That’s ’cause I’m a genius,” Wade said, leaning back with a grin. “Also devastatingly handsome, but you already knew that.”

Logan rolled his eyes, but the edge was gone. His head tipped sideways until it rested against the couch back. His breathing slowed, softened, and before long his eyelids slipped shut.

Wade stayed awake longer, watching. Not just the man, but the way the cabin seemed to hold him now—blankets draped, stolen items piled in a nest upstairs, the quiet hum of pack energy shifting around him like a protective circle.

Not just survival. Not just instinct. Something more.

Wade didn’t touch him, didn’t speak again. He just sat there, sentry and fool, until his own eyes drifted heavy.

Later, when the house had gone fully still, Wade stepped outside for air. The cold bit at his skin, sharp and bracing. The forest stretched endless and dark, but the cabin behind him glowed warm, alive.

Victor was there again, leaning against the railing, no cigarette this time. His arms were folded, his expression unreadable.

“He tell you anything?” Victor asked without turning.

“Enough,” Wade said. “More than he wanted to, less than he needs to.”

Victor grunted. “Sounds about right.”

They stood there in silence for a while, both looking at the treeline. Then Victor’s voice came low, steady. “He’s never been good at letting anyone carry his weight.”

“Yeah,” Wade said softly. “Guess that’s why we don’t let him choose.”

For the first time that night, Victor glanced at him, and there was something almost approving in his gaze. “Good.”

No more words were needed.

When Wade went back inside, the cabin smelled of cedar and smoke, of food lingering in the air, of life settled into wood and fabric. Logan was still on the couch, curled in Wade’s hoodie, the swell of his stomach rising with each steady breath.

Wade eased down beside him, careful not to disturb the fragile peace. He let his head fall back against the cushions, let the warmth of the room seep into his bones.

Outside, the forest stretched wide, shadows pressing close. But in here—in this small, messy, stolen-space cabin—something had shifted.

It wasn’t just a hideout anymore. Not just a shelter.

It was theirs.

And for the first time in a long, long while, Logan let himself belong to it.

Chapter Text

The first morning after the reveal felt different, though no one said so out loud.

It wasn’t in the air exactly—though the cabin seemed to hold its breath more often now—but in the subtle shifts threaded into the routine. Smells of breakfast lingered longer, footsteps in the hall slowed when they passed Logan’s door, and the conversations in the kitchen carried a softness that hadn’t been there before.

When Logan woke, he stayed in bed longer than usual, staring at the ceiling with his hand flat across his stomach. The world hadn’t ended. Nobody had thrown him out. Nobody had treated him like a liability. But the silence around it all made his skin prickle.

Eventually, the smell of frying bacon pulled him downstairs. He came slow, one hand on the railing, the other shoved deep into the pocket of Wade’s hoodie. The hem still hung loose everywhere except where it curved around the swell of his stomach.

It was strange—still—to let it show. To not flatten his palm against it in shame or adjust his shirt to disguise it. The guys knew now. There was no bluffing anymore about why his appetite had shifted, why he ducked out of rooms earlier, why Wade and Victor had been shadowing him like bodyguards.

Fred was already in the kitchen, moving with the noisy efficiency of someone who’d been up for hours. Pans clattered, bacon sizzled, and butter hissed on toast. He didn’t pause what he was doing when Logan walked in, just flicked his gaze over, eyes snagging briefly on his middle before sliding back to the pan.

“Sit,” Fred said, jerking his chin toward the table. “Before someone else tries to feed you and screws it up.”

Logan raised an eyebrow but didn’t argue. He slid into the chair. The wood creaked under him, and the scent of coffee reached his nose a beat later. Fred didn’t ask if he wanted any. He just poured a mug, then set it down with a plate already loaded: eggs, bacon, toast, and a pile of sliced fruit that looked far too intentional.

Logan frowned. “Didn’t ask for—”

“Don’t care.” Fred’s tone wasn’t sharp—more like the way you’d tell someone to put on a jacket because it was cold out. “Eat.”

Logan rolled his eyes, but the fork scraped against the plate a moment later. He didn’t miss the way Fred hovered in his peripheral vision, watching not him but the food, making sure it didn’t sit too long.

It was both irritating and… something else. Something Logan couldn’t quite name.

When Wade drifted in a few minutes later, hair a mess and socks mismatched, he leaned down and stole a piece of bacon off Logan’s plate.

Logan swatted at him. “Get your own.”

“This is me getting my own,” Wade replied with a grin, dropping into the chair beside him. He leaned his elbow on the table, chin in hand, and studied Logan like he was some fascinating animal that might spook if you moved too fast.

Fred slid another plate in front of Wade with a muttered, “Eat and shut up,” but Wade only winked at him before turning his grin back on Logan.

And that was how breakfast went: quiet, steady, not normal exactly—but not broken either.

The days blurred in their own quiet way, the pack shifting around him like water finding its shape.

By midweek, Bolt’s usual prodding had changed form. He still sparred with Logan in the training room, still needled him with little comments—but the edge was different. Where before Bolt had pressed until Logan’s temper snapped, now he eased off just shy of it.

One morning, they circled each other on the mat, the sound of socked feet whispering over canvas filling the silence.

“You’re slow today,” Bolt said, smirk in place. But his strikes came a hair slower, his aim deliberately wide.

Logan narrowed his eyes. “You going easy on me?”

Bolt tilted his head, shrugging. “Maybe I just don’t wanna be responsible for knocking you on your ass in front of the kid.”

Logan snorted, lunging forward anyway. The next few moves came faster, sharper, enough to draw a real grin from Bolt. Sweat slicked their brows, and Logan’s chest burned by the end of the round. Just as his breathing edged toward ragged, Bolt clapped his hands together.

“Break time,” he said. No gloating. No pushing past the line.

Logan glared, but sat on the edge of the mat anyway, catching his breath.

When he stepped out of his room later that afternoon, he found the railing in the hall sanded smooth where it had been splintered. Nobody mentioned fixing it. But he didn’t need to ask.

Wraith’s attention was harder to pin down. He moved through the cabin like smoke—always there, always watching, never quite where you expected him. Logan caught him lingering more often now, usually in doorways or leaning against the porch post, gaze steady but unreadable.

One rainy afternoon, Logan came into the kitchen to find a sealed packet of ginger candies on the counter beside a mug. The kettle on the stove was already steaming.

Wraith didn’t say anything. He just poured the hot water, slid the mug toward Logan, and tapped the candies once with two fingers before stepping back.

Logan picked one up, turning it over in his fingers. “…Thanks.”

Wraith inclined his head—barely more than a dip—and left without a word.

It was like that with him. Gestures in place of sentences. Watchfulness instead of questions. Logan didn’t know if it made him more uneasy or more steady. Maybe both.

Victor’s presence was louder, but no less deliberate than Wraith’s.

If Wraith was smoke drifting through the cracks, Victor was the timber beam holding the cabin together—heavy, immovable, unavoidable. His ways of looking after Logan weren’t subtle. They were declarations written in wood and muscle.

The woodpile outside Logan’s door doubled in size. Neatly split logs stacked high, straight enough that you could’ve drawn lines against them. Logan noticed the change immediately—because it was impossible not to.

The first time he tried to haul any of it inside, Victor was there in the hall like he’d been waiting. Arms crossed. Shoulders filling the space so wide Logan would’ve needed to duck under to pass.

“You sit,” Victor said flatly.

Logan scowled. “I can carry—”

“Not asking.” The tone was stone. Not harsh, not dismissive, just immovable.

For a beat, neither of them moved. Victor’s golden eyes held steady, not challenging but daring Logan to push. The rumble under his voice carried both a warning and a promise: try it and I’ll stop you, or sit down and I’ll handle it for you.

Logan huffed, taking one deliberate step back, just enough to let Victor pass. His pride bristled, but he also didn’t miss how easily Victor hefted an entire armful of logs as though they were twigs.

Later that week, Logan returned to his room and found a heavy wool blanket folded neatly at the foot of his bed. No note. No explanation. But the cedar scent in the fibers was unmistakable. Victor’s scent.

Logan ran his fingers across the thick weave. He didn’t say thank you. But when he pulled it over himself that night, he slept deeper than he had in days.

And then there was Wade.

If Victor was a wall, Wade was gravity itself. Always pulling close. Always tugging things into orbit around him—laughter, chaos, warmth, sometimes irritation.

Wade’s adjustments weren’t loud. They weren’t one-time gestures. They were constant, endless, inevitable. He seemed to appear whenever Logan was halfway through doing something that might strain him.

Carrying groceries from the truck? Wade appeared, already plucking the bags from his hands with a cheery, “Heavy lifting is strictly outlawed in this county, bub.”
Reaching for the top shelf? Wade leaned over, snagged the jar, and made a crack about Logan’s “tragic shortness.”
Starting to chop vegetables at the counter? Wade hip-checked him aside, claiming “knife privileges revoked on account of precious cargo.”

It was infuriating. It was ridiculous. And yet, Logan found himself gritting his teeth a little less each time.

One evening, Logan came into the living room and found Wade sprawled on the couch like a starfish, surrounded by a pile of throw pillows.

“You’re nesting on my nest,” Logan said, arms crossed.

“Correction,” Wade replied, not even opening his eyes, “I am enhancing your nesting instincts by modeling peak relaxation. Observe the master.”

Logan shook his head, but when he sat down at the far end, Wade shifted his legs until they brushed Logan’s. He didn’t say anything about the contact. Just left it there, as natural as breathing.

The nights after that, Wade drifted toward wherever Logan had settled, always with an excuse. Had to check the firewood. Needed to fix the remote. Was morally obligated to sit down before Logan hogged all the couch space. Sometimes they traded barbs. Sometimes they just sat. Sometimes the crackle of the fire filled the silence in ways words couldn’t.

It didn’t escape Logan’s notice that Wade was also the first one awake if he left the bed in the middle of the night. Whether it was for water, or pacing restlessness, or just to sit at the window, Wade was always there a few minutes later. Sometimes he talked. Sometimes he didn’t. But he never let Logan sit alone long enough for the silence to turn heavy.

By the end of the week, evenings in the cabin had taken on their own rhythm.

Dinner was loud—Fred banging pots, Bolt making some smart-mouthed comment, Wade doing impressions of anyone unlucky enough to be in the room. The chaos blurred together into something that looked suspiciously like routine.

Afterward, when the dishes were done and the lamps turned low, the noise eased. Victor usually took the chair closest to the fire, arms crossed, eyes half-lidded but never asleep. Bolt claimed the rug, stretched out like a cat, muttering at anyone who stepped too close. Wraith leaned against the wall or the porch post, shadow more than man. Fred often disappeared into the kitchen again, “experimenting” with bread or soup for the next day.

And Logan… Logan found himself caught in the center of it, every evening. Sometimes on the couch with Wade’s knee brushing his. Sometimes in the armchair with his blanket folded across his lap.

It was unnerving, being the center without meaning to be. Conversations orbited him. Tasks rearranged around him. The air seemed to shift subtly whenever he left the room.

At first, Logan fought it. He bristled when Fred set a second plate down before he asked. He snapped when Victor blocked him from lifting the kindling. He rolled his eyes when Wade hovered too close.

But somewhere in the haze of days, he realized he wasn’t fighting as hard. The irritation gave way to a wary kind of acceptance, like leaning against a railing you didn’t entirely trust but finding it held anyway.

Still, nights were restless.

When the house quieted and only the wind whispered through the eaves, Logan often lay awake with his hand against the curve of his stomach. The weight of it felt heavier in the silence, pressing against his ribs, filling his lungs with thoughts he didn’t have names for.

Family. The word hovered at the edge of his mind. Dangerous. Vulnerable. Soft in ways that never belonged to him.

And yet—when he listened to the steady rhythm of Wade’s snoring through the wall, or Victor’s heavy footsteps pacing once before settling, or Fred’s low hum from the kitchen as he scrubbed dishes he didn’t need to scrub—something in his chest eased.

The silence didn’t feel empty anymore. It felt full.

Time in the cabin had its own way of stretching. Days blurred together, weeks folded into each other, and before Logan realized it, nearly a month had passed since the reveal.

The pack had adjusted in ways that weren’t flashy or announced. It was in the quiet corners, the things done without being asked, the looks that lingered just long enough to be noticed.

Fred no longer asked if Logan was hungry—he simply put a plate down in front of him at every meal. Breakfasts came heavy with eggs and bacon, lunches with soups that simmered slow, dinners with bread fresh from the oven. Fred always pretended the extra fruit or the second helping wasn’t for Logan, but nobody else got the same treatment.

Bolt’s training sessions had shifted too. The younger man never admitted it out loud—God forbid he say he was being considerate—but his sparring changed. Less sharpness, more awareness. He’d cut off drills just before Logan hit his limit, disguising the mercy with a smirk or a joke. It was irritating, but Logan couldn’t ignore that it also kept his body from tipping into exhaustion. And on days when Logan was too sore or too tired, Bolt always seemed to show up with some “fix” to distract him—dragging him into a movie, a card game, or a dumb story about something he’d read.

Wraith became a steady shadow. Never intruding, never asking questions, but always there when the nausea hit or when Logan’s steps faltered. Ginger candies, hot tea, a steadying presence leaning in the doorway—gestures small enough to be dismissed, but weighted in their timing. His silence wasn’t emptiness anymore; it was presence in its purest form.

Victor’s authority remained as solid as the walls around them. He didn’t let Logan carry firewood. He didn’t let him climb ladders. He didn’t let him strain in any way without stepping in like a wall planted in the earth. Some nights, Logan would find a second blanket folded neatly on his bed, or a mug of broth left cooling on the table outside his door. No words. Just care, heavy and immovable.

And Wade—Wade was constant. Wade was everywhere. Sometimes irritatingly so, sometimes comfortingly so, but always, always there.

If Logan leaned against a counter, Wade leaned next to him. If Logan stretched on the couch, Wade’s legs found his. If Logan tried to climb onto a stool, Wade steadied it with one hand, cracking some joke about OSHA violations in private homes.

But beneath the banter was something softer, something quieter. Wade never let Logan do anything alone—not because he thought Logan was weak, but because he wanted to share the weight.

One evening, Logan woke from a restless nap to find Wade sitting on the floor by his chair, sketching something on a scrap of paper.

“What are you doing?” Logan muttered, voice still rough with sleep.

“Scientific diagram of your belly’s current orbit in relation to the rest of the furniture,” Wade replied without looking up. “Hypothesis: by next week, it will achieve its own gravitational pull and small household objects will start circling it.”

Logan rolled his eyes, but when Wade shoved the doodle into his hand—a round circle labeled Planet Logan with little stars around it—he didn’t throw it away. He kept it folded in his pocket, and when Wade found it days later in the laundry, he didn’t say a word. He just smiled.

Wade’s presence wasn’t just physical; it was emotional ballast. When Logan’s thoughts turned too heavy in the quiet hours, Wade had a way of cutting through them—sometimes with humor, sometimes with a hand sliding over his, grounding him back into the moment.

Evenings became the truest reflection of what they were becoming.

The fire always burned, Fred always tinkered in the kitchen, and Bolt always complained about something no one cared about. Wraith hovered in the edges, Victor claimed his armchair, and Wade claimed the couch—always leaving just enough space for Logan to join him.

It was a circle, unspoken but undeniable. Logan in the middle, the rest orbiting in their own ways.

Some nights they argued—about chores, about cards, about Victor’s refusal to let anyone else split wood. Other nights they fell into companionable silence, the crackle of the fire filling the air. But always, Logan felt their awareness, subtle or blatant, pressing around him like a shield.

At first, it had made him restless. Like being smothered. Like being trapped. But slowly, almost against his will, he felt the edges of his resistance soften.

There were moments he caught himself leaning into it. Noticing Fred’s second plate before pretending not to. Sitting on the couch close enough that Wade’s knee brushed his. Letting Bolt win an argument he could’ve snapped over. Pulling the wool blanket Victor left into his lap without complaint. Keeping the ginger candies in his pocket, though he’d never admit they helped.

They weren’t grand gestures. They weren’t spoken promises. But in the marrow of the days, Logan found himself taking comfort in them.

One night, when the cabin had gone still and Wade’s snores buzzed faint through the wall, Logan lay awake with his hand curved protectively over his stomach. The thought came unbidden, dangerous, heavy: family.

The word felt foreign in his chest. Sharp-edged, like it didn’t belong. But it also felt inevitable, pressing closer with every day that passed.

He didn’t say it out loud. Not yet. But the firelight in the living room, the footsteps on the stairs, the quiet food left waiting for him—all of it whispered it for him.

Family.

And for the first time in a long time, Logan didn’t push the thought away.

By the end of the month, the cabin was no longer just a shelter. It was a circle, a rhythm, a shifting of weight from one pair of shoulders to many. Logan didn’t call it family yet. He wasn’t ready. But every plate set down, every spar ended early, every blanket folded, every joke deflected, every shadow lingering in the doorway—every small act carved the word deeper into the walls.

He carried it in silence. But he carried it.

Chapter Text

Dinner that night was the kind that smelled like it had been cooking for hours—slow-roasted pork, rosemary potatoes, something rich and buttery that Fred had refused to name until everyone sat down. The table was crowded, mismatched chairs pulled in from the porch, plates stacked at one end. Steam curled off the food, mingling with the cedar-and-woodsmoke scent that clung to the cabin.

Fred set the last platter down with a thump, and Wade was halfway through spearing a slice of meat before Fred swatted his fork away.

“Let people serve themselves, Wilson,” Fred said.

“They can serve themselves from my plate,” Wade countered, already scooping potatoes onto Logan’s without asking.

Bolt took the seat across from Logan and immediately reached for the bread basket, only to have Fred yank it out of reach.

“You’ll eat vegetables first,” Fred ordered.

Bolt narrowed his eyes. “I’m not five.”

“You’re worse,” Fred said, dumping a spoonful of green beans onto Bolt’s plate.

Logan ate quietly at first, watching the rhythm of it—Fred’s bossy efficiency, Bolt’s needling, Wade’s casual theft of everyone’s food. The stove’s warmth sat square in the center of the room and radiated outward; the kind of heat that worked its way into your muscles and uncurled the fists you didn’t know you’d made. He kept his head down, fork steady, paying attention the way he always did—counting breaths, cataloguing tones, measuring how close each body was to his chair.

By the time his plate was half-empty, the noise had thickened. Wade narrated the distribution of food like a sportscaster—“And Wilson steals yet another rosemary potato from the unsuspecting Victor, a bold move from a man with no sense of self-preservation”—and Victor pretended not to hear him while keeping one palm up like a shield between Wade’s fork and his pork.

Bolt flicked a green bean at Fred. It bounced off Fred’s shoulder and rolled into his lap.

Fred didn’t even blink before catapulting a potato wedge in return.

That was all it took. Within seconds, potatoes were flying, Wade was doing play-by-play with increasing hysteria—“And the crowd goes wild! A wedge arcs through the air like a tater-comet!”—and Victor was growling for them to “cut it out,” shielding his plate with one big hand and snatching a stray roll out of the air without looking.

A rogue bean landed perfectly on Logan’s fork as he lifted it. He stared at it for a heartbeat, like the universe had told a joke only he could hear. Before he could stop himself, he laughed. Not a quiet exhale, not a scoff. Laughed. The sound startled him enough that he blinked, eyes stinging. It startled the others too; heads turned in a quick ripple.

Wade caught it immediately. His grin went wide and bright, the kind that said remember this. “And he laughs! Ladies, gents, and genetically-enhanced weirdos, we have audio confirmation of joy!”

“Eat your beans,” Victor said, but the corner of his mouth had softened.

Fred planted the bread basket in the middle of the table like a referee throwing down a flag. “Truce. Or I will serve nothing but oatmeal for a week.”

“That’s a war crime,” Wade whispered.

“Try me,” Fred said, and the room dropped back down from chaos into clatter—forks on plates, someone’s chair squeaking, the stove popping.

Logan ate. He didn’t realize until he was wiping at his mouth with his thumb that he’d finished everything on the plate.

“More?” Fred asked, already reaching for the serving spoon.

“I’m good,” Logan said, and when Fred still looked like he might argue, he added, softer, “Thanks.”

Fred didn’t make a thing of it. He just nodded and shifted his attention to Bolt, who was attempting to hide his green beans under a slab of pork as if no one had ever thought of that tactic before.

Later, the porch was a different kind of battleground.

The night air was sharp enough to nip at skin, the kind that made breath puff out in pale clouds. Beyond the lamplight, the clearing dissolved into black pines and frost-rimmed brush. Logan stepped out for the quiet, hoodie zipped, hands shoved into the pockets, thinking he might make one slow lap down the steps and back up—anything to move the restlessness out of his head.

The boards creaked behind him.

“Thought you’d freeze without company,” Wade said, slipping into his peripheral like he’d been waiting behind the door just to deliver that line.

“I’m fine,” Logan replied.

Wade braced his elbows on the railing and peered at the sky like he expected it to talk back. “Define fine.”

“Not throwing you off the porch,” Logan said.

“Ah. A ringing endorsement. We’ll mark you down as ‘stable, slightly homicidal.’”

Victor’s heavy footsteps followed, more statement than sound. He stepped out carrying a folded blanket. Without a word, he draped it around Logan’s shoulders.

“I don’t need—” Logan started.

“Not asking,” Victor cut in, same tone he used when blocking a doorway.

Wade, not to be outdone, produced a thermos from somewhere (pockets like a magician’s hat) and pressed it into Logan’s hands. “Hot chocolate. Extra marshmallows. You’re welcome.”

Logan eyed them both, exasperation barely masking the flicker in his chest. “You two competing for ‘most overbearing’?”

“Already won that,” Wade said.

Victor grunted in agreement, which only made Wade look offended on principle. “You can’t agree with me, that ruins the dynamic.”

They stood there, quiet knitting the space between the jabs, until an owl called from the dark and frost beaded along the railing. Out in the trees, something shifted—snow shedding from a laden branch, or a fox ghosting through the brush. Victor’s head turned toward the sound like iron on a magnet.

“Tracks by the creek this morning,” he said, like he was commenting on the weather.

Wade’s posture straightened. “Human?”

Victor didn’t answer directly. “Fresh. Not ours.” He let the words hang. “I’ve doubled the watch. Wraith’s taking the long loop.”

“Could be hunters,” Wade offered, light but watchful.

“Could be,” Victor said, which meant I don’t think so.

Logan swallowed the mouthful of hot chocolate that had just turned thick in his throat. He hated the way the night pressed in then, how the darkness felt less like a blanket and more like eyes. He hated more that Victor had seen that—and had brought the blanket anyway.

Wade’s shoulder bumped his, a small tap. “We draw lines,” Wade said. “And we make sure anything out there trips over them.”

Victor gave a single nod, like a gavel falling. “No one alone outside after dusk,” he said, the rule shaped and set.

Logan bristled on instinct. His mouth opened—I don’t need——and closed again. The blanket around his shoulders held the memory of Victor’s hands, the thermos warmed his palms. The line felt less like a cage and more like a chalk mark around a campfire. He held his breath and let it out slow, fog blooming in the cold.

“Fine,” he said. Then, grudgingly, “Thanks.”

Wade’s “you’re welcome” carried too much satisfaction for anyone’s comfort.

That night, the nest was warmer than usual, smelling faintly of cedar and cocoa. Logan had been rearranging the blankets—adding Victor’s wool throw to the top layer, smoothing the sides like a creature making a burrow—when Wade appeared in the doorway, leaning there with that infuriatingly casual posture that said I’m not leaving even if you tell me to.

“You moving furniture in here?” Wade asked.

“Making it comfortable,” Logan muttered.

Wade stepped in, toeing off his boots. “You know… purely for safety testing, I should see if it’s structurally sound.”

“It’s a pile of blankets, Wade.”

“Exactly. Could be dangerous. Might swallow someone whole.”

“Lucky me.”

Before Logan could argue, Wade stretched out on the edge of the nest, arms folded behind his head like he belonged there. He closed his eyes with exaggerated contentment. “Yep. Definitely needs my professional supervision.”

“Fine. Ten minutes.”

Two hours later, they were still there.

Logan listened to Wade’s breathing slow, listened to the muffled thud of Fred closing a cabinet, to the wind thumbing the eaves. He told himself it was practical to let Wade stay. The nest was big enough. Making Wade get up would be more effort than it was worth. Practical, he repeated to himself, as if practice would make the word true.

But the truth pressed in, warm and heavy: it didn’t feel bad having someone stay.

Wade cracked an eye. “You thinking real hard for a guy lying on a blanket mountain.”

“Shut up,” Logan said, no heat in it.

“Copy that,” Wade murmured, and did.

The cabin settled around them like an exhale.

The smell of frying bacon was enough to drag Logan into the kitchen before he’d decided to get up. Morning light was winter-pale, the kind that made every surface look cold no matter how warm the stove kept the air. Fred stood at the skillet, broad back hunched slightly, moving with the steady rhythm of a man who cooked like he fought—efficient, no wasted motion.

Without looking over, Fred grunted, “Sit.”

“I was just gonna grab—”

“Sit,” Fred repeated, pointing to a chair with the spatula. “You’re eating a proper breakfast.”

Logan sat.

Fred plated eggs, bacon, and toast in quick succession, setting the dish down with a thump. “Coffee’s already poured. Don’t argue.”

Logan wrapped his hands around the mug. “You practicing your parenting skills?”

Fred didn’t blink. “Don’t need to practice. Already the responsible one here.”

“That’s bleak,” Logan said.

Fred shrugged, flipped bacon. “Someone’s gotta be. Eat.”

They ate mostly in silence, save for the sizzle and the tick of the wall clock. When Logan’s fork slowed, Fred nudged the plate closer with one finger, like sheer proximity could convince him. He didn’t comment on the second helping he slid across; just did it and turned back to the stove.

After, when Logan pushed back from the table, Fred gave a short nod toward the plate. “Good. Keep that up.”

For a man who rarely said anything personal, it landed heavier than it should have. Logan opened his mouth, then shut it again, the thank-you slipping sideways into something less fragile.

On his way to the hallway, he paused. “You—uh. That stew last week. It was decent.”

Fred’s mouth twitched. “It had vegetables.”

“I noticed.”

“Good,” Fred said, which, judging by his tone, ranked somewhere close to you saved my life on the Fred scale.

By afternoon, Bolt had found his mark.

Logan was cutting through the living room when Bolt called from the hall, “Hey, need a hand with something.”

That something turned out to be a wobbly shelf in Bolt’s room. The space smelled faintly of motor oil and cedar polish, tools spread across the desk in neat chaos that had its own weird logic.

“Could’ve fixed this yourself,” Logan said, leaning on the doorframe.

“Could have,” Bolt agreed, “but it’s faster with two.”

It wasn’t faster. Bolt kept stopping to dig for a tool he’d already set out, or to tell a story about the last time he’d “improved” something and accidentally shorted Fred’s coffee maker. When Logan crouched to level the bracket, Bolt told him to stand—“I got it, sit, sit”—and then promptly dropped a screw, which they both watched roll under the dresser like a tiny, gleeful escapee.

“You did not invite me in here for efficiency,” Logan said flatly.

Bolt smirked. “I invited you for company.”

“Say that again and I’m leaving.”

“Companionship,” Bolt tried, and barely dodged the screwdriver Logan flung onto the bed.

By the time the last screw tightened, Bolt stood back, satisfied. “See? Teamwork.”

“You just wanted someone to pass you the screwdriver.”

“Yeah,” Bolt admitted, “but you’re less annoying than Fred.”

It was a low bar. It still earned a huff from Logan, which Bolt counted as a win. When Logan turned to go, Bolt added, offhand, “Also, Victor said not to let you climb on any chairs.”

Logan paused. “Did he.”

Bolt pointed to a bright yellow note taped to the inside of his door in block letters: NO STOOLS. ASK FOR HELP. Someone—Wade—had drawn a stick figure falling off a chair with Xs for eyes. Victor’s signature was a deep, unmistakable V at the corner.

“You people are insufferable,” Logan said.

“And yet,” Bolt said, “you’re still here.”

Logan didn’t dignify that with an answer.

That night, the cabin was dim and quiet, most of the team either in their rooms or scattered between the porch and kitchen. When Logan pushed open his door, the first thing he noticed was the smell—something herbal and sharp, not his usual cedar-and-smoke.

The second thing was the small, folded blanket tucked into the corner of the nest. Dark gray, heavy, the kind that felt expensive without looking like it. On top of it sat a packet of dried fruit and a small jar of honey.

He didn’t need to check to know it was Wraith’s doing.

Wraith had a way of giving without saying, dropping things into your path and vanishing before you could thank him. Logan picked up the blanket, thumb rubbing the edge automatically. Someone—Wraith, obviously—had stitched a barely visible line of thread along one corner, a loop you could hook a finger through and tug. Practical. Quiet. So Wraith it was funny.

Logan set the jar and fruit aside for later and pulled the blanket over the top of the pile, letting the extra weight settle. The nest felt… more complete. More like a declaration: this space is chosen. He stood for a long minute with the lamplight washing the edges gold, the room holding the day’s heat, and let himself breathe deep.

The cabin, with all its quirks and noise, felt steady.

And for the first time in a while, he thought—maybe—so did he.

They formalized things the next day because that’s what you do with fear: you give it a framework so it doesn’t slosh everywhere.

Victor called it with his usual charm: “Kitchen. Now.” No explanation, which meant the explanation would be obvious once you arrived. Wade whistled as if he’d been the one to assemble the troops; Bolt showed up with a wrench he didn’t need; Fred wiped his hands and didn’t bother with a towel; Wraith materialized like he’d been there the whole time.

Victor set a map on the table—hand-drawn, clean, margins filled with neat notations. Crease marks scissored through the creek line. “Tracks came in here, crossed to the stand of birch, doubled back.” He tapped with a blunt finger. “Boots. One set. Weight distribution suggests someone carrying. Not heavy. Pack or gear.”

Wade leaned in. “Hunted animal? Firewood?”

“Could be,” Victor said again, the same way he’d said it last night—like a lid he was setting on a pot that might boil over. “Could be scout. Either way, we draw lines.”

He looked up, and in that tiny silence everyone found their posture straighten. Orders, even if he didn’t say the word.

“Line one,” Victor said, ticking it off without flourish. “No one outside alone after dusk. Buddy system at all times beyond the porch. If you can’t find a buddy, you don’t go.”

Wade raised his hand like a kid. “I volunteer as everyone’s buddy.”

“Denied,” Victor said. “You talk too much.”

Wade looked wounded. “I talk the perfect amount.”

“Line two,” Victor went on. “Watches double. Wraith takes the long loop. I take the creek. Rotate every two hours. If you see anything, you do not engage alone. You call it in.”

“On what radios?” Bolt asked. “We burned out the last handhelds when—”

“When you plugged one into the generator to ‘test durability,’ yes,” Fred supplied.

Bolt looked unrepentant. “It failed.”

“We do it the old way,” Victor said. “Signal whistle. Two short, one long, repeat. If you hear it, you answer.”

Wade cupped his mouth and made an awful bird noise that had to be illegal. Victor’s glance promised consequences. Wade mimed zipping his lips, which convinced no one.

“Line three,” Victor said, and here his eyes flicked to Logan before going back to the map, like refusing to be more obvious than the truth already was. “If there’s a lockdown, Logan does not move without accompaniment. Wade or Fred stays with him. Period.”

Logan stiffened. “I don’t—”

Victor raised a hand, not to cut him off harshly but to mark the edge clean. “Lines, runt. We’re drawing them so we don’t trip over one another in the dark.”

Logan’s mouth thinned. “I’m not—”

“Helpless,” Victor finished for him. “I know.” A beat. “You’re not alone either.”

The floor of the cabin creaked like the house itself had an opinion. Wade’s hand drifted toward Logan’s knee under the table and then stopped, hovering. Bolt studied a knot in the wood as if there were answers inside it. Fred tightened his jaw like a bolt in a vise.

Wraith, of all people, spoke. “Lines keep wolves from circling too close to the fire,” he said, voice mild. “They don’t keep the wolves inside from running.”

Logan’s eyes flicked to him, surprised. Wraith offered him nothing else but that. It was enough.

Victor nodded once, a stake driven. “That’s it. We follow the lines. We adjust if we have to. We don’t broadcast what we’re protecting.”

Wade raised his hand again, a parody of solemnity. “Motion to formally add a fourth line,” he said.

“No,” Victor and Fred said together.

Wade ignored them. “No stools,” he intoned. “Ask for help.”

Bolt snorted. “Seconded.”

“It’s already posted on a door,” Victor said, cutting off the laugh. “Meeting adjourned.”

No one stood right away. The rhythm of chairs, the scrape of wood, came a beat late; like they were all waiting for something else to be said.

Logan didn’t say anything at all.

It took less than forty-eight hours for the lines to get tested.

The sound came at dusk: an engine on the far road, gunning hard, then a crack like a backfire or a shot, then silence. The noise slid along the tree line like a knife. Everyone froze—the old dance drilled into bone.

Victor was already at the door, hand lifted, palm open: hold. Wraith ghosted to the back window. Bolt reached for the wrench he’d left on the table. Fred took the kettle off the flame; the hiss cut clean.

Wade’s eyes landed on Logan. Not a question, not a command. A fact: I’m here.

Logan hated the way his hands wanted to close. Hated the way the old heat rose in his chest—the impulse to push toward the noise, to meet whatever it was with teeth. The lines echoed: buddy system, whistle, do not engage alone. He exhaled, the breath ragged for reasons that had nothing to do with pride.

“Move,” Wade said, gentle as his voice ever got, and Logan did.

They went to the interior hallway, the place with two walls between them and the outside, the place chosen last month when a storm had pushed a pine onto the porch. Fred pressed a flashlight into Wade’s palm on the way by; Wade set it on the floor, beam angled low, soft enough to read shapes but not the way to the cabin. Victor’s silhouette passed in front of the window like a sundial hand. Somewhere beyond, Wraith’s whistle—two short, one long—threaded the dark and waited for its twin.

Logan forced his shoulders to drop. His pulse ticked hard against his throat. Inside his hoodie, the swell of his stomach rose and fell as he counted, steady. Wade didn’t touch him, and that was its own mercy. Just stood close, heat a line on Logan’s left side.

“Breathe,” Wade said. “In on four, out on six.”

“I know how,” Logan said, and did it anyway.

They stayed like that for fifteen minutes. Twenty. Long enough for the engine to not return, long enough for Wraith’s whistle to call and answer and then go still. Feet thumped the porch. Victor’s voice, low. The kettle was set back on the flame; the hiss resumed like someone had unpaused the sound of the cabin.

“False alarm,” Bolt announced, too loudly, the volume of someone whose adrenaline needed somewhere to go. “Hunters. Probably. Or very rude teenagers.”

Wade’s laugh was quiet and frayed. “The rudest.”

Logan unclenched his fists. The ache in his fingers surprised him. He flexed them until the blood returned and said nothing. It wasn’t the first false alarm, and it wouldn’t be the last. But the lines had held. They had moved together. He’d stayed.

Back in the kitchen, Fred plunked a mug down so hard some of the tea sloshed onto the saucer. “Drink.”

Wade saluted with his mug. “Aye aye, Captain Carbs.”

Bolt finally set the wrench down. It made a solid sound against the table, a punctuation.

Victor didn’t comment. He just looked at each of them in turn, a roll call without names, and nodded once.

Logan drank. Heat slid down his throat and settled somewhere steadier than bone.

It was almost inevitable that the real friction didn’t come from an engine on a far road. It came from something small and petty, the way storms often do—from a stool.

The stool in the pantry sat under the top shelf where Fred liked to stash his hoard of baking supplies. Logan wanted the jar of dried cherries Wraith had given him. He reached without thinking, fingers brushing the rim, and felt the pull across his abdomen—sharp enough to sting, familiar enough to make his jaw set. He grabbed the stool. Positioned it. Stepped up.

Wade walked in, saw, and went very still.

“Don’t,” Wade said.

“It’s two steps.”

“I don’t care if it’s one. Get down.”

“I’m getting cherries.”

“I’ll get them.”

“I’m not helpless.”

“That’s not what this is.”

Logan’s hands tightened on the shelf. “What is it, then?”

“It’s me not wanting to watch you take a risk you don’t have to,” Wade said, all the humor stripped back. “It’s you not needing to do everything by yourself and still being the strongest person I know. It’s—” He cut himself off, breath rough. “It’s the lines, Logan.”

Logan stepped down, slow. The stool’s foot scraped the floor. “And what about mine?”

Wade blinked. “Your what?”

“My lines.” Logan turned, the jar forgotten. “You think I don’t have any?”

Silence throbbed in the small space between them; the pantry always felt like a confession booth when the door was shut. Wade set his hands on his hips like he needed somewhere to put them other than on Logan’s shoulders.

“Tell me,” Wade said, after a heartbeat that felt like a test. “Start drawing.”

Logan stared at the floor, speaking to the grain in the wood because eye contact made the words heavier. “Don’t make decisions for me and call it protection. Ask me before you move my things, especially in the nest. Don’t—” his mouth twitched, like the word hurt on the way out “—don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room. Even when you’re joking.”

Wade nodded once, no protest. “Okay.”

“And,” Logan added, voice low, “stay.”

Wade’s head tipped. “Stay away?”

“Stay,” Logan repeated. “Here. With me. When it’s bad. When it’s not. That’s a line too.”

Wade’s grin arrived slow, like sunrise. “Yeah,” he said, voice gone gentle again. “That one’s easy.”

They stood there with the jar of cherries on the shelf between them like a witness. Wade reached up, plucked it down, and handed it over without ceremony.

“Teamwork,” he said.

Logan made a face. “Don’t start.”

Wade didn’t. Not then.

They didn’t talk about names. That would have felt like a door too far. But it came up sideways, like everything else.

Bolt found an old pack of alphabet magnets in a drawer—leftovers from whatever life the cabin had before them—and slapped them on the fridge just to annoy Fred. For a week they grazed there, bright letters rearranged into FART and BOLT SMELLS and, once, a very anatomically explicit phrase Wade swore was educational.

On the eighth day, Logan walked through the kitchen and found the letters aligned at the bottom of the fridge in a neat row: A B C D.

He never figured out who did it. Maybe Fred, alphabetical by nature. Maybe Wraith, leaving breadcrumbs for a future conversation. Maybe Victor, practicing the quiet kindness of not pushing. Maybe Wade, sneaking softness into the edges of his jokes.

Logan paused, thumb pressing one magnet into place. He didn’t allow the thought to finish forming. He didn’t have to. The letters were enough.

Snow arrived overnight. The kind that fell heavy and wet, plastering itself to the sides of trees and turning the steps into a slide. Morning was bright in the way winter mornings are—too many diamonds at once. The door stuck in the swollen jamb; Victor shouldered it open and swore under his breath.

No one left for patrol without a partner. The rule had already sunk into muscle memory. Wraith’s scarf appeared around Bolt’s neck like a conjuring trick. Fred declared oatmeal and then made pancakes anyway. Wade used the snow as an excuse to pelt Victor with a handful of slush and then fled, cackling, while Victor deliberated whether chasing him would violate some line about dignity.

Logan stood on the threshold and breathed in the sharp air. The baby—they never called it that out loud, but in his head the word had shortened to something solid and private—shifted against his palm. He swore he could feel the cabin shift around him like a body making room.

“Careful,” Wade called from the yard, voice cheerful and useless.

“Don’t fall,” Victor added, which from him meant I will catch you if you do.

“Eat more,” Fred said, which meant I see you.

Wraith didn’t say anything, but when Logan stepped down the first, icy stair, a gloved hand appeared at his elbow, steadying him without claim.

Lines. He could see them now like threads strung from tree to tree, from hand to shoulder, from door to fire. Theirs and his. Not walls. Not cages. Guides. Guardrails. A map in the snow that pointed him back to the same place: here.

Sleep came badly that night. The snow made the world too bright; even the dark seemed to glow. Logan lay awake and listened to the house—the tick of heat through pipes, the small groan of timber, a mouse skittering somewhere in the walls. He wanted to get up and walk. He wanted to put his forehead against the cool glass and count the pines. He wanted, for a truly ridiculous second, to drag the whole nest to the living room so he could be near the fire and watch the sparks leap.

He didn’t move. He was trying so hard not to move that his muscles ached with it.

After a while, Wade’s silhouette filled the doorway, hair a dark mess, hoodie half-zipped. He didn’t turn on the light. He didn’t say you okay?—which Logan would have met with a growl. He just stood there long enough that Logan could feel the question without having to entertain it.

“Can’t sleep?” Wade asked eventually, voice low.

“Noise in my head,” Logan said.

Wade came in and sat on the floor, back against the side of the bed, knees pulled up like a teenager hiding from a party. “Want me to talk? Want me to shut up? I can do either. I can also hum the national anthem but I worry that’s a war crime.”

“Quiet’s fine,” Logan said.

“Copy.”

They sat there until the quiet became something he could climb down into. Wade’s shoulder pressed against the mattress. Their breath found a rhythm. The noise in Logan’s head leaned away from the edges, as if it had found there was less room for it than before.

Somewhere between one breath and the next, Logan fell asleep. Wade stayed on the floor, head tipped back, eyes closed, like a guard dog who’d trained himself to nap.

Morning scraped an icicle-bright line across the window. Logan blinked himself awake to the old familiar ache of a night spent half-tense. Wade had, predictably, draped half of the wool blanket over himself from his position on the floor. Logan nudged the blanket back and watched Wade’s face crease into a little annoyed line, sleep-stubborn.

“Up,” Logan said.

“No,” Wade said, voice buried in fabric.

“Coffee.”

“Carry me.”

“Absolutely not.”

Wade opened one eye, grinning. “Worth a shot.”

He pushed himself up and, in doing so, brushed his hand against the small curve at Logan’s middle—a graze that might have been accidental in anyone else. In Wade it felt like a promise he was trying not to make too loudly.

Logan caught his wrist. Not hard. Just enough to hold it there for one breath. “If we’re drawing lines,” he said, the words tasting like something he could chew, “here’s one more.”

Wade waited.

“You can stay,” Logan said. “As long as you ask. As long as I say yes. That’s the line.”

Wade’s smile shifted from grin to something quieter. He pressed his hand gently against Logan’s, the contact plain and warm. “Okay,” he said. “Then can I stay?”

Logan rolled his eyes to disguise the way something in his chest lifted. “Yeah,” he said.

“Cool,” Wade said, unbearably pleased. “But I’m still stealing your bacon.”

“I dare you.”

Dinner that night was simpler—stew and bread, a salad Fred pretended not to have made. Bolt attempted to combine the salad with stew into a single spoon and received a unanimous “No” from every direction. Wraith knocked the snow from his boots so meticulously that Fred eventually snapped, “Just marry the doormat, why don’t you,” which made Wraith cough into his scarf with suspicious timing.

Victor updated the map with a new set of tracks: deer this time, neat and unbothered. The lines held steady, goose-quilled and sure. Wade swore he’d seen the world’s fattest squirrel terrorizing the woodpile; thirty minutes later, Bolt returned with a drawing of a squirrel the size of a bear that he taped to the pantry door, and Fred did not remove it because the laugh it yanked out of Logan paid the rent.

Later, after the dishes and the evening rounds and the inevitable argument about whose turn it was to stack wood (Victor’s, apparently, until he forced Bolt to take the ax “for character development”), Logan stood at the porch’s edge. The snow reflected the spilled light like the ground had learned how to glow. The line of his breath rose and faded. He lifted a foot and traced a line in the thin frost along the rail with his heel—a child's act, small and private.

Lines in the sand, lines in the snow, lines on a map. They weren’t walls. They were the shape of the place where you chose to stand.

Behind him, Wade’s steps, soft. Not assuming. Not grabbing. He stopped a half pace away and waited.

“Cold,” Wade said.

“Yeah,” Logan answered.

Wade’s arm brushed his. Not a question. Not quite a claim. The middle place they’d agreed to build.

In the trees, the owl called once, twice. The snow made a hush of everything else. Logan looked out over the dark like it owed him nothing and owed him everything and thought about the circle in the kitchen, the whistle in the woods, the nest upstairs, the jar of cherries in the pantry, the magnets on the fridge that spelled nothing and everything at once.

He didn’t say the word. He didn’t have to.

He stood where the lines met and knew exactly which side he was on.

Chapter Text

It was one of those evenings where the cabin seemed to settle early. The air outside had turned brittle, frost already crawling along the edges of the windows, and inside the smell of stew lingered, thick and comforting. Everyone had eaten in that slow, heavy way that came from too much bread and just enough wine to loosen shoulders.

Logan was half-reclined in the corner of the couch, one hand absently tracing the curve of his stomach. At six months, there was no hiding it anymore—not from strangers, and certainly not from the people sharing a roof with him. The bump sat low and forward, stretching his worn t-shirt, and it moved sometimes now, small shifts and rolls under his palm that made him feel both fierce and unsettled.

They were all in the living room, scattered. Fred had claimed the armchair nearest the fire, Victor was stretched out along the opposite couch, Wraith perched in the shadows near the far wall with a mug of tea, and Bolt had dropped himself onto the floor with his back against the couch. Wade sat sideways in the chair nearest Logan, legs over one arm, fidgeting with a deck of cards he wasn’t actually shuffling.

Logan hadn’t meant to say anything that night. But the words had been pressing at the back of his throat all day, and maybe the quiet was too much. Maybe it made room for things he’d been keeping shut.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said finally.

The fire popped. No one moved right away. Victor’s eyes slid open just enough to glance at him.

“About what?” Wade asked, voice mild.

“About… after,” Logan said, fingers tapping against the side of his stomach. “I’m gonna start looking at prospective families soon. For the baby.”

It was quiet enough to hear the logs shift in the grate.

Wraith didn’t move, but his gaze flicked to Logan, unreadable, then away again. Bolt looked over his shoulder, gave the faintest nod, and went back to fiddling with a small metal puzzle in his hands.

Fred sat forward. “Hold on. What do you mean ‘families’?”

“Adoptive families,” Logan said, slow and deliberate, like if he didn’t leave space for interruption he might actually get through it. “People who want kids. Who can take care of them.”

Victor sat up fully now, leaning forward on his knees. “You’re saying you’re not keeping it?”

“That was the plan,” Logan said, meeting his stare. “Always was.”

Fred frowned. “We moved out here, we—”

“We moved out here so Stryker wouldn’t know,” Logan cut in. “Not so I could play house.”

Fred’s jaw tightened. Victor’s did too, though his eyes softened almost immediately. “Thought maybe you’d changed your mind,” Victor said quietly.

Logan looked away. “I didn’t.”

Wade hadn’t spoken again. He’d set the cards down and was just watching him, something still and sharp behind his expression, like a knife hidden under cloth.

“You do what you think’s right,” Wraith said finally from the corner, his voice low. “We’ll back it.”

Bolt nodded again without looking up. “Yeah. Your call.”

The conversation could have died there, but Logan felt the churn in his chest, the way their reactions—all of them—lodged under his skin. Fred’s disbelief. Victor’s quiet hurt. Wade’s silence. Even the wordless support from Wraith and Bolt made his stomach twist, because it meant they were already letting him go.

He pressed his palm over the baby, feeling the faintest flutter, and tried not to think about the fact that “prospective family” meant sifting through strangers and deciding who got to claim something he hadn’t even figured out how to name yet.

The living room went on without him after that. Wraith finished his tea. Bolt eventually solved his puzzle, the two halves clicking apart with a sound that might as well have been punctuation. Fred muttered something about needing another beer but didn’t move. Victor leaned back slowly, the chair creaking under him, but his gaze never strayed far from Logan. Wade… Wade stayed unreadable.

Logan didn’t stick around to see what came next. He pushed himself off the couch with a grunt, joints aching in ways that had nothing to do with age, and disappeared down the hall. The quiet swallowed him quick.

The stairs complained under his feet—not loud, just enough to remind him there was still life in the house—but when he reached his room, the quiet hit him like cold air.

He closed the door without really thinking about it. The faint click sounded final.

The nest took up almost half the floor now. It had grown without him really noticing: layers on layers, colors bleeding together in a patchwork of soft and worn. More blankets folded in. More clothes pilfered from the others, tucked away in the right places for the right mix of scent and texture. Some things were half-buried, edges peeking out like old bones—the cuff of Victor’s flannel, the hem of Wade’s hoodie, Fred’s mug wrapped in a scarf that still smelled faintly like soap and cinnamon.

He sat on the edge, careful not to shift the pile, and leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees. His palms slid over the curve of his stomach without conscious thought. Six months.

It felt like nothing and forever at the same time.

The baby moved faintly under his hand—just a flutter, but enough to make his throat tighten. He pressed there, as if he could hold it in place, hold everything in place.

“Prospective families.” The words landed in his mind like dropped iron. Heavy. Impersonal. The kind of language that sounded good in an official file, but cold when you actually said it out loud.

He tried to picture the process: the interviews, the questions about “expectations,” strangers with polite smiles and curated answers about why they’d be “a perfect fit.” He could almost hear them trying to convince him this was the best choice, their best rehearsed lines about giving the kid “a better life.”

And maybe they’d be right. Maybe that was the smart move.

Maybe that was what he wanted.

He’d never planned on keeping it. Not once. Not in the beginning. He still didn’t know if he could—not without screwing it up so badly that the damage would be permanent. He wasn’t built for this. Not the day-in, day-out grind of parenting. Not the kind of unconditional care a kid deserved. He’d ruin it. He always did.

But there was another picture, too. One that came without permission.

The baby asleep in the nest, the firelight flickering over soft hair. Victor’s massive hands holding them like they were something precious. Wade crouched on the floor, teaching them to throw cards like weapons, grinning like he was in on some secret. Fred sneaking them snacks from the kitchen. Bolt building them something—a crib, a toy, something that would last. Wraith showing them tracks in the snow, teaching them how to read the woods like a book.

That vision made his chest ache in a way that felt too close to dangerous.

He dug his palms into his eyes until he saw sparks. He tried to push it all away. He’d been down this road before—imagining things he couldn’t have. That way led to disappointment. That way led to loss.

And the memories came whether he wanted them or not. Every time he’d thought something might last. Every time he’d been wrong. The faces blurred together—people who’d told him he’d be fine, who’d sworn they wouldn’t leave, who’d gone anyway. Or worse, people he’d left first because he couldn’t stand waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He tried to tell himself that was different. That this wasn’t about him. But the truth was, the baby was the most his thing he’d ever had. And that made the thought of letting it go… feel like carving something out of his own chest.

A noise crawled up his throat—half-laugh, half-sob—and he bit it back so hard his teeth ached. He dragged both hands down his face and stared at the nest, at the proof that some part of him was already planning to keep it safe.

What the hell am I doing?

His breathing hitched without warning. He could feel it—the spiral starting. The one where every thought fed the next until the floor felt unsteady.

What if he kept the baby and failed?
What if he gave it away and spent the rest of his life wondering if they were okay?
What if Stryker found out?
What if the group resented him for making it their problem?
What if they didn’t? What if they wanted to keep it—and he let himself believe that was possible—only for it all to get ripped away?

He bent forward, arms wrapped around his stomach like that could shield both of them from the future. The room felt smaller. The shadows heavier.

Some part of him wanted someone to knock on the door. Another part wanted to barricade it.

That’s when the knock came—solid, two beats, the sound grounding him for just a second before the door creaked open without waiting for him to answer.

The knock jolted him hard enough that his shoulders jumped.

He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His throat felt too tight, his mouth too dry.

The door still opened.

Victor filled the frame like he always did, broad shoulders blotting out the hall light, one hand braced casually against the wood. His gaze swept the room once—the sprawled nest, the crumpled blankets, the clothes clutched in Logan’s fists—and slowed.

“You’re still up,” Victor rumbled.

Logan’s voice came out hoarse, sharper than he meant. “So are you.”

Victor stepped inside and shut the door behind him. The click was soft, but in the tight air of the room it might as well have been a slam. He didn’t come straight to the point—he crossed the space slow, like approaching something spooked.

Up close, there was nowhere for Logan to hide the damage. His eyes were glassy but dry, like he’d already burned through whatever tears he’d had. His knuckles were white where they gripped the edge of Wade’s flannel, twisting it so tight the seams strained. His shoulders had curled forward, caging his stomach, not in comfort—in defense.

Victor crouched by the nest, the boards under him giving a low groan. He didn’t touch, didn’t crowd, but his voice carried the same low gravity he used when calming a fight before it started.

“You’re wound up like a bear in a trap,” he said. “What’s going on?”

Logan huffed a humorless breath. “You already know. Everyone knows. ‘Prospective families,’ right? That’s the polite way to say ‘getting rid of it.’”

Victor didn’t flinch. “You really think that’s the right move?”

Logan’s jaw worked. “I think I’m not the kind of person who should be raising a kid.”

“Why?”

The single word landed heavy. No accusation. Just the demand for truth.

Logan barked out something between a laugh and a snarl. “You want a list? Violence. Trust issues. I cut people off before they can cut me. I’ve got a history of screwing things up so bad there’s no fixing it. That enough for you?”

Victor’s gaze stayed steady. “You forgot a few.”

Logan shot him a look sharp enough to cut. “Yeah? Enlighten me.”

“Loyalty,” Victor said without hesitation. “Instinct. The ability to keep the people you care about alive in situations most wouldn’t survive. And before you start—” He leaned in a fraction. “—that’s exactly what a good parent does. Shows up. Every time. Even when it’s ugly.”

Logan’s grip on the flannel tightened until his fingers ached. “It’s not the same.”

“It’s exactly the same,” Victor said.

The words hit something in Logan’s chest he didn’t want touched. His stomach churned. “You make it sound simple.”

“It is,” Victor said. “Doesn’t mean it’s easy. But don’t sell yourself short because you’re scared.”

“I’m not—”

Victor gave him that look—the one that stripped away the lies before they could fully form.

Logan dropped his gaze, heat burning the back of his neck. “Even if I… even if I thought I could… I don’t even know where to start.”

“Then you let us help you start,” Victor said simply. He straightened, slow and unthreatening, like giving Logan space back was part of the offer. “Think about it. Sleep on it. But stop tearing yourself apart like this before you’ve even made the call.”

When he left, the room didn’t feel lighter. But it didn’t feel quite so airless, either.

The room felt too big after Victor left. Not quieter—the cabin had been quiet before—but emptier in a way that made Logan’s skin itch. The lamplight was too warm, the air too heavy, and his thoughts wouldn’t stop pacing.

Victor’s voice was still there, low and steady, looping back over the same lines: Shows up every time. Don’t sell yourself short. Scared.

Logan hated that it stuck. Hated that a part of him wanted to believe it.

He shifted in the nest, pulling the flannel tighter, until the seams dug into his palms. Blankets slumped to one side, clothes spilling from the edges like the whole thing had lost its shape. He’d been clawing at it without realizing—not tearing, just… moving, rearranging, trying to make something feel right when nothing did.

That’s when the door eased open again. No knock. No warning. Just the faint scrape of wood as Wade slipped in, the smell of coffee trailing in ahead of him.

“You planning on fortifying this place, or are you just redecorating?” Wade’s voice was light, but it skimmed low under the words.

Logan didn’t look up. “Didn’t know I had visitors tonight.”

“Yeah, well…” Wade stepped over a stray blanket corner and set two mugs down on the low table. “Couldn’t sleep. Figured you weren’t either.”

Logan huffed, shifting his weight but not his posture. “Good guess.”

Wade lowered himself onto the edge of the nest, moving slow like he wasn’t sure if he’d be allowed. His weight dipped the pile just enough that Logan had to shift, and the warmth of him seeped in fast, familiar and unwanted all at once.

“So… adoption, huh?”

Logan’s jaw tightened. “Word gets around fast.”

“Fred and Victor aren’t exactly subtle,” Wade said with the faintest grin. “Pretty sure half the block knows if they’ve got their windows open.”

Logan stayed quiet, eyes fixed on the heap of fabric in front of him. Victor’s words flickered through again—don’t sell yourself short—and it made answering harder.

“You really want to go through with it?” Wade asked after a beat.

“I don’t know,” Logan admitted, the words dragging out of him like they weighed a hundred pounds each. “Feels like every time I picture letting it go, there’s this… gap. Like I’m leaving a piece of myself behind. But keeping it?” He shook his head. “That’s a mess I don’t know if I can handle.”

Wade leaned back on his hands, studying him with that unreadable look that always felt like it saw too much. “Maybe it’s not about avoiding the mess. Maybe it’s about figuring out which mess you can live with.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“Wasn’t meant to be.”

Logan risked a glance at him, half-expecting the smirk to be there. But Wade’s face was open, bare in a way he didn’t let happen often. His gaze flicked down—not long enough to linger—to Logan’s stomach, then back up.

“For what it’s worth,” Wade said quietly, “I think you’d be good at it.”

Logan’s breath caught before he could stop it. “Don’t say stuff like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it makes it harder.”

For a second, Wade looked like he might push—like he might lean in and really force the point. But he didn’t. He just stayed there, close enough to feel the warmth through the nest layers, quiet enough that Logan could hear his own heartbeat over the ticking of the lamp.

“Okay,” Wade said finally. “So, logistics.”

Logan blinked. “What?”

“You want to look at profiles?” Wade asked. “We can. I can help you set up an alias, Wraith can scrub what needs scrubbing, Bolt can build a burner that doesn’t look like a burner. If you decide to go that way, we make it safe.”

Logan studied him. Wade’s tone hadn’t wavered. It wasn’t a pitch. It wasn’t a trap. It was… an offer to stand wherever Logan pointed.

“And if I don’t?” Logan asked.

“Then we start a different list,” Wade said. “Supplies. Contacts. A pediatrician who won’t ask questions. A fire code friendly way to make this nest less of a textile avalanche.”

“Shut up.”

“Respectfully,” Wade said, “no.”

The corner of Logan’s mouth twitched despite himself.

Wade took a breath, let it out slow. “I don’t care what you pick,” he said, and when Logan’s eyes snapped up, Wade corrected, soft but firm, “Okay, that’s a lie. I care. I care a lot. But I care more that you are the one picking and not fear. Not Stryker. Not the version of yourself built by people who wanted you to think you break what you touch.”

Logan stared so hard at the floor it blurred. The baby nudged against his hand, a small insistence. He didn’t know if it was answer or question.

Wade nudged the mug toward him. The coffee had cooled, but it promised something familiar. Logan didn’t drink. He just wrapped his hands around it like a heat pack and let the ghost of the smell fill the space between them.

By the time Wade left, the coffee was cold and untouched. The air still smelled like him, threaded into the fabric at Logan’s side.

Logan didn’t move it away.

You’d think the cabin would lean around a conversation like that, but morning came with its ordinary chores like a metronome: firewood, breakfast, checking the traps, a sweep for tracks. Snow was a rumor in the forecast; the sky held itself the color of tin.

Fred wordlessly pushed a bowl into Logan’s hands when he sat—oatmeal with dried fruit sliced on top, the good kind Wraith had brought. “Eat,” he said.

Logan expected the lecture to follow—the one about calories and iron and being smart instead of stubborn—but Fred just poured coffee for himself and settled in across the table. His face was rough with sleep; his eyes were kinder than his mouth ever let on.

“Look,” Fred said finally, the word landing like a pan on the stove. “Whatever you decide, you’re not deciding it alone. That doesn’t mean we vote. It means we carry whatever comes with you. Got it?”

Logan’s spoon paused. “Why?”

Fred blinked like that was the dumbest possible question and also the most important. “Because you’re ours,” he said, as if that solved math. “Because you’ve been carrying us in one way or another since we met you, even when you tried not to. Because—” he gestured at Logan’s middle with his chin, awkward, gruff “—that is ours too, if you say the word. And if you don’t, we don’t stop being yours.”

Logan stared at him. “That was almost poetic.”

“Shut up,” Fred said, ears going pink. “Eat.”

He ate.

Bolt intercepted him in the hallway after, hands jammed into his hoodie, expression carefully casual. “Hey. Uh.” He flicked his gaze down, up, like he was checking for a tripwire. “I made a list. Of questions to ask agencies. If you want.”

Logan blinked. “You did what?”

Bolt produced a folded sheet from his pocket, edges soft from being opened and closed too many times. The writing slanted, cluttered with arrows and boxes. “Stuff like background checks, post-adoption contact, medical privacy. I looked up a couple… online. On a library computer. Masked.” He pursed his mouth. “Wraith watched me so I didn’t do anything stupid.”

“You doing anything stupid is practically your brand,” Logan said, taking the paper.

“Yeah, but not this stupid,” Bolt said. “This is… important.”

Logan looked down at the list. At the care in it. At the hours it represented that no one had asked him to spend.

“I didn’t ask you to—”

“You don’t have to,” Bolt said, cheeks flushing. “I wanted to.”

“Thanks,” Logan muttered, a little too rough, a little too quick. Bolt’s grin was immediate, reflex.

“Cool. Tell me if you want me to, like, make a spreadsheet or something.”

“No,” Logan said, with feeling.

“Okay, but just know I can.”

“I do know. It haunts me.”

Bolt, delighted, retreated before Logan could ruin it on purpose.

Wraith found him near the porch, adjusting the scarf around his throat with unhurried hands. He didn’t speak for a long moment, just stood with him and watched frost lift off the railing where the rising light warmed it.

“I have a contact,” Wraith said finally. “If you need one. Woman whose job is to keep girls alive when systems fail them. She owes me a favor.”

Logan’s throat tightened. “And you trust her?”

“As much as anyone,” Wraith said. “Which is to say… selectively. With limits I define.”

“Sounds like you.”

Wraith’s mouth curved. “I’ll keep it quiet.”

Logan nodded. The wind licked his ears. He pulled the hoodie up automatically. He didn’t ask Wraith to pass the number along. He didn’t say not to. The option lived between them like a third presence, neither welcome nor unwelcome, merely real.

Victor passed on his way back from the creek, snowdust in his hair, breath ghosting. He didn’t stop. He thumped his gloved hand against Logan’s shoulder as he went by, a weight more than a gesture. It said: I’m here. It said: Decide when you’re ready. It said: Eat more—which Logan understood less as admonishment and more as Victor’s strange dialect for love.

He thought looking would make it easier. It didn’t.

That afternoon, perched on the edge of the bed with a burner laptop open across his knees, Logan let Bolt’s list sit beside him like a compass and typed in phrases that felt like handing pieces of himself to the machine. Open adoption. Closed adoption. Private agency. Safety, privacy, confidentiality. He didn’t use his name. He didn’t use the cabin’s internet. Wraith had rigged something with a hot spot and a rickety signal that bounced like a stone across a pond, leaving barely a ripple.

Profiles came up. Photos of couples on beaches, couples in kitchens, couples in front of houses designed to look unthreatening. Posed dogs. Staged nurseries. So many pumpkins. So many matching sweaters. Letters that said the same thing in different fonts: We have so much love to give. We can’t wait to meet you. We want to complete our family. We promise your child will never wonder if they were wanted.

He clicked. Scrolled. Clicked again.

Some of them he closed in seconds. Some held his attention long enough that he read the letter twice. Every one of them flattened on the screen; no weight, no scent, no noise, no proof of kindness beyond words. He tried to imagine handing the baby to any of those pixelated lives. His stomach clenched against his ribs.

He kept the tab open anyway. Sometimes just to stare at the title bar like if he looked hard enough the right answer would appear.

Wade appeared in the doorway halfway through and didn’t come in. He just leaned and watched the blue light wash Logan’s face.

“You okay?” Wade asked, and the question wasn’t about the laptop.

“No,” Logan said. Then, because he was trying not to lie to the people he’d asked to stand with him: “But I’m not worse.”

“Okay,” Wade said. He nodded at the screen. “Want a second set of eyes?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay,” Wade said again. He didn’t ask to be needed. He let the question hang in the air like a coat Logan could put on when he got cold.

When Wade finally did sit beside him, an hour later, he didn’t touch the laptop at first. He glanced, took in the couple with white smiles and a golden retriever, and made a face.

“What,” Logan said, defensive without wanting to be.

“They color-coordinated with the dog,” Wade said. “That’s a red flag.”

“It’s a sweater.”

“It’s a cry for help.”

Logan fought a twitch at his mouth. Wade tapped the trackpad, scrolled through a letter that featured four paragraphs about how the couple “loved adventure!” and three about their shared passion for triathlons.

“I mean, good for them,” Wade said. “But this reads like a dating profile titled We Promise To Take Your Kid Hiking At 4 A.M.”

Logan huffed, a reluctant puff of air. Wade scrolled to another. “These two,” Wade said, softer. Pictures of a tiny apartment crammed with plants, a bookshelf bowed under the weight of secondhand paperbacks, a kitchen that looked like people actually cooked in it. “They look like their house smells like cinnamon and dust.”

“Dust,” Logan repeated.

“In the nice way,” Wade said. “Also their dog isn’t wearing a sweater.”

Logan let himself look, really look. Their letter didn’t gush. It spoke in plain sentences: We’re nervous. We won’t pretend we aren’t. We promise nothing we can’t do. We will show up. He closed the tab because his chest hurt. He reopened it because it hurt worse to close.

“I don’t know,” Logan said.

“You don’t have to,” Wade said.

They worked down Bolt’s questions together, not sending them anywhere, just… putting them in order, putting language on the weight so it shifted from formless to something you could pick up.

After a while, Wade cleared his throat. “Do you want… to call them families? Or would you prefer ‘profiles’ or ‘options’ or literally anything else.”

“Why,” Logan said, suspicious.

“Because the word is landing on you like a sack of rocks,” Wade said, gentle. “And we can use a different one.”

Logan stared at the blue glow on his hands, the small white crescent scar near his thumb. “Options,” he said.

“Okay.” Wade toggled his voice like he was switching on a light. “The options suck less when we’re naming them out loud. That’s science.”

“It’s not.”

“It is in my school.”

“What school is that.”

“Wade Wilson University. Motto: We Try Shit.”

Logan snorted, rare and incredulous. “That’s your motto?”

“Yeah,” Wade said. “It beats we wait until fear makes the choice for us.”

Logan shut the laptop.

They didn’t talk for a while.

The engine on the far road came back two nights later, right as the sky went purple with cold. It whined, sputtered, belched. Then a truck door slammed—a sound that traveled like a thrown rock.

Victor was up before anyone could blink. Wraith had his coat on by the time the second slam came. Bolt grabbed the whistle from its nail. Fred killed the lights with two flicks. Wade was beside Logan in three strides.

They moved the way they had practiced—quiet, quick, no wasted panic. Logan hated the way his pulse jumped. He hated more that when the whistle call cut two shorts, one long, the bulk of his relief was not for the cabin as a whole but for the small, hard bump under his palm. He didn’t like how that truth lit something in him that looked like a decision even though he hadn’t made one.

“Back hall,” Wade said, and Logan went without arguing.

They stood in the dark and counted heartbeats. Wraith returned first, breath on a leash. “Truck stuck at the bend. Two idiots,” he said. “Drunk or stupid. Maybe both. They freed it. They’re gone.”

Bolt let the breath out of his lungs loud enough that Victor glared. Fred turned the light on the lowest setting like the house was blinking awake.

Wade touched Logan’s shoulder. The question in his eyes was old as a road: you with me?

Logan nodded before he meant to. Yes. He was. The shape of the answer sat in his chest like a hot stone and didn’t cool when the danger passed.

The next day, Wade was unbearable and thus, perfect. He threw himself into chopping kindling with the performance energy of a street magician. “Observe as I create warmth and also splinters,” he said, and managed to avoid slicing his thumb open by sheer dumb luck.

Fred declared that the stew needed “a final seasoning” and then slid a second bowl toward Logan without looking at him. Bolt presented a wooden rattle he had whittled from a scrap, proudly. It was ugly in the way first tries are ugly—lopsided, charming. “It doesn’t have lead paint,” Bolt said, beaming. “Which I googled and found out is bad.”

“Thank you for that revelation,” Fred said.

Wraith repaired the tear in the cuff of Wade’s hoodie with three silent, precise stitches while Wade wore it and complained that he was being constrained by society.

Victor pretended not to notice when Logan moved his chair three inches to the left so he could brace his knees against the coffee table—the only position that eased the ache across his lower back. When the ache didn’t ease, Victor got up, left, and came back with a heating pad that had seen better decades. He plugged it in, put it on the arm of the chair, and walked away like the pad had simply appeared by spontaneous generation.

Logan didn’t thank anybody. He was trying not to say things he couldn’t unsay. The thank you lived anyway, in the way his shoulders lowered the tiniest bit.

Wade noticed. Wade always noticed. He diverted the noticing into bit after bit—stupid, short, half-bad jokes that acted like rope tossed across a gap. Logan never asked him to stop.

The baby rolled sharp that evening—enough to push against skin in a way that looked like a fist from the inside. Logan sucked in a breath, hand flying to the spot. He stared, startled, and then, against his will, smiled like an idiot.

Wade’s eyes went huge. “Was that—?”

“No,” Logan said, instantly, protectively.

“Liar,” Wade whispered, reverent. “Can I—?”

“No,” Logan repeated, but he didn’t move away. He left his hand there, and the electricity of almost-contact buzzed between them like bees.

“Okay,” Wade said softly. “Ask me again later.”

Logan didn’t promise. He didn’t say no either.

After dinner, he found a pencil and an index card—one of the stock Fred used for lists—and took them into his room. The nest was warm from the day’s sun. He sat cross-legged in front of it and stared down at the blank square until his eyes went out of focus.

Then he wrote three words, slow and careful:

What do you want?

He set the card where he couldn’t miss it—in the notch where the flannel met the wool, in the tiny altar of his own ridiculous making. The question sat there, quiet as a mouse, loud as a bomb.

He didn’t answer it. Not that night.

He woke before dawn to the sense of being watched and found Victor in the doorway, a silhouette cut from dark. “Perimeter’s clear,” Victor said, voice low. “Coffee’s on.”

Logan grunted acknowledgment. He pushed himself upright and paused halfway there, palm braced to his lower abdomen. The baby shifted, slow and strange, and Logan breathed through it. He stood, the blankets sliding from his lap like a surrender flag.

In the kitchen, the world smelled like coffee and cold. Fred had left a note next to the pot: BOLT, DO NOT TOUCH UNTIL 6AM. Under it, someone (Bolt) had written ok :(. Under that, a third hand (Wade) had drawn a cartoon of Bolt crying into an empty mug.

Wade came in as Logan poured. He was barefoot, hair wrecked, hoodie inside out. “Morning, sunshine,” he said, and kissed the rim of his own coffee mug like he was trying to psych it up.

Logan drank. “I’m not sunshine.”

“You are to me.”

Logan scowled on reflex. “Stop doing that.”

“Being honest?”

“Making this complicated.”

Wade sobered a notch. He set his mug down and rested his hip against the counter like he was bracing a hull. “Okay,” he said. “How about we make one thing simple.”

“Impossible.”

“Watch me.” Wade held up a finger, like he was enumerating for a class no one had signed up for. “One: It’s your choice. Two: Whatever you choose, I’m not going anywhere. Three: If you choose to keep the baby, we will make room. If you choose adoption, we will choose safety. In either scenario, you are not suddenly less ours.”

Logan’s voice thinned. “Don’t say ours.”

“Say a different word,” Wade said. “Say mine. Say pack. Say nothing and just point and I’ll translate.”

Logan swallowed. The room felt extremely occupied by air and also missing it in all the places he needed it.

Wade didn’t fill the silence with a joke. He reached for the sugar and missed the jar on purpose and muttered “dammit” and Logan snorted and some of the pressure bled out.

“Later,” Logan said finally. “Ask me again later.”

“About…?” Wade prompted, cautious.

“Feeling the kick,” Logan said, choosing the harder thing, because it would prove he could. “If you want.”

Wade went very, very still. “Yeah,” he said, voice careful. “I want.”

“Later,” Logan repeated, because if he said it twice it might hold.

“Later,” Wade echoed, as if he’d been given a password to a door.

The day moved in its ordinary ways: chores, a run to the shed for salt, Fred’s heroic attempt to fix a squeak in the back door with something that smelled like vinegar and regret. Bolt tried to teach Wraith a card trick. Wraith learned it in one attempt and then did it better than Bolt, which offended Bolt on a spiritual level. Victor repaired a crack in the porch rail and declared that if anyone leaned on it like a drunk again, he would remove their elbows. Wade pointed out that removing elbows would create more leaning, not less, and Victor stared at him until he stopped speaking.

Underneath all of it, the question padded through the rooms: What do you want? It curled up under Logan’s chair, followed him down the hall, watched him struggle with his boots. It sat with him at lunch and made even Fred’s bread feel like a coin he was flipping.

He took the index card out of the nest and carried it with him. The edges went soft fast from his pocket. He didn’t show it to anyone. He didn’t need to.

Near sunset, the sky went the color of dirty sage. Snow had been tracked in and melted and left prints like maps. Wade hovered with his usual poor pretense at nonchalance.

“Ready?” Wade asked, meaning: Is now later?

Logan nodded, once. “Yeah.”

They went to Logan’s room, not because it was secret but because it was his, and the nest was his, and if he was going to share, he wanted it to be in a place where he had learned the contours of needing. The lamp was on low. The wool blanket carried the day’s sun.

Logan sat. Wade sat beside him, careful, reverent in the strange way he got sometimes when he confused the hell out of Logan by being gentle.

“Where?” Wade asked, and held out his hand like he was asking for a blade.

“Here,” Logan said, and set Wade’s palm against his shirt, just left of center, where the last kick had rolled like thunder under skin.

Wade didn’t breathe for a count of five.

Nothing happened.

Wade smiled, small, a little embarrassed and not at all ashamed. “They’re shy.”

“Or they hate you,” Logan said, defaulting to the easier tone.

“That would be fair,” Wade said. “I’m an acquired taste.”

Another long count. Then, faint, a pressure—small as a coin under the skin. Wade’s mouth dropped open. He didn’t look at Logan. He didn’t say anything. He let his face be the only prayer in the room.

The baby moved again, more definite. Wade made a sound so quiet it almost wasn’t sound at all. His eyes stayed on his own hand, as if he were afraid to miss the pattern.

Logan watched Wade’s throat work, the way he swallowed like something sweet hurt going down.

“Hi,” Wade whispered, to the place where his hand touched. “It’s me.”

Logan’s chest went hot and cold in the same second. The room dipped, then steadied.

Wade lifted his hand away, as if he’d been given something breakable and had to return it. He didn’t make a joke. He didn’t ruin it in any of the dozen ways he could have. He looked at Logan, finally, and whatever was in his eyes was as old as a vow.

“Thank you,” Wade said, and meant it.

“Don’t make it a thing,” Logan managed.

“Too late,” Wade said, and somehow made it not dangerous.

They sat side by side until the light reached the edge of the window and fell off.

He did not decide that night.

He read Bolt’s list one more time and folded it into quarters. He set Wraith’s contact name under a book, not lost, not ready. He watched Fred write out a grocery list and add oranges with an exclamation point and roll his eyes at himself. He let Victor shove a second pillow under his knees while pretending to explain how leverage works.

Wade hovered, as bad at hovering as a moth is at pretending it doesn’t love fire. Logan let him. He found that he could breathe inside Wade’s orbit. He found that it helped to have someone there when the question got teeth.

The index card lived on the nest. The words didn’t fade. They sharpened.

What do you want?

Sometimes he answered in his head: safety. Sometimes: a clean exit. Sometimes: to not be asked to be soft. Sometimes: to stop being scared of what I might break. Sometimes, late, when the cabin was sleeping and the wind pushed a low voice through the pines, the answer came without armor: to keep them. The answer frightened him enough that he would sit up and count breath until it retreated.

He didn’t trust the answers that came when everything was quiet. He didn’t trust the ones that came when it was loud, either.

So he didn’t answer yet.

The question did not leave. It curled up next to him like a patient animal.

He couldn’t stand the quiet anymore near midnight, so he went to the kitchen for water. The house glowed low. The magnet letters on the fridge spelled BOLT SMELLS again, plus an A that wandered uselessly, and under those four, a neat line someone had arranged: C A R E.

Logan paused with his fingers on the edge of the fridge. He didn’t know who had put them there. He didn’t need to. The word landed softer than he expected and heavier than he wanted.

On the way back, he passed the open door of Wade’s room. Wade slept like he did everything else: committed. One arm thrown over his head, mouth open, blanket losing the fight. As if connected by wire, Wade’s eyes cracked and found Logan in the dark.

“You okay?” Wade mumbled.

Logan should have said yes. He should have said go back to sleep. He should have said something that kept the distance steady.

“Ask me again in the morning,” Logan said, and was surprised by the small ease in his chest when he did.

Wade smiled, already mostly gone back under. “Deal.”

“Wade,” Logan said, and Wade hummed.

“Yeah?”

“If I—if I keep them,” Logan said, the words clumsy and huge, “I’m going to need you to shut up sometimes.”

Wade’s sleepy laugh was nothing but joy. “I can try,” he said. “For them.”

“For me,” Logan said, because he was done pretending the want wasn’t his.

“For you,” Wade said, and the promise felt like a hand on the small of his back, steadying, urging him forward without pushing.

Logan went back to his room. The index card waited. He didn’t answer it. He lay down and put his hand on his stomach and listened to the cabin breathe.

The question didn’t get quieter.

But it didn’t feel like it was shouting at him anymore.

It felt like it was waiting for him to be ready to speak back.

Chapter Text

The cold had settled into the cabin’s bones by the start of Month Seven, the kind of deep chill that lingered even when the fire was stoked high. Mornings began with the creak of floorboards contracting under frost and the hiss of the kettle on the stove, and even those small sounds seemed loud against the muffled quiet outside. The windows wore a fernwork of ice; breath ghosted in the hallways until Fred bullied more heat out of the stove. Snow on the porch steps had been shoveled and re-shoveled, but it came back in drifts like a dog that didn’t know when to stay.

Logan hated mornings now.

Not because he’d ever been much of a morning person, but because waking up meant immediately remembering how heavy his body felt, how each joint seemed to move in slow protest. By the time he got his feet on the floor and pushed himself upright, his breathing was shallow, his back already complaining, a wire of ache across his lower spine that hummed on even good days.

This morning, it was the stairs that betrayed him.

He’d started down with the intention of making coffee before anyone else was up—a rare chance to be in the kitchen without someone hovering—but halfway down, his vision tunneled. The edges went dark, the center warped like heat off asphalt, and his balance slipped sideways in a way that had nothing to do with clumsiness. He gripped the banister, teeth clenched, forcing himself to keep moving until he could drop into the nearest seat.

That seat happened to be the couch. He sat heavily, elbows on his knees, willing the spinning to ease. The room tilted, then righted. He took a slow breath through his nose, another through his mouth, counting like Wade had taught him to count when his thoughts sprinted.

That’s how Wade found him.

The man came in from the kitchen carrying two mugs, hair still a mess from sleep, wearing the hoodie Logan had been eyeing for weeks. He stopped dead when he saw Logan slumped there. The mugs clinked softly as he set them on the coffee table without looking away.

“What the hell, Shortstack?” Wade’s voice was sharp, but it was the undercurrent—concern threaded deep—that made Logan bristle on instinct.

“Fine,” Logan muttered, running a hand over his face. “Just tired.”

“Bull.” Wade crossed the space in three strides, crouching so they were level. “You’re pale.”

“I’m always pale.”

“Paler.” Wade’s eyes narrowed, calculating. And then—without warning—one arm slid behind Logan’s back, the other hooked under his knees.

“The hell are you—”

“Relocating your stubborn ass.” Wade straightened, lifting him like he weighed nothing, ignoring Logan’s sputtered protests.

“Put me down,” Logan growled, grabbing a handful of hoodie.

“Nope.” Wade strode the three steps to the couch (the other couch, because of course Wade had opinions about optimal couch), sat with Logan still in his arms, and adjusted him like a piece of precious cargo. Then he pulled a blanket from the back of the couch and tucked it around him with infuriatingly meticulous care.

“This is ridiculous,” Logan muttered.

“You being sick is ridiculous,” Wade shot back. “You should be horizontal, warm, and fed. I can do two out of three right now.”

Logan huffed out a breath, watching Wade fuss with the blanket corners like tight angles could keep out fear. “You’re enjoying this way too much.”

“Guilty,” Wade said without shame. He pushed one of the mugs into Logan’s hands. “Water first. Coffee after. Doctor Wade prescribes.”

“Doctor Wade didn’t go to medical school.”

“Doctor Wade watched a lot of YouTube.”

Logan rolled his eyes. He drank anyway.

It wasn’t a one-off.

The next morning, Wade intercepted him halfway down the hall before breakfast, eyes narrowing at his unsteady gait. “Where you headed?”

“Kitchen.”

“Wrong,” Wade said, steering him toward the couch with a palm between his shoulder blades. “You’re headed for tea and couch time. I’ll bring the kitchen to you.”

Logan tried to argue but ended up sitting. Tea appeared ten minutes later, along with a plate of toast Victor had apparently handed off without question; the toast was cut into triangles for no reason Wade could defend other than “fun.”

By the third day, Wade stopped asking where Logan was going at all—if he caught him on his feet, he was redirecting him to a chair, a couch, or back to bed. When Logan muttered about autonomy, Wade muttered back about gravity and center of mass and the recently enacted “No Falling Down Stairs Act of This Household.”

It was infuriating.

It was also… easy.

Logan had always been self-sufficient to the point of self-destruction. Letting anyone handle his day-to-day had felt like losing ground. But now—now when just getting dressed left him winded, when the stairs felt longer than they should, when the weight of his belly pulled his spine like an anchor chain—letting Wade carry the weight, even for a little while, was dangerously tempting. Like stepping out of armor without the world immediately finding the seam.

The bridal carries started as a joke.

Logan had dozed off in the armchair after lunch, only to wake as Wade slid an arm under his knees.

“What are you doing?”

“Relocating,” Wade said, grinning down at him.

“I can walk.”

“Sure,” Wade said, already lifting. “But this is faster.”

Logan cursed him the entire way to the couch. The next day, it happened again. The day after that, too. By the fourth time, Logan had stopped protesting out loud, though he still made a show of rolling his eyes. The worst (or best) was realizing he’d started tucking himself closer during the trip, nose brushing warm cotton without thinking, hands finding that comfortable place at Wade’s shoulder where muscle met hoodie.

Wade never made a joke about the tucking. He smiled with his mouth closed like the joke would be too small for what it was.

Meals changed, too.

Fred, who normally inhaled food like someone might snatch it away, started matching Logan’s pace bite for bite. He’d quietly slide an extra roll or a bigger spoonful of soup onto Logan’s plate, grunting when Logan raised a brow. “Fuel,” Fred would say, as if the word explained everything from metabolism to love.

Bolt moved half his projects into the dining room so Logan wouldn’t be alone after dinner. He’d sand down wood or sort screws while Logan lingered with tea, their conversations meandering between useless trivia and half-serious plans for fixing up the porch come spring. “We should build a ramp,” Bolt said once. “For… carts. Or, like, heroic exits.” He didn’t look up when he said it, but Logan heard the offer under the blueprint.

Wraith stayed his usual ghostly self, but Logan kept finding new additions to the nest—a folded knit blanket that smelled faintly of cedar, a sealed tin of ginger candies, a small sachet of dried lavender tied with plain string. He never said anything. Logan always placed them in the middle where they’d be easiest to reach, as if acknowledging the gifts made them permanent.

Victor, for his part, became a one-man OSHA agency. He sanded the top stair to fix the lip that had tripped Logan twice, added a rail to the hallway wall where there wasn’t one, and declared the stool in the pantry a controlled substance. When anyone asked who made him king, he said, “Gravity,” and that was that.

One evening, rain came in sideways, drumming against the porch roof and rattling the windows. The power flickered twice, making the lights stutter. Wade was sprawled across the couch, legs dangling over the armrest, while Logan sat at the other end with a blanket over his lap. The fire huffed and hissed, throwing off a tired kind of heat.

“You should be in bed,” Wade said, eyes on the muted TV.

“I am in bed,” Logan deadpanned.

“That’s a couch.”

“Bed-adjacent.”

Wade turned his head, one brow raised. “Need me to carry you upstairs?”

Logan’s snort was softer than usual. “You’re not carrying me to bed like some kind of—”

“Prince? Hero? Chivalrous rogue?”

“—pack mule,” Logan finished.

“Same difference,” Wade said cheerfully.

Logan didn’t answer, but when Wade draped his arm along the back of the couch in a loose half-circle, Logan leaned into it without thinking. The blanket slumped, the corner of it sliding across Wade’s thigh. Outside, rain turned to sleet, ice tapping like a telegraph on the windows. In here, the only message that mattered was a warm shoulder and the steady in-and-out of someone else’s breath.

By the end of the week, Logan couldn’t remember the last time Wade hadn’t been within reach.

Once, he tried getting up in the night for water. He’d made it to the hallway when Wade appeared in the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “You good?”

“Just water.”

“I’ll get it,” Wade said, already turning. Logan waited with his hand on the doorframe, listening to Wade’s feet on the tile, the clink of glass, the rush of tap water, the small pause that meant Wade was deciding whether to add ice. He returned with the glass and one hand on Logan’s elbow as if guiding him through a crowd.

“You’re hovering,” Logan muttered.

“Yeah,” Wade said simply. “I am.”

It should have felt suffocating.

Instead, it felt like the cold outside couldn’t quite get in when Wade was there. And maybe that was the most dangerous thing of all.

The weather changed like a mood—snow melt leaving wet patches in the shade, the wind carrying a damp scent of earth and pine. Restlessness crept under Logan’s skin. He went to the kitchen early, still stiff but restless, and reached for the bread. He made it halfway through slicing when Wade’s voice floated from the doorway.

“And here I thought we’d cured you of doing your own work.”

“You’re late to your own overprotective streak,” Logan said, not turning.

Wade stepped in, plucking the knife before Logan could react. “You’re slow today.”

“I’m pregnant, not useless,” Logan muttered.

“You can be both,” Wade said, already finishing the slicing. “Sit.”

Logan thought about arguing, but his hips ached and the chair was right there. He lowered himself with a muttered curse, watching Wade work. There was something irritating about the way Wade moved—efficient, sure, but with a casualness that said he expected Logan to let him take over. Irritating, and also, if he was honest, a little relieving.

“Victor’ll be pissed you’re stealing his chore,” Logan said.

“Victor can take it up with me,” Wade replied, sliding the bread onto a plate. “He’ll probably thank me.”

Later, Victor did—his way. Logan drifted to the porch in the afternoon, the sunlight just warm enough to make sitting outside appealing. He brought a blanket and settled into a chair, eyes closed to the sounds of wind through the trees. Victor came out carrying a mug of coffee. “You’re supposed to be inside,” he said, but his voice had no teeth.

“I’m getting air.”

Victor stood a moment, then set the mug on the railing. “Keep the blanket tight.”

“You’re worse than Wade,” Logan said with one eye open.

“Doubt it,” Victor said, leaning against the post. “But if he’s not here, I’m filling in.” He didn’t leave until Logan’s breathing had evened out. When Logan cracked his eyes again, the coffee still steamed on the rail like a benediction.

The nights grew heavier that month. Logan woke more often—sometimes to shift aching hips, sometimes from dreams he couldn’t remember. Bruises bloomed where he hadn’t bumped, just from sleeping hard on a seam of blanket. He could feel the baby rolling now, not just fluttering. Tides under skin. Not a passenger so much as a roommate.

One midnight, after he’d rolled onto his side for the tenth time, he gave up and pushed himself out of the nest. The cabin was dim, lit by the faint blue stove clock. He padded down the hall and found Wade in the living room, stretched on the couch with a book and glasses slipping down his nose.

Wade looked up. His expression softened instantly. “Trouble sleeping?”

“Just… restless.”

Wade set the book aside and patted the cushion. “Come here.”

“You inviting me to your lair?” Logan asked, raising a brow.

“Damn right.” Wade shifted to make space.

Logan hesitated, then lowered himself. Wade tugged the blanket over them both, the world shrinking to a shared rectangle of warmth. The fire had settled into a red bed of coals that glowed as if the house had a heart.

“You’re getting used to this,” Wade murmured.

“Shut up,” Logan said, eyes closing.

He fell asleep with Wade’s hand a light weight on his forearm, not holding—anchoring.

Two days later, Bolt roped him into what he called light work. “You can sit,” Bolt said, setting a small wooden box on the table. “Just need help holding these while I drill.”

It was simple—steadying pieces of wood while Bolt worked—but it kept Logan at the table for an hour, listening to Bolt’s dry commentary about tolerances and dovetail joints and the philosophical differences between glue and screws. Somewhere in the middle, Logan realized it had nothing to do with needing help and everything to do with not wanting Logan to sit alone.

When they finished, Bolt pushed a mug of tea across the table. “Payment.”

“You’re bad at subtle,” Logan said.

“Don’t need to be,” Bolt replied, unbothered.

Wraith drifted past, left a packet of saltines next to the tea as if a tide had washed it ashore, and vanished again. Fred yelled from the kitchen that tea wasn’t a meal and then brought out a plate of scrambled eggs pretending he’d made them for himself. Victor pretended not to see any of it and then went outside to sharpen the shovel that didn’t need sharpening.

The next big snow came at the end of the week. The storm swept in overnight; by morning the porch was buried halfway to the railing. Wind carved ridges in the drifts; the trees wore white shoulders. The cabin felt smaller in that way winter had of pressing you close to your own life.

Logan stood at the window watching the wind draw calligraphy. Arms slid under his knees and shoulders.

“Wade—”

“Snow day,” Wade said, grinning as he lifted. “You’re couch-bound until further notice.”

“You’re insufferable,” Logan muttered, but Wade had already carried him to the couch, set him down, and tucked a blanket with exaggerated precision, like respecting the nest’s rules had extended to living room throws.

“And yet, here you are,” Wade replied, settling beside him. He held out a thermos. “Hot chocolate. Doctor Wade re-prescribes.”

“Doctor Wade is reckless with marshmallows,” Logan said, unscrewing the cap. Four tiny pillowy criminals bobbed at the top.

“Reckless… with love,” Wade said.

“Stop.”

“Never.”

Wade clicked the TV on. The storm trapped them, but the house held: creaks and sighs, the thrum of the generator when the power hiccuped, soft footsteps overhead as someone—Fred—refolded towels into his very particular rectangles.

By dusk, they’d all drifted into the living room like tide pooling in a familiar rock: Victor in the corner chair, Bolt on the rug with a pile of screws, Fred kneading dough because he did that when he couldn’t fix the weather, Wraith near the window, posture listening. The snow turned the world outside into a blank page. Inside, small sounds wrote their own language.

When Bolt dropped a screw and muttered a curse, the baby rolled. Logan’s hand moved. His shirt lifted without his permission. Wade’s gaze cut there and then up, question plain. Logan made the smallest motion: Okay. Wade’s palm spread warm and wide and reverent, and the baby’s foot pressed up like a punctuation mark.

“Whoa,” Bolt whispered.

Fred pretended not to look, which meant he was looking.

Victor’s eyes went soft in that way that made Logan’s gut shift. Wraith’s mouth tipped, almost a smile.

The storm ate any words that might have been said.

Week seven into the seventh month, Wraith said, “We should schedule a call.”

Logan was half-asleep on the couch, mind drifting between Wade’s laugh and fire crackle. “What call.”

Wraith sat on the arm of the chair rather than the cushion, like he didn’t want to disturb the line of Wade’s arm around Logan’s shoulders. “Midwife,” Wraith said calmly, as if the word were a bird he could hold without spooking it. “A friend of a friend. Code name: Finch. She consults. No records unless she makes them herself. If she does, she keeps them offline.”

Logan’s mouth went dry. “No hospitals.”

“No hospitals,” Wraith agreed. “Phone, first. She’s blunt. You’ll like her.”

“I don’t like anyone.”

“You’ll like her,” Wraith repeated, with such certainty Logan couldn’t argue without lying.

They chose an hour when the wind would be loudest and the road emptiest. Wade set the burner on speaker. Wraith listened from the hall. Victor paced once and then held still like a big animal trying to be small. Fred stood at the stove stirring nothing. Bolt disappeared and then reappeared and then disappeared again, which was how Bolt did nerves.

“Finch here,” a woman’s voice said through static. “I have two minutes for pleasantries and then I’m rude.”

Wade beamed like she’d told a joke just for him. “You’re hired.”

Questions came like clean cuts. Blood pressure? Swelling? Headaches? Vision? Movement patterns? How often, how strong? Diet? Sleep? “Are you falling?” Finch asked.

“No,” Logan said automatically.

“Has anyone caught you recently,” Finch clarified, unimpressed.

Wade lifted his hand. “Hi.”

“Drink water,” Finch said. “More than you think. Salt your food. Stretch your hips like your life depends on it. Because if you want to move a baby through a pelvis, it sort of does. Are you panicking at night? Yes or no.”

Logan stared at the phone. “Sometimes.”

“Normal,” Finch said. “Not fun, but normal. The animal in you knows a storm’s coming and is building a den. Let it. That’s what the nest is for. Also, get a blood pressure cuff. I don’t care how you do it. Learn the numbers. Call me if the top number is over 140 or the bottom over 90. Call me if you see stars or feel like you swallowed a beehive. Call me if you’re scared.”

“I don’t—” Logan started.

“You do,” Finch said. “You called me. Keep doing that. And whoever the chatterbox is in the room—”

Wade raised his hand again reflexively. “Hi.”

“—you don’t get to downplay symptoms because you’re trying not to spook him.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Wade said, chastened and delighted in equal measure.

Finch rattled off stretches and snacks, ways to sit to take pressure off the back, what to do when sleep became more theory than practice. She ended the call the way she’d started it—clean. “You’re doing fine. You’re not alone. Call me. Goodbye.”

Silence flooded in.

“Like her,” Logan said before he could stop himself.

“Obviously,” Wraith murmured, just smug enough to be a person.

They ordered the cuff. Fred stole it first to test it on everyone because science. Victor’s readings were offensive to the human imagination. Wade claimed he was “a cool 118/76 all the time, baby,” which was demonstrably untrue. Wraith refused to share his numbers on the grounds that “mystery is part of my brand.”

When Wade tried to measure Logan the first time, Logan grabbed the cuff and did it himself.

“Okay,” Wade said, hands up. “You can be in charge of your arm.”

“Thank you,” Logan said dryly.

The numbers came back good. Wade didn’t whoop. He didn’t need to. He said “huh” like he had expected good news all along and the universe had decided to finally meet him halfway.

There were bad nights.

One started with a dream of running and ended with Logan on the floor beside the bed, palms stinging from where he’d caught himself. He sat there stunned, legs folded under him, and tried to sort the pain—panic or pulled muscle or just cold terror. The baby rolled, affronted. He swallowed bile.

He didn’t call for anyone.

He didn’t have to. Wade arrived like he had a sensor wired to Logan’s fear. He didn’t touch Logan without asking. He didn’t say I told you so or this is why we set rules. He said, “Want help up?” and when Logan nodded, Wade did it slow. He kept one hand on Logan’s elbow until Logan said, “Okay,” and even then stayed close enough to catch him if okay turned out to be a lie.

“Bathroom,” Logan said, because he needed the sink and the mirror and the illusion that he could watch himself steady.

Wade waited outside the door. His shadow under the threshold made a small, stupid comfort. When Logan came out, Wade didn’t reach for him. He stepped back so Logan could choose the contact or not.

Logan chose. He set his hand on Wade’s shoulder like a question, and Wade answered by bracing his palm at Logan’s back in the exact place that made it easier to walk.

They made it back to the bed. The nest received him like it had been waiting up. Wade crouched. “Do you want me to stay,” he asked, and it wasn’t a plea; it was logistics.

“Yeah,” Logan said, surprising himself with how fast the yes came. “So shut up.”

Wade shut up. He arranged himself on the floor with his shoulder against the mattress. He handed Logan water like he’d been born to do precisely this. Logan drank. His pulse slowed. The next morning, Wade had cricks in his neck and wouldn’t admit it, and Logan pretended not to notice, and that was how they paid each other back.

On a clear afternoon between storms, Wraith took Logan outside for a walk. “Short,” Wraith said. “Flat.” He handed Logan a pair of crampons like he was issuing a weapon.

They moved slow along the path Victor had stomped around the clearing. Snow shone like glass where no one had broken it. Wraith talked just enough to make silence less of a predator. “Look,” Wraith said, pointing at prints. “Doe and fawn. See the spacing? Fawn’s sloppy. Still learning.” He paused. “They do fine even when they’re clumsy.”

“I’m not clumsy,” Logan said.

“No,” Wraith agreed. “You’re stubborn. It presents similarly.”

Logan huffed.

“Your center of gravity has changed,” Wraith went on. “Adjust stance. Wider. Toes out a degree. Think pyramid, not pillar.”

Logan obeyed before he’d decided to. It was easier. Which annoyed him.

They reached the creek, crusted and not to be trusted. Wind stitched through the trees. Wraith handed him a peppermint. “For the nausea you won’t admit you feel,” he said.

“Shut up,” Logan said, smiling with his mouth closed so Wraith wouldn’t get the satisfaction.

By the end of Month Seven, Logan had stopped noticing the moments where he reached for Wade without thinking—leaning into his side on the couch, letting him take a mug when his grip felt untrustworthy, waiting at the top of the stairs when he heard Wade’s footsteps because going down together was easier. He still swore when Wade lifted him without warning, still snapped when Fred set a third roll on his plate, still glared when Victor moved a chair out of his way like he was planning a parade route. The edge hadn’t been sanded off him. It had simply learned where it didn’t need to cut.

It wasn’t surrender. Not exactly.

The line between refusing help and accepting it had blurred so much, Logan wasn’t sure he could see it anymore. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. The weight had shifted. Not gone—never gone—but distributed. Like an invisible harness had latched to his ribs and other hands had taken up the slack.

Maybe—for now—that was fine.

It picked a bad morning, as machines do. A gray day, wet cold pressing against the walls. The lights stuttered and failed, and the generator coughed and went still. The silence after was a kind of roar.

“Stay,” Wade told Logan, already on his feet.

“I’m pregnant, not a dog,” Logan said, already trying to stand. The baby shoved at his lower right like they’d agreed to block and tackle.

“Exactly,” Wade said. “Which is why you’re not helpful if you pass out while I’m elbow deep in a machine.”

“I’m not—”

Wade crouched, catching Logan’s eyes with his own. “Let me get it. You get warm. Teamwork.”

Logan glared and lost. He hated that he liked the word teamwork when Wade said it like that. He hated that it made room in his chest.

Wade and Bolt killed an hour swearing at the generator like it owed them rent. Fred fed the fire like it might decide to be a furnace if they showed it enough love. Wraith cracked a window a finger-width because carbon monoxide didn’t care about good intentions. Victor took the outside loop, eyes slitted against the cold.

When Wade came back in with grease on his cheek and triumph in his step, the lights popped back and everyone breathed like they’d been holding it. Wade dropped to his knees in front of Logan as if he’d just won a trophy he wanted to show off. “We live!”

“You smell like diesel,” Logan said.

“It’s my new cologne,” Wade said solemnly. “Eau de Competence.”

“Try Shower,” Logan advised.

Wade grinned, bright and ridiculous, and went to do exactly that.

Logan watched him go and let the drop of adrenaline melt. The baby pushed at his ribs and then relaxed, as if the little body inside him had decided that this part of the world, for now, could be trusted.

The magnet letters on the fridge had become a kind of house oracle. Fred reset them every Monday to BUY EGGS and BOLT SMELLS. Wade added POOP any time he got near them. Wraith rearranged them in the night into words no one noticed until noon. Victor mostly glared.

One afternoon, there was a new constellation at the bottom: B E A N.

Logan stared like the letters had grown legs.

Wade, guilty immediately, said, “It’s not a name. It’s a… placeholder. A term of endearment. A vibe. A legume-forward philosophy.”

“Bean,” Logan repeated flatly.

“It’s scientific,” Wade said. “They’re bean-shaped! Sometimes. In my heart.”

“We’re not calling them Bean.”

“Of course not,” Wade said, nodding vigorously. “Absolutely not. Definitely not.”

He continued to absolutely definitely not call the baby Bean in a whisper so soft Logan couldn’t prove it in court.

Later, when Logan was alone in the kitchen, he moved the letters two inches higher so they wouldn’t get knocked off by a careless hip. He did not consider what that meant. He didn’t have to. The magnets knew.

It was late. The house rested like a big animal. The wind had stopped arguing with the eaves. Logan lay awake, the nest built high around him. The index card Wade had never seen lay on the bedside table: What do you want? He’d started adding smaller lines under it. Safety. Truth. Room. Time.

He reached for the card and then let his hand fall away. He reached for it again and found his fingers had gone to Wade’s hoodie instead, the one he’d stolen and never returned.

This wasn’t a decision night. He knew that. The call to Finch had taken the teeth out of the worst of his fear, but the choice sat where it had always sat. Yet the weight of it had become a different kind of heavy—less a boulder and more a pack. He could lift this one in parts. He could ask for a shoulder under the strap.

He stood, moved down the hall as quietly as a man with creaking hips could. Wade’s door was open an inch in a way that meant this is not a boundary, this is an invitation. Wade slept like a man falling down a hill—loud, committed, taking the blanket with him.

Logan rapped the door with two knuckles. Wade flailed awake, hair sentient, eyes bright in one blink like a dog.

“What’s wrong,” Wade said, already up on his elbows.

“Nothing,” Logan said, and meant not nothing, not a fire. He meant everything, but not tonight.

“Okay,” Wade said, waiting.

Logan heard his own voice do something he hadn’t practiced. “Will you—” He swallowed. “Will you stay.”

Wade’s expression did that softening thing Logan had no defenses against. “Yeah,” he said. “Always.”

Logan snorted to keep the world from tilting. “Don’t say always.”

“Tonight,” Wade corrected. “I’ll stay tonight.”

“Good,” Logan said.

They didn’t touch in big ways. Wade took his usual place on the floor with his shoulder against the mattress. Logan lay on his side facing the shadow shape of Wade’s head. The house breathed. The question on the index card didn’t go away. It rearranged itself into something he could look at without flinching. He let sleep find him with Wade’s quiet snore putting markers down the path.

After that, time became less a calendar and more a braided rope stuck through the middle of that month—the tug of cold, the tug of tired, the tug of Wade’s constant orbit. They formed small rituals to carry weight: Victor’s daily perimeter report distilled down to “boring,” a word he said like a blessing; Bolt’s evening drop-ins with tea that he pretended to hate; Wraith’s scarf pulled up to his eyes on the coldest nights; Fred’s hand on Logan’s shoulder for half a second when he passed behind his chair, grounding disguised as impatience.

The belly grew. The baby rolled. The lines they’d drawn in earlier months didn’t feel like fences anymore. They felt like scaffolding.

And when Logan caught himself waiting at the top of the stairs for Wade, hand on the banister, weight shifted to the side that hurt less, a small voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like Finch said, good. that’s safety. that’s smart. that’s love configured for your current architecture.

He let Wade reach the step below him before stepping down together.

He didn’t call it surrender.

He called it balance.

Chapter Text

Victor started shadowing him without ever announcing it, which was the most Victor thing in the world: make a choice, become immovable, let everyone else figure out they’d just entered the orbit of a planet. The first day Logan noticed for real, he was halfway to the door with the wood basket hugged against his stomach. The weight bit into his forearm and sent a dull ache up into his elbow, but momentum had always been his god; the trick was to keep moving, to let motion do the thinking.

The porch light carved a modest circle on the snow outside. He could feel the cold leaking through the threshold, could see the plume of his breath fog the glass when he leaned into the door with his hip to open it. The wood basket shifted. His balance tipped—just a fraction—center of gravity a new and unfamiliar country beneath his ribs.

Victor stepped into the doorway like a wall had learned to walk.

“Leave it,” he rumbled.

“I’ve got it.” Logan’s hands tightened, tendons jumping, pride an old reflex skittering quick under skin.

“Not the point.” Victor didn’t raise his voice; he barely moved. Just lifted one arm, hand open, palm up. A patient threat, a promise. “Give me the basket, runt.”

Logan’s mouth flattened. There was a flash of the old impulse to bite the hand that fed him, to slam past and do it anyway just to prove he still could. Then he felt the baby shift—small, low roll under his palm—and the argument stuttered in his throat. He exhaled through his nose and surrendered the handle.

Victor took it like it weighed as much as a sandwich. He pivoted sideways, shouldering the door open with one broad sweep and stepping into the cold. The winter air slapped him in the face—Logan could tell by the way the muscle in Victor’s jaw jumped, a tiny movement, a map of a man who noticed the world and refused to let it move him. Snow squealed under his boots. The porch boards complained. He didn’t hurry. He never hurried.

Logan stood in the doorway and told himself he was only there to make sure Victor stacked the wood right. Victor came back, handed him nothing, and nudged him gently back with two fingers against the center of his chest—careful, careful, always careful when he remembered.

“Sit,” Victor said, and when Logan bristled, added, “You can supervise from the couch.”

“You going to file a report if I don’t?” Logan asked, half a bite left in it.

Victor’s mouth twitched. “You want paperwork, I’ll find you some.” Then he was gone again, back outside, the sound of wood knocking against wood, measured and steady.

Logan retreated to the couch because the couch was warm and because the line between need and want had smudged so often lately it wasn’t worth pretending he could draw it straight. He sat, leaned back, and tried to make his body stop making noise. A moment later, a weight fell across his legs—a blanket, heavy and worn soft. Victor’s work. Not dramatic. Not announced. Just there.

Victor kept at it until the woodpile by the stove stood like a low, bark-walled fortress. When he finally shrugged the snow off his shoulders and came in for good, he paused beside the couch, eyes moving over Logan’s face with the blunt intimacy of a surgeon reading a monitor. He didn’t ask how Logan felt. He didn’t ask if the baby had kicked. He didn’t ask if the blanket helped. He bent and tugged the edge of the blanket in tighter, fussing like a man who refused to call fussing by its name.

Logan caught his wrist on the way up—just a brief, firm press of fingers over bone. “I can still do things,” he said. It came out half warning, half plea.

Victor’s eyes softened by degrees, the only way they knew. “I know,” he said. “So can I.”

They stared at each other long enough for the stove to crackle like punctuation. Victor broke first, straightening, grunting something that could have been approval or could have been the cold leaving his ribs. He settled into the armchair across the room with a newspaper he didn’t read. He turned the pages anyway, one hand on print, the other near the fire, and every time Logan shifted, Victor’s gaze ticked up—a metronome set to Logan’s breathing.

When the afternoon slipped toward evening and the light turned thin as scraped bone, Victor stood again. He didn’t ask if Logan wanted tea. He simply left and returned with a mug that steamed honey over black. He set it within an easy reach and said nothing. He didn’t need to. In the silence, Logan felt something re-knit where the day had torn it: a quiet line between them, pragmatic as rope, strong enough to haul with.

By the time the first owl called out beyond the trees, Victor had replaced the wicker handle of the wood basket with a strip of leather, thick and soft. “Better for hands,” he said, setting it down as if it had always been like that. Logan pretended he hadn’t noticed the way Victor’s thumbs worried the new seam, testing, making sure it wouldn’t bite.

“I said I could still do things,” Logan muttered, playing with the handle like a man who had decided to adopt a truth gently rather than fight it and bleed.

Victor’s answer was a shrug big enough to tilt the room. “And I said so can I.”

Outside, the wind nosed around the eaves, found no purchase, moved on.

Fred didn’t negotiate with need; he fed it. If Victor was a wall, Fred was a kitchen at full boil—clatter, heat, steam, the heavy perfume of butter taking corners at speed. The day after the wood-basket standoff, Logan woke to a smell that hauled him from sleep by the collar: yeast and cinnamon, a sweetness edged by toast, and beneath it all, the comfortable animal of coffee.

He shuffled in barefoot, pajama pants dragging, one hand at the small of his back the way his body kept reminding him to do now. The kitchen was fogged with heat, the windows humming soft with condensation. Fred stood at the stove like a general over a map, spatula tapping the lip of a pan, a towel flung over one shoulder. An apron begged for mercy against the breadth of his chest, letters faded to a ghost of Kiss the Cook.

“Sit,” Fred said, without turning.

“I can—”

“Sit,” Fred repeated. The same word Victor used, a different cadence: less command, more architecture. Sit, and I will build around you.

Logan took the chair he liked, back to the stove, face to the windows. The world outside was bleached to a soft gray; the world inside was rendered in fat and heat. A plate appeared, and another, and then bread still warm from the oven, torn into hunks with bare hands and slapped with butter that ran down the sides in indecent rivers.

“I’m not—” he started.

“Hungry?” Fred supplied. He thudded another slice onto the plate. “You are. Eat.”

Logan eyed the mountain of food, considered fighting, lost interest in losing. He reached for the bread. It burned his fingertips; it tasted like the world made sense for the time it took to chew. By the second piece, the clench in his shoulders had eased half an inch.

Fred worked around him, the efficient orbit of a man who had run restaurants and road teams and the occasional small war. He pretended not to notice when Logan slowed, only to distract by jabbing a finger toward the coffee pot. “Top up.”

Logan leaned, poured, held the pot in the air as if that were the labor that proved he still had skin in the game. Fred let him have it. He kept the eggs at a soft set, the bacon crisped to the edge of char, the potatoes salted like the sea. At some point he slid a shallow bowl of broth onto the table, steam fragrant with ginger and garlic, and pretended it had simply fallen there by accident.

“I said I’m not—”

“You will be,” Fred said. “Or you should be. Either way, it’s hot. Eat it now.”

Logan tried half a protest in the shape of a smirk; it fell apart under the heat of the broth. The ginger cut through nausea like a hand pressing down on tremor. He ate more than he meant to. He left a smear of butter on his thumb and licked it; the barbaric little sound he made earned him a sideways glance and a satisfied grunt from Fred.

They talked only in the negative space between clatters.

“The baby kick this morning?” Fred asked, like inquiring after weather he could see out the window but wanted confirmed.

“Restless,” Logan said. He thumbed the hem of the hoodie stretched over his belly. “Likes to sit low. Pisses me off.”

“Good,” Fred said, unhelpfully. “Means strong. Means stubborn.”

“Doesn’t all this mean both of those things,” Logan muttered.

Fred’s mustache twitched. “Runs in the house.”

Fred moved like he was building a perimeter—salt within arm’s reach, towels at the ready, the trash bin rotated clockwise for a faster grab, Logan at the center. He didn’t hover. He situated. When Bolt slouched through in search of a screwdriver he’d left by the fruit bowl (because of course he had), Fred snapped, “Hands. Wash,” and jammed a plate into Bolt’s chest that said you live here; you eat here; you will be fed here like it or not.

By the time the frenzy eased, the kitchen had been stripped down and rebuilt twice. Fred wiped the counter with a fresh towel, glanced at Logan’s plate, and without comment carved the last heel of bread into thirds, one for Logan’s plate, two riding his palm like a magician’s trick. He set the third down with exaggerated care.

Logan stared at it. “I don’t need—”

“You want,” Fred corrected softly, eyes on his hands instead of Logan’s face. “There’s a difference.” He turned away before Logan could answer, banging drawers as if noise might cover the intimacy.

When Logan finally hauled himself up, the chair groaned in farewell. He put his plate in the sink—one small rebellion—and ran water over it. Fred, at the stove again, didn’t turn, but his voice found Logan anyway. “There’s broth in the pot,” he said. “Take a thermos. In case you wake up mean.”

Logan let one corner of his mouth tip. “I always wake up mean.”

“Then take two.”

He poured one. He poured two. He set the lid with a screw and thought about how sometimes love sounded like orders shouted over kitchen steam, how sometimes being known was a meal you didn’t ask for placed where your hands fell.

He went back to the hall heavier and somehow lighter, thermos hot against his palm, stomach warm enough to temper the edges of the day.

Bolt arrived like a footnote to a plan he’d been building for days. The knock on Logan’s door was three taps and a pause, the tempo of a man who lived on timing. He didn’t wait for an answer before he opened the door with his hip, a toolbox balanced against his thigh, a coil of cable looped like a tame snake over one shoulder.

“Come on,” he said, breath puffing in the chill that snuck under the door with him. “Need hands.”

“I’ve got two,” Logan said dryly. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, lacing boots he wouldn’t tie tight—not anymore; his belly refused that kind of contortion without protest.

“Need your hands,” Bolt said, as if they were a different species altogether. He tilted his head toward the hall. “Basement.”

Logan’s eyebrows climbed. “Romantic.”

“You can whisper sweet nothings to the fuse box,” Bolt deadpanned. “Let’s go.”

Logan’s lower back sent up a complaint. He stood anyway because sitting still was a thin sort of death and because Bolt had that look that said I will keep standing here until we both fossilize. The basement air met them like cool breath. It smelled like damp wood, metal, old sawdust, some ghost of gasoline and winter apples in a box that had forgotten it was supposed to be food months ago.

Bolt’s workshop had accrued over the weeks like a second organism—a table scarred from a hundred small decisions, jars lined up like soldiers filled with screws sorted by size, washers by shine, nails by attitude. He set the toolbox down with reverence and flipped the latches. The sound was precise, pleasing in the way of things meant to click. Logan leaned against the workbench, fingertips pressing dents in the scarred wood, and marveled—not for the first time—at the neatness of Bolt’s chaos.

“At ease,” Bolt said, mocking a drill-sergeant bark as he dug around. “Today we’re improving, not exploding.”

“What am I doing,” Logan asked, prepared for something stupid.

“Hold,” Bolt said, and pressed a smooth board into his hands. “And complain. Keeps the mice away.”

Logan took the board automatically. It was heavier than it looked, solid, its edges kissed clean by sandpaper. Bolt measured, set, measured again, tongue stuck in the corner of his mouth like every cartoon carpenter who’d ever pretended to be less smart than he was. He marked with a pencil, picked up the drill, and nodded at Logan to set the board to the exact lip of the bench.

“You could do this alone,” Logan observed.

“I could,” Bolt agreed, drilling a pilot hole in a staccato that made the dust on the tin lampshade shiver. “But then who would laugh when I strip a screw?”

“You won’t strip a screw.”

“You have very little faith,” Bolt said, but his grin flashed sharp and boyish before the next screw sang into wood.

They fell into a rhythm—Bolt call, Logan response, the music of project. It was soothing in the way repetition is: hold, measure, drill, swap, sand the whisper of a splinter, shake out a hand. Bolt muttered under his breath about Fred’s in-house dictatorship of the kitchen, about Victor’s new habit of pretending the porch had done him a personal wrong by existing under snow, about Wade’s ridiculous insistence on carrying anything that looked even sideways at Logan.

“Man thinks he’s a forklift,” Bolt said, straight-faced.

“He is,” Logan murmured. The board steadied under his palm. The baby rolled, a slow turning under skin. He didn’t say anything about that because saying things sometimes made them too real.

“Hold there,” Bolt instructed, and when Logan’s breath hitched a fraction, Bolt’s eyes flicked up fast as a hinge. He didn’t speak to it. He set the drill down, passed the board to his other hand, and with the ease of a man switching the radio station, slid a stool behind Logan’s calves. “Sit,” he said, and then, to make sure it didn’t sound like an order, added, “Take a load off. Your glamorous assistant needs a break anyway.”

Logan sat. The stool was colder than the bench; the cold shocked something alert in his spine. He let the board rest over his thigh, felt Bolt’s glances like ticks of a metronome, saw the way the younger man adjusted his pace—longer pauses between motions, more time lining up the drill, excuses to stop and knock sawdust off the table with the back of his hand.

“What are we building,” Logan asked when the silence began to taste like worry.

“A box,” Bolt said.

“I figured that,” Logan said, deadpan. “What for?”

Bolt pursed his mouth, a tell he’d never admitted to. “Stuff.”

“Very descriptive.”

Bolt sighed like a martyr, then pushed a finger at the hinged lid leaning against a nearby crate. The lid had been sanded within an inch of its life, edges round enough not to bite skin. “For the things you keep meaning to ask Wraith for and then don’t,” he said lightly. “Tea. Crackers. Whatever. Put it by your bed. Gives you somewhere to point when Wade tries to feed you like a wounded fox.”

Logan stared at him. The combination of sarcasm and precise kindness did something in his chest he wasn’t prepared for. He swallowed it with a press of his tongue to his molar and nodded once. “You’re bad at subtle,” he said.

“I am excellent at subtle,” Bolt said, offended. “I did this whole thing under the guise of a box.” His hands kept moving. “Anyway, it was either this or reinvent the lantern. I decided to leave fire to Fred.”

When the box took shape, it was—like most good things—sturdy and unassuming. Bolt sanded the last rough spot, blew sawdust off the lid, and set it on with a whisper of wood on wood. He slid the box across the bench to Logan’s knees and patted the top like a dog.

“For your lair,” Bolt said, mouth crooked.

“You bringing me tribute now?” Logan asked.

Bolt raised both eyebrows. “How else will I be allowed entry?”

He carried the box up like it was evidence and set it beside the nest, exactly where Logan’s hand fell when he reached out in the dark. He didn’t crow. He didn’t explain. He only lifted the lid, dropped a wrapped pack of crackers and a tin of tea bags inside, and clapped the lid shut as if he’d hammered a flag into a hill.

Logan, at a loss for the right-sized thanks, knocked his knuckles lightly against Bolt’s shoulder. The intimacy of the gesture felt like stepping onto a new board that held. Bolt inclined his head, pretending he didn’t notice what had happened.

On his way out, Bolt paused at the door. “Hey,” he said, eyes fixed on the hall like he wasn’t about to say something that mattered. “You don’t have to do all the hours alone.”

The words landed like a tool put back in the right drawer. Logan didn’t say he knew. He said, “Get out before I make you clean Victor’s boots.”

Bolt grinned and vanished, and the box sat there, solid as a promise you could rest your feet on.

Wraith moved through the house like the shadow you needed but never saw coming. He didn’t announce himself. He just… adjusted the world by degrees until it fit. When Logan looked back, it was to realize something had been easier for days and only now, like a man stepping into the outline of his own footprints, could he see Wraith’s shape in the snow.

The nest thickened without ceremony. One evening, Logan dragged a blanket toward his shoulder, and his fingers brushed cashmere where there had been only cotton hours before. Gray, weighty, woven tight enough to keep drafts from thinking too highly of themselves. He lifted half of it and breathed in—forest, stone, the faint clean of Wraith’s soap. He settled it over his side and watched the lamp light call a sheen from the weave.

On the mantle, a squat jar appeared with a hand-lettered note: Honey (good kind). He took the lid off and the smell rose sweet and round. The note’s parentheses made his mouth twitch. Wraith’s handwriting always looked like it had been carved by a man who believed letters should be as useful as rope.

The third night of the week, when nausea angled up out of nowhere like a knife forgotten in a drawer, Logan stumbled into the kitchen at one in the morning. The house had gone to its hush—no floorboards, no muttered argument drifting from the TV, no bolt sliding home at the front door. He opened the fridge for the comfort of the light on his face and found a plate waiting on the middle shelf, plastic wrap fogged with cold. L was scrawled on a piece of tape. Inside, sliced pears nested beside cubes of cheddar. It wasn’t magic. It was better than magic. It was forethought.

He took the plate to the table and sat in the cold circle of the fridge light haloing the floor, fork in hand. The fruit hit his tongue with a watery sweetness that made his jaw ache. The cheese grounded everything back to the body. By the time he had finished half and wrapped the rest, the worst of the wave had passed. He put the plate back exactly where it had been and stood with his head against the open door a moment longer, letting the hum of the compressor stitch him back together.

When he closed it, Wraith was at the threshold like the house had exhaled him. He didn’t startle Logan. Wraith never did. The man took in the open honey on the counter, the knife set neatly on a towel, the way Logan’s hand settled on the small of his back like he had to remind the ache where to stay.

“Helps to nibble,” Wraith said, voice pitched low so it wouldn’t wake the walls. His hair was pinned back, the line of his mouth soothed to neutral. His eyes were the only giveaway, bright enough to throw light back. He reached one hand toward the top shelf of the cabinet without looking and came down with a tin Logan had stopped keeping track of. He slid it toward him. “Peppermint. No caffeine.”

Logan’s fingers brushed Wraith’s, brief, dry, an exchange of charges. “You a physician now?” He kept it light because anything heavier at one in the morning broke too many things.

Wraith’s mouth tipped one degree. “I have Google.” He turned to the kettle and set it on with a careful hand—kettle on back burner, handle away from the low edge where a half-asleep hand might knock it. Logistics like a lullaby. He set a cup, then another. He always made two of everything, as if someone might walk in and need the second; often, someone did.

“You always like this?” Logan asked, because questions at one a.m. often slipped a gate grown men built high.

“Like what?” Wraith didn’t look over; he didn’t need to to hear the truth inside the question.

“Sliding into ghost holes. Filling them,” Logan said. He smirked to dull the sincerity, and didn’t quite pull it off.

Wraith let the kettle sing for one beat and then clicked it off before the note turned sharp. He poured, the steam hiding his face for a second. “Used to be worse,” he said quietly, like a confession he’d tried on in other rooms. “Now it’s useful.”

He slid the cup across. Logan wrapped both hands around it and felt his skin remember warmth. The peppermint reached his nose and did some small clever thing to the root of his nausea. He didn’t thank Wraith out loud. Wraith didn’t require thanks, only evidence that the solution fit. Logan drank. That was currency enough.

They leaned into the counter, hip to cabinet, silent as the tea cooled. Somewhere, a pipe ticked behind a wall—expansion, contraction, the sound of a house holding itself together under cold. When Wraith finally spoke again, it wasn’t about tea. He kept his eyes on the dark square of the window, where porch light turned snowflakes into specs of slow, floating static.

“You don’t have to decide everything in the dead of night,” he said. “It will lie to you. Let morning argue its side.”

Logan let the sentence pass through like mercury. He didn’t answer because the answer would have been that night was when decisions felt the most honest, and that was a kind of truth he didn’t have the language to make safe yet. He finished the tea and set the cup down exactly on the ring the last cup had left, lining circles like coins.

Wraith nodded once, a pact sealed. He lifted the honey, twisted the lid on, and put it back where the hand would find it without looking tomorrow. Then he reached out and, with a deftness that made the breath catch in Logan’s throat, adjusted the drawstring of Logan’s hoodie where it had gotten trapped beneath his forearm, a small mercy offered without comment. The motion was intimate and anonymous, like tucking a child into a cab and telling the driver an address.

“Sleep,” Wraith said.

“I’ll try.” The attempt was both threat and promise. It would have to do.

Wraith vanished as silently as he’d arrived. In his wake, the kitchen belonged to Logan again, smaller and kinder. He padded back down the hall, the peppermint still leaf-cool on his tongue, and found the box Bolt had built. He dropped the tea tin inside and closed the lid with a click that sounded like a space claimed.

Sleep played coy for a week, then refused to show up at all. The ache at the base of Logan’s spine took up a tenancy that no amount of pillow fortifications could evict, and the baby had decided night was rehearsal for a life of motion. He turned from his left to his right side and back again, then to his back against orders, then to his left, willing breath to make a shape that fit.

The ceiling did that trick of staring back. The shadows of the curtains drew slow shapes across the plaster as the wind nosed and thought better of speaking. Somewhere in the house, a floorboard popped. Somewhere else, a pipe sighed. The world hadn’t moved; it had only reminded him he was still in it.

He got up because lying there made his skin feel too tight. He got up because the room had turned into a mouth eating the quiet the way machines ate power in the night. He got up because he could feel fear buttoning itself from the bottom without asking his permission, the oldest reflex he owned.

The hallway had that blue tint that makes every edge look gentler. Logan padded out in bare feet, the boards cool and forgiving under his arches. The house breathed. He passed the nook where the stairs turned and paused, hand on the banister, breath fogging faint in the beam of a nightlight Fred had insisted was for “old eyes,” which everyone knew meant “the pregnant one.”

Wade’s room sat down the hall, door not fully latched, the seam of light along the jamb warm and human. He stood there long enough for his pulse to decide between fight and something that felt perilously like ask. He raised his hand and didn’t knock. The door yielded to the gentlest push, as if it had been waiting to be tapped, like doors in childhood do in dreams when you most want them to.

Wade was sprawled sideways across the bed in an atlas of limbs, one arm flung over his head, forearm thrown across his eyes like he’d tried to hide from the lamplight and lost. A paperback lay face-down on the quilt beside him, a sin against spines Logan would mock any other day. The lamp was turned low; the room smelled like laundry and soap and the warm salt of Wade’s skin.

Wade registered movement before his eyes opened. His hand slid down off his face, fingers splaying like a man who’d caught a ball in his sleep. He blinked, then smiled, small and real, the kind that started at the eyes. “Hey,” he said, voice guttered and soft.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Logan said. It felt like walking into a confession he hadn’t intended to give.

Wade shifted up against the headboard and patted the mattress beside him like it wasn’t a question. “Come on. You’re letting the heat out.”

Logan stood dumbly for a second. His mind was a list of reasons to leave: pride, habit, that old contract he had with solitude that said me first, always, until the last light goes out. It turned out none of those were stronger than the pull in his ribs toward a steady heartbeat he trusted.

He crossed the room, sat where Wade’s hand had thumped the duvet, and the mattress bowed to accept new weight. The bed’s warmth was immediate, the kind that crept up bare ankles and got under everything. Wade reached past him and switched off the lamp. The dark leapt in like a friend who had been waiting outside the door, but it didn’t feel sharp anymore. It felt like cover.

They lay back, one at a time, the choreography of two men who had learned to move around each other in doorways and on too-small couches and in corridors designed by sadists. Logan drew a breath that made it all the way down. Wade let the silence sit like a dog between them, taking up space comfortably, faithful to the bone.

“Back hurts,” Logan said finally, because naming one thing he could fix was better than thinking about all the ones he couldn’t. His voice dragged on the syllables, worn.

“Roll,” Wade murmured. “Face me.” He reached slowly, cataloguing consent in pauses and hoverings, and slid his palm along the curve of Logan’s lower back, the heel of his hand landing just above the ache. He pushed with pressure that was firm but not force, up and in, slow circles like he’d studied this body as a map and had remembered every good road.

Logan exhaled with his mouth open. The sound that came out was undignified and honest. “Christ.”

Wade huffed a laugh into the dark. “That’s the idea.”

“You’re insufferable,” Logan managed, which in this dialect meant don’t stop.

The baby rolled thin as an eel. Wade’s breath hitched; his hand flattened, the warmth gathering through cotton, the bones of his fingers careful, careful, careful. “Hey,” he said, voice going even softer, as if he might wake someone if he spoke too loud. “Hey you.”

Logan didn’t label the thing that clenched behind his sternum, the strange braid of tenderness and grief. It was easier to classify everything as pain and go from there. He nodded against the pillow no one could see, and felt Wade nod back, as if they were two men in a boat agreeing on the tide.

“You’re making that face,” Wade said eventually. He didn’t need to see it to know; it was in the way Logan’s shoulders rode up toward his ears and stayed there even as Wade coaxed the muscles between his vertebrae into something like memory of ease.

“What face,” Logan said, dry as dust.

“The one where you punish yourself for things you haven’t done yet.”

Logan was silent long enough that the ceiling could have grown a new crack. Then: “I don’t know what happens after.” He didn’t try for cool. He let the words out rough as they came. “With me. With the kid. With… this.”

There was a pause where he could feel Wade draw a breath and set it down. “I don’t either,” Wade said. There was no joke under it, no paper airplane of deflection thrown lazily at the admission. It was lifting a weight and letting Logan see the muscle tremble.

The room settled around it. The winter outside pressed its head to the panes and listened. Logan’s throat went tight the way it does before tears, but he was a man who let storms pass behind closed doors. The tightness stayed and turned into a burn under his breastbone.

“I keep trying to picture giving her away,” he said, and it was the first time he’d said her out loud in the dark where lies are harder. “I keep trying to see my hands empty and my—” he swallowed, “and my chest not feeling like it’s been scooped out with something dull. And I can’t.”

Wade’s hand stilled for a breath and then kept moving, pressure modulated like negotiation. “Doesn’t mean you have to decide tonight,” he said, gentler than Logan had known his voice could be.

“I know. But it feels like if I don’t, it’ll decide itself for me.” The old fear rose sharp; he let it be recognized. “That I’ll blink and—” he made a cutting motion in the air that Wade would feel against the sheet more than see, “—and it’ll be gone, and I won’t have said yes to anything, just… failed to say no.”

“I’ve done a lot of things,” Wade said in a tone that could have been a smile or a scar. “Letting something decide itself has never ended well.” The bed shifted as he scooted in closer, thigh aligning along Logan’s, heat choosing its loyalties. “Here’s what I know: whatever happens, I’m not leaving.”

The sentence fell between them and was bigger than the bed. It was also the simplest thing in the world.

“That’s a bad idea,” Logan said on reflex, and then realized he meant it as warning, not dismissal. Old dogs, new patterns.

“Probably,” Wade said, sounding almost pleased about it. “Still doing it.”

Logan breathed and felt the breath go all the way down to where a stranger was becoming someone he knew. The ache in his back let go by degrees under Wade’s palm. Outside, somewhere under the eaves, snow shifted with a sound like a box of beads being tilted. He stared into the dark because the dark was less personal than Wade’s face, and the inside of his chest felt startlingly, treacherously, like he could lay down a weapon no one had asked him to carry.

“Stay,” Wade said softly, and Logan didn’t ask what he meant because he knew it wasn’t just about the night.

He stayed. The mattress recognized his shape again. Wade’s hand kept time, learned the border of pain and pushed at it gently like a tide taking back the beach. Somewhere in the prayer of that rhythm, sleep advanced on him from behind, a cat not disturbed by words, only by movement. He let it take him, not as surrender, but as choice.

He didn’t remember Wade turning off the lamp. He didn’t remember the exact moment he stopped worrying and started dreaming. He only remembered waking once with his forehead pressed under Wade’s jaw and both of Wade’s hands bracketed over his belly like a man who had sworn something without witnesses and intended to keep it.

Morning made a slow approach, patient enough to be trusted. Light pooled reluctantly in the corners of Wade’s room, skimming over the seam in the drywall, turning the dust in the air into a galaxy that answered to no one. There was a new sound layered into the cabin’s usual morning song—the precise whisper of Wade not moving. Logan recognized the effort because it was the sort you made for something small asleep on your chest, a negotiation with breath and weight and love you refused to speak of in daylight.

When he surfaced, it was to the feeling of being held without being trapped. Wade wasn’t wrapped around him; he was arranged near him in that way that says I am here if you reach and I will not move if you don’t. Logan lay very still and let awareness creep through his limbs like light. He catalogued absence of pain in his back with the cautious amazement of someone testing a tooth after it stops hurting.

“Awake?” Wade asked, not louder than a thought.

“Maybe,” Logan said.

“Do you want coffee, tea, or to be left alone to pretend you’re not human?” Wade asked, and the list made Logan’s mouth pull against his will.

“I could be persuaded to admit to tea,” he said. “If you don’t talk while you get it.”

“I can do stealth,” Wade said, and slid out of the bed with a grace that should have been illegal on a man that size. The mattress rebounded slightly. The cold he let in was brief and honest. Logan stared at the ceiling and let the little seams of his life line up—the box by his bed with Bolt’s practical tenderness, Victor’s leather handle, Fred’s broth, Wraith’s peppermint—and felt something in him tilt toward a word he’d never had comfort putting in his mouth.

Wade came back with two mugs. He handed one over and sat cross-legged, straddling the duvet like a teenager. The steam climbed and painted Wade’s face in shapes Logan wasn’t allowed to stare at this long, this openly. He did anyway, because safe homes demand small rebellions.

“We said stupid things last night,” Wade said.

“We always do,” Logan said, but he held the mug tighter because he knew what Wade meant.

“I’m not sure what happens after,” Wade said. He didn’t look away when he said it. “I know you and the kid are my after, in some way. Could be we hand her to a family you pick and we go home and build something around the hole. Could be we keep her and pretend we know how and learn by trial and error. Could be I get hit by a truck on a yogurt run. I don’t know.”

Logan stared over the rim of the cup, the tea fogging his eyelashes. “Did you just put ‘yogurt run’ and ‘truck’ in the same sentence?”

“I did,” Wade said solemnly. “Realistic contingencies.”

Silence, but it was the friendly kind, with a chair pulled out for it. Logan’s fingers moved on the ceramic, finding heat and claiming it.

“I’m not leaving,” Wade said again, simply, like counting to one. “Not for this, not for the next thing, not because you push or because you don’t know what you want.” He scratched the side of his jaw and smiled at some joke he wasn’t going to share. “You couldn’t get rid of me with fire.”

“You’re very flammable,” Logan deadpanned.

“Not emotionally.”

Logan looked at the bed, at the ridgeline of the duvet, at Wade’s knee close enough to bump if he wanted to. The decision he still didn’t have to make wasn’t here, but the one about who would stand with him when it came was, and he had already made it sometime in the dark without paperwork.

“Okay,” he said, and the word felt like a lock tumbling, not relief exactly, but alignment.

Wade’s grin was quick and teenage and mortal. He didn’t reach out. He didn’t change anything. He let the world remain exactly where it was, and somehow that was a greater gesture than any declarative clutch.

“Okay,” Wade echoed. “Tea now.”

They drank. The room brightened to the point where colors remembered themselves. Footsteps sounded in the hall—the cabin was awake—and Wade glanced at the door, then back at Logan. “You want to sneak out before the peanut gallery starts narrating our lives?”

Logan smirked. “We’re adults.”

Wade considered that. “We are.”

“Also yes,” Logan said. “Let’s sneak.”

They did. They moved like men who had done worse in tighter spaces with more at stake. Wade cracked the door and slid out first, gauging the hall like a thief; Logan followed, the baby a small planet under his hoodie, whole solar systems not yet named.

They parted at the landing with a look that said enough. Wade went left toward the kitchen; Logan went right toward the nest. The house took both choices without complaint.

If a hinge had turned in the night, the door it moved didn’t slam open. It eased wider by inches. They didn’t start touching more. They stopped pretending it was by accident when they did.

Victor clocked it before lunch and logged the data without comment. He handed Wade the shovel when snow flocked the walk, and on his way back in brushed snow off Logan’s shoulder with the back of his knuckles in the same motion he used to flick ash off a cigarette—habit turned affection by sleight of hand.

Fred reacted with recipes. He began producing small, dense loaves studded with apricot and walnut “for stamina,” which he shoved at Logan with a grunt and at Wade with a look that said don’t eat it all first. He stuffed the pantry with jars whose labels had graduated from soup to soup (good) to soup (good, eat this first). Logan laughed the first time, then stood a long time with the jar in his hand because the parenthesis made him feel like someone had made room for him inside every word.

Bolt honed a routine of “projects” that happened to take place in whatever room Logan was in. He took apart the lantern and put it back together and then announced it was brighter—Logan wasn’t sure if that was true or if the world itself was simply less averse to offering light where they needed it. Bolt begged him to hold a scrap of leather for three entire minutes while he threaded a strap through a buckle, and then forgot the strap and sat with Logan instead. If Wade came through and made fun of them for building a belt in the living room, Bolt flipped him the screwdriver like a baton and Wade bowed as if he’d been knighted for heckling.

Wraith doubled down on his preference for being the exact thing you needed one minute before you knew you did. When Logan’s ankles swelled to the approximate width of Fred’s forearms, Wraith left a shallow basin by the stove filled with water infused with something sharp and green. He didn’t write a note. He didn’t have to. Logan planted his feet in it and the sigh he made might have been audible on the porch. Wade came in at that exact moment, took in the scene, and, without comment, retrieved a towel warmed by the oven door’s proximity. He dried Logan’s feet like he’d been told to do it once under threat of death and then put lotion on like a man casing a museum, reverent and alert.

At night, the house took to clustering. They didn’t make it a ritual; it just kept happening. Movie on, volume low to suit Wraith’s standards for not alerting the entire forest; Fred’s hands busy with some ordinary emergency in the kitchen he pretended to resent; Victor in the corner chair counting things that didn’t need counting, like windows and breaths and ways through. Bolt and Wade argued about something that couldn’t matter and mattered anyway because Logan laughed while they did it. The laugh was not generous at first. Then it was. Then it lived in his chest like another organ.

The next hard night arrived as if to test what had shifted. Back spasm at two a.m., the kind that made the edges of the world pixelate. Logan slid out from under the covers and braced against the dresser, head down. The house heard. Wade did, at least—he was there before the second exhale, hair a compromise with gravity, face wide open with concern, hands not touching until Logan found the seam in the dark with his palm and pressed Wade’s wrist into position at the small of his back.

“Okay?” Wade asked, and because the word had lived in the space between them for a day and had not been thrown away, it meant more. It meant tell me what you need and I will be that shape.

“Pressure,” Logan managed, breath razored. Wade leaned in, the heel of his hand a ballast right where Logan’s body had been asking for someone to be all month. Fred appeared in the doorway in boxers with a towel over his shoulder like he’d been prepping for a midnight sauna. He didn’t ask; he went to the kitchen. The kettle whispered soon after. Wraith ghosted past, deposited something on the bedside table (peppermint, honey, a single small cut wedge of lemon), and disappeared as if he’d never been there. Bolt’s door opened, closed. Victor’s heavy tread came and went on the porch, the perimeter having demanded a lap because the air inside was too loaded to sit in.

“We’re ridiculous,” Wade said, soft and smiling because he could feel what Logan was thinking.

“Pack of idiots,” Logan ground out.

“Yours,” Wade said, and pushed at the exact moment muscles let go.

Logan’s laugh sounded like surrender and victory signing a mutual treaty. He sat on the edge of the bed, hands on his knees, and watched the cup of tea steam like a beacon on the nightstand. Wade fetched it, because that was what Wade did now, and pressed it into his hands with fingers that didn’t shake. The peppermint untied the knot behind his tongue. He drank. Wade watched him do it the way a man watches a storm nose off over the next hill. When the worst of it passed, Wade didn’t move away. He had become, somehow, the kind of furniture that follows you from house to house and always fits in the right corner.

By morning, frost painted every window. Breath fogged in the first step out of bed. Fred’s stew tasted better than it had any right to, and Bolt was halfway through a story about the time he’d installed a light switch upside down that ended with Victor saying, “He did,” from the armchair like a judge stamping a verdict.

Logan sat on the rug, back to the sofa, shoulders against Wade’s shins. He didn’t think about how, three months ago, he would have sat on the other side of the room where the air was thinner of people. He didn’t think about what would happen in four, or six, or ten weeks. He thought about now, the smell of garlic in the air, Wraith’s quiet between sentences, the weight of Wade’s hand coming to rest lightly on the crown of his head as if checking for heat, as if inventing a blessing no one had taught him.

Later, when the sky turned the color of metal and it felt like the storm might lay another quiet sheet over the trees, Logan found himself at the hallway no-man’s-land between his room and Wade’s. He didn’t think. He turned left instead of right. The dark recognized his footfall. Wade said “Hey,” like a man who had always known this sound. Logan climbed into the bed that had learned his edges and was met with hands that had practiced being gentle long enough to call it muscle memory.

“Still not leaving,” Wade said into his hair.

“Still a bad idea,” Logan said, as the baby turned under his palm and the house listened and didn’t interrupt.

“Probably,” Wade answered, and pulled the blankets over all three of them like a man covering a campfire so the warmth would be there in the morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, whatever names those mornings decided to take.

Chapter Text

The ninth month didn’t slip in quietly. It took over.

It was not a date inked on the cabin’s wall calendar, nor a neat number in a doctor’s handbook that could be checked off with calm detachment. It was an atmosphere, something that sank into the walls and the floorboards until the air itself seemed thicker. Time no longer ticked forward in seconds and minutes but stretched, bent, and folded around Logan’s body. Even silence felt different, as though it had learned how to linger in longer stretches, weighted with expectation.

The weather colluded in the change. Snow had begun its full reign, burying the cabin beneath layers that softened the outline of the world. The pines stood heavy-limbed and muffled. The paths Victor had cut weeks ago were now swallowed by drifts, leaving only the faint promise of a trail. The outside world pressed inward, relentless, as if reminding them there was nowhere else to go - no escape, no retreat.

Logan bore the weight of it most keenly. His body was not his own anymore; it was borrowed, reshaped, a vessel shifting daily into something more cumbersome. He had always moved like someone built for survival, quick, precise, efficient. Now, every motion came with hesitation. Getting out of bed each morning required more than just willpower. It meant bracing his hands against the mattress, muttering a low curse as he dragged himself upright, pausing on the edge with his head bowed until the wave of imbalance passed.

Even breathing betrayed him. His ribs, once an easy cage that expanded without thought, now resisted him, narrowing the space for his lungs. A deep inhale scraped against invisible walls. His back sang with ache, constant and unyielding, a reminder of the new gravity pulling him down.

He hid what he could. Logan was not a man who yielded easily to weakness. His voice remained clipped, his tone sharp, but even the tightness of his jaw could not disguise the way he moved slower, the way he lingered longer in chairs, the way his eyes closed too quickly in exhaustion.

And the others noticed.

They noticed everything.

Victor became a weighted shadow.

Not the kind of shadow that went unnoticed, but one that altered the room itself, shifting its balance. He positioned himself in doorways before Logan reached them. He moved chairs without being asked. He cleared clutter from the path before Logan’s feet could meet it.

It was never announced. Victor did not speak of what he was doing, and Logan, for his part, did not acknowledge it. But the care threaded through every silent action.

From Victor’s perspective, it was instinct, a soldier’s vigilance, applied to something more fragile than any battlefield. Logan was not fragile, Victor reminded himself. Logan was stronger than most men he had ever known. But strength meant little against the raw unpredictability of the body’s labor. Victor’s mind, always a machine of calculation, noted the way Logan shifted his weight, the lines of tension in his shoulders, the subtle tremor in his breath when he lowered himself too quickly into a chair.

Victor did not often let himself dwell on fear. But when he did, in the sleepless hours before dawn, he admitted this frightened him. Not Logan himself, Logan was as unbreakable as iron, but the possibility of what could happen, of something beyond even his control. Protection was Victor’s nature, but this was a battlefield where his hands could only hover, never strike.

So he hovered anyway.

Where as Fred got louder.

He was not a man who asked questions easily. His words came in declarations, often brash, sometimes gruff, but always unmistakable. The kitchen became his stage, and Logan his reluctant audience.

“Sit your ass down before you pop something,” he barked one morning when Logan shifted toward the sink.

“That tea’s not strong enough, lemme fix it,” he declared the next afternoon, elbowing Logan aside before he could lift the kettle.

“Nope, don’t carry that- not on my watch,” he ordered when Logan bent toward a basket of firewood.

Fred filled the cabin with smells as much as with words. Soups simmered on the stove, heavy with garlic and herbs. Stews thickened until they clung to spoons. Fresh bread cooled on the counter, its crust cracking at the press of a thumb. Though Fred grumbled that the food was for everyone, there was always a bowl waiting at Logan’s place, steaming and full, placed with a kind of brusque reverence.

Fred was not good at soft words. He had never learned the language of tenderness. But he understood sustenance, understood the way a full stomach steadied a man against storms.

Each dish was a translation: I see you. You’re mine to take care of. Don’t fight me on this.

Now Bolt threw himself into handiwork like a man possessed.

Every squeak in the floorboards was silenced, every loose hinge tightened. He replaced the porch steps, sanded the railing, and muttered darkly about splinters as he smoothed edges down to satin. He installed a soft-close lid on the toilet because, as he insisted, “no one needs to hear that slam at three a.m.” He measured walls, windows, and hallways with his tape measure, muttering about baby gates, corner guards, draft-stoppers.

Fred caught him one afternoon crouched by the hearth, the tape stretched across the stone ledge.

“For Christ’s sake, Bolt,” Fred barked, “you plan on measuring the damn air next?”

“Babies crawl, Fred,” Bolt muttered without looking up. “They crawl and hit things. Sharp things. Dangerous things.”

“This kid isn’t even out yet,” Fred shot back, crossing his arms. “And you’re baby-proofin’ like it’s already tearing through the place with a hammer.”

Bolt clicked the tape shut, jaw set. “Somebody’s gotta do it.”

Fred grumbled but let him be. Behind his irritation was the grudging knowledge that Bolt’s compulsions weren’t just fuss — they were fear, dressed up as carpentry.

Wraith stayed silent.

He never hovered, never asked, but Logan found his presence in small ways. A fresh mug of tea appeared on the arm of the chair just as Logan sank into it. Pillows appeared in stacks before Logan admitted he needed them. A blanket settled over his shoulders while he slept, though he never remembered anyone placing it there.

One night, Logan stirred from shallow sleep by the fire and saw Wraith by the window. He stood like a statue, a shadow against the falling snow, watching the treeline as if it might suddenly reveal something. The lamplight barely touched him, but in the reflection of the glass, Logan glimpsed his jaw set tight, his eyes sharp and unblinking.

Wraith looked less like a man and more like a drawn bow, tension coiled and waiting. Logan closed his eyes again, pretending he had not seen. Some forms of loyalty did not require acknowledgment.

And Wade — Wade had changed the most.

Once he had been an orbit, chaotic and unpredictable, his energy ricocheting through rooms like a comet that refused a steady path. Now he was gravity. He was not content to be nearby; he had to be with Logan. Every motion Logan made was shadowed by Wade’s presence: a hand at his back in the kitchen, a body braced beside him on the couch, a joke murmured just loud enough to break tension when it threatened to choke the air.

At night, when the fire dimmed and the others drifted into their own corners of rest, Wade sometimes lingered.

“You ever think,” Wade said once, staring into the fire, “that none of us were made for this?”

Logan grunted. “You talkin’ about me or you?”

“Both,” Wade admitted. He leaned back, arms stretched across the chair as though to pretend at ease, but his voice was low, thoughtful. “I’ve been a lot of things — merc, clown, pain in the ass. Not sure ‘anchor’ was ever on the résumé. But for you—” He broke off, then smirked, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Guess I’ll try it on.”

Logan didn’t answer. But the flicker in his gaze, the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, was enough for Wade.

And Wade, for once, stayed quiet.

It was midafternoon when Fred caught it.

Logan was pacing. Not fast, not frantic, just moving, his hand pressed against the small of his back, his other hand resting on the swell of his stomach as though by instinct. He circled the couch, paused by the window, circled again.

Fred’s beer bottle landed with a soft thunk on the arm of his chair. “You good?”

“Fine,” Logan said. The word was short, sharp, but it held something strained, stretched too tight.

“Fine like ‘fine,’ or fine like ‘two minutes from keeling over’?”

Logan started to snap back, but the retort died in his throat. His hand clenched hard on the back of the couch, his whole body going still. The twinge wasn’t sharp, not yet, but it was a pull from somewhere he couldn’t ignore. His breath caught.

Fred rose instantly. “Vic!”

Victor was in the doorway in seconds, Wade at his shoulder. Wraith slipped in from the porch. Bolt came from the hall, wiping sawdust from his palms.

“What’s wrong?” Wade asked, his voice steady but too careful to be casual.

“Nothing,” Logan ground out, but the grit in the word gave him away.

Victor’s eyes swept over him once, slow and deliberate. “It’s time.”

The cabin shifted instantly. 

Fred shoved the coffee table aside with a single sweep of his arm, the wood screeching softly against the floorboards before he wedged it against the wall. Bolt darted to the hall closet, arms filling with blankets he piled onto the couch and floor in layers. Wraith slipped upstairs, returning moments later with the go-bag none of them had admitted was ready, setting it silently near the door.

Logan remained standing, body tight, jaw set, eyes flashing as though daring anyone to make him sit. Sitting would feel like surrender. He wasn’t ready to surrender.

Wade stepped in close anyway, palm finding the small of Logan’s back. His voice dropped to a murmur pitched only for him.

“You’re breathing like you’re about to hit someone.”

“I might.” Logan’s tone was edged steel.

“Save it for me. I can take it.”

The tension between them broke just enough to draw Logan down. He lowered himself to the couch with a hiss, his body unwilling but his breath too tight to argue.

The first contraction faded, leaving a ghost behind — a warning that more were coming.

The room settled into its new rhythm. Victor claimed a chair nearby, elbows braced on his knees, eyes never leaving Logan but not crowding him. Fred busied himself at the stove, the hiss of the kettle and clink of mugs filling the space. Bolt rearranged the blanket stack three times, then a fourth, his motions too quick, too restless. Wraith lingered in the doorway, still and silent, a sentinel in the half-light.

The next contraction arrived harder. Logan bent forward, his hand seizing Wade’s without thought. His grip locked down, iron tight, until Wade’s knuckles ground together.

“Shit,” Wade muttered, eyes watering.

“Don’t you start,” Logan growled.

“Wouldn’t dare,” Wade said, though his teeth clenched against the pain.

The contractions found their rhythm. Each one began low, spreading upward until it seized his whole body. The breaks between them shrank until the air itself seemed to contract with him. Sweat dampened Logan’s hair, clinging to his temples, his hoodie unzipped halfway as though even cloth pressed too heavily against him.

Wade shifted between roles with every wave. Sometimes he knelt in front, offering his hand. Sometimes he braced Logan from behind, his chest a wall for Logan to collapse against. His voice moved constantly, low and steady, filling the air when silence grew too heavy.

“Lean,” Wade murmured when Logan’s shoulders locked against the strain.

“I’m not—”

“Yeah, you are. You’re carrying your weight in your shoulders. Drop it lower. Let it go where it needs to.”

Logan cursed, but his body obeyed. The pain shifted, no less sharp, but less like it was tearing him apart from the inside.

Fred crouched low, pressing a mug of tea into his hands. “Drink. Don’t argue.”

Bolt hovered at Logan’s side, muttering, “Better for your spine if you shift like this,” while adjusting pillows under his back.

Wraith stepped in only to press a cool cloth against Logan’s neck. His hand was steady, firm, grounding.

Minutes stretched, collapsed, blurred. Time no longer moved forward but folded in on itself with each contraction.

Wade’s voice cut through the haze.

“Breathe with me. In. Out. Don’t outrun it. Match it.”

Their foreheads nearly touched, the heat of Wade’s breath filling the space between them. Logan resisted at first, his instincts all fight, all grit. But Wade’s tone, steady and unyielding, cut through the storm. Against his will, Logan matched him.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t comfortable. But it worked.

At one point, Logan’s grip grew so fierce Wade thought his bones might snap. “I hate you,” Logan ground out, voice raw.

“Good,” Wade said without hesitation. “Means you’re still with me.”

Victor’s presence remained constant, a weight without words. Sometimes his hand settled briefly on Logan’s shoulder, a firm squeeze before withdrawing. He monitored everything — breath, color, posture — with the eyes of a man used to measuring survival.

Fred stayed in motion, clinking mugs, stirring pots, filling the air with the grounding scent of broth and herbs. Bolt disappeared once outside, coming back with snow sharp on his jacket, as if he’d needed the cold air to shock his nerves quiet. Wraith leaned against the window, watching the tree line as though daring anything to cross it.

Hours stretched. The contractions grew sharper, faster, crueler.

Logan paced between waves, Wade shadowing every step, ready to catch him when his knees buckled. Sweat clung to both of them, Wade’s sleeves shoved up, his hair damp. But he never left Logan’s side.

When Logan faltered mid-stride, Wade caught him, voice low. “I’ve got you. Don’t fight me.”

Logan wanted to argue, but the force of the contraction stole his words. He sagged against Wade instead, teeth clenched against the sound that tore out of him.

Fred’s voice cut through once, sharp but steady: “Don’t lock up, Logan. Move with it. Makes it worse if you fight.”

Bolt knelt awkwardly, fussing with pillows. “Better like this. Keeps pressure off your back.”

Wraith’s cool cloth returned, pressed against Logan’s temple. He didn’t speak, but his silence was its own kind of steadiness.

When one contraction hit like a freight train, Logan doubled over, a raw sound breaking from him that he barely recognized. His grip on Wade’s hand crushed down hard enough to blanch Wade’s knuckles.

“You’re doing it,” Wade said, leaning in, his jaw tight but his voice unshaken. “Don’t stop now.”

Logan collapsed sideways against him, his forehead pressed into Wade’s collarbone. Wade’s hand found the back of his neck, fingers curling there, anchoring him.

“You’re gonna get through it,” Wade murmured.

Logan didn’t answer. Didn’t lift his head. But he didn’t pull away either.

The end came fast.

One moment Logan was struggling for breath, the next Victor was there, voice low but firm, commanding without question. “Now.”

The world narrowed. The firelight faded. The creak of the floorboards, the hiss of the kettle — all gone. There was only the body’s raw focus, the primal force of pushing, the strain that turned time liquid.

Wade was in front of him, one hand clamped in Logan’s, the other braced against his shoulder. His voice stayed steady even when Logan’s broke.

“That’s it. Right there. You’ve got it.”

And then — a sound.

Sharp. High. New.

The air shifted with it. The world returned in fragments: the fire crackling, the boards creaking under Victor’s step, the sharp inhale Fred made despite himself.

Victor wrapped the tiny, writhing body in a soft blanket and crossed the space, placing it directly into Logan’s arms.

The room went still.

Logan stared down, his chest heaving, the weight of the baby in his arms both impossibly light and unbearably heavy. The small breaths puffed against his shirt, warm and fragile.

Morning brought the knock.

Sharp. Polite. Wrong.

The black SUV sat in the drive like it had been dropped from another world, too sleek, too polished for the snow-muffled pines. Wade opened the door, Victor looming beside him.

“We’re here for the—” the lead man began.

“Not happening,” Wade said, his voice flat as steel.

“We have—”

“No,” Victor said. He stepped forward until the man’s heel nudged the step. “Turn around.”

The men faltered. Papers rustled in their hands, the language of courts and ownership useless here. Bolt appeared behind, arms crossed, sawdust still on his shirt. Fred filled the kitchen doorway, his frame blocking the light. Wraith lingered in the shadows just inside the living room, still and silent as a drawn bow.

The weight of them was too much. The men’s words broke. Their shoes crunched against the gravel as they retreated, first slowly, then faster, until the SUV doors slammed and the engine swallowed them into the trees.

The cabin breathed again, as though it too had been holding its breath.

Logan sat in the armchair, the baby curled against his chest. Each rise and fall of its tiny body against him steadied the pounding of his own heart. Fred stirred something on the stove, the spoon clinking softly. Bolt muttered as he rearranged tools that didn’t need rearranging. Wraith sipped a mug gone cold, his eyes still lingering on the window.

“You’re stuck with us now,” Wade said, dropping into the seat beside Logan, his grin faint but real.

Logan didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The weight of the baby in his arms said everything.

When they left — all of them together, the baby bundled safe, the cabin door locked behind — the sun burned gold against the trees, the snow crunching under their boots. Victor took the lead. Bolt and Wraith followed, silent but steady. Fred carried the bags. Wade walked beside Logan, his hand a warm, firm weight at the small of his back.

Wherever they were going, they were going together.