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He has come to the end of running from himself.
There are horrors too terrible to face, fears too deep to overcome. Healing, wholeness, are things of completion, an endpoint attainable. But one can be broken and broken and broken yet more, and there is no point where the breaking ends.
Death holds no escape. He has suspected it a long time, but now he knows. In hell there is only more of the same pain, an endless reckoning of history. He should be better at hating himself, maybe, he should be less of a coward. But he knows where he sent them, and he cannot meet them again. He is running.
There is nowhere left to run.
He climbs.
In his life, Logan has done little simply for the pleasure of it. Life, to him, has been about survival, a fight, an endless war. The wilderness is his home, the only one he can return to. To hunt, to make a life in the forest, is more a state of being than recreation. But, in the times when he has escaped, when the weight and the loudness of humanity have become too much, when he has carved out space for himself to breathe, in those brief fleeting moments when he has had time and peace enough to be happy, he has climbed.
There is a cleanness to the exertion of rock climbing: a contest without an assailant, without anger or pride or any living emotion save his own. The cliff face is a thing to be conquered, without any reward for the conquest. It is a contest against oneself, the rock only a medium. There is a freedom to it, an exhilaration, to move upward and upward, to feel the wind, the air around you, to be exquisitely alone.
He climbs now because there is nothing left to do.
He climbs. The rock is hard beneath his claws, and he feels the vibrations conferred to his bones, traveling up his arms. He knows that there is a breeze up here, the scent of life, cold and sunlight. He knows this, but he feels none of it. All there is is the rock and movement, only because to be still is impossible, to be still is to be swallowed up by himself.
A summit is a magic unto itself. A peak is a singularity, a coming together, a convergence point. To be alone on a mountaintop is to be both wholly alone and wholly belonging, the whole earth opening up beneath you and surrounding you. To stand on the top of a mountain and look out is to make yourself larger than the world, while simultaneously overcome by the world’s largeness. There is nothing on earth that Logan has found to be more beautiful.
He stands at the top of the cliff and, looking down, he sees nothing but empty distance, and an ending to nothingness.
He jumps.
The pain is like a thundercrack. Brain death like silence.
There is no time between moments of agony. In unbeing is no time and all time. It is not felt, it is not remembered, and yet it is, and his body knows it. That knowing is enough. Experience tells him that there are seconds and minutes of not quite deadness. Seconds and minutes for the world to pass him by against minutes and hours of agony as his body reassembles itself. It is worth it. It is more than worth it. Some of his joints are still misaligned, blood still oozes from the body, as he climbs again.
He has come to the end of running from himself, and here there is nothing left but ending.
He climbs, and falls, and climbs, and falls. The nothing stretches, and mingles with the living. He climbs, and the exertion overcomes him, until there is no world beyond himself, and no thoughts within himself, and all there is is the beating of his heart and the breath in his lungs, and the singular determination to end these things.
The mind can only endure so much. He runs from himself, runs from the human, and the human, in pain and not being, pounded and pounded into the earth, slips away. The body is fractured, contorted, starved and exhausted. The brain takes longer to return, and when it does, the mind is too shattered to return with it.
The animal remains, and the animal does not know guilt in the way that humans do. Suicidality is a deeply human impulse; the animal does not understand the purpose of its purposeful destruction. It does not understand the cliff, gouged again and again with metal claws, or the stony ground, blood soaked, cratered by metal bones. It stands alone as it is, naked (its clothes do not grow back along with its shredded flesh, the trappings of its humanity so easily destroyed) and though it does not forget, it ceases to be the thing that remembers. It has no reason to remain in this place drenched in death stench. It leaves, moves, because that is the only thing it knows to do.
He is running.
The animal does not know guilt in the way of a human, but that is not to say that he does not know guilt, does not know shame, cannot hate himself for what he has done. There is no greater instinct than the protection of one’s children. Shame is not a thing which the animal knows to put a word to, but it has long been taught to distrust itself, and that sense of his own danger has never been stronger.
The animal moves. He is not going anywhere in particular. It does not seek its death because it does not understand the impulse. It does not seek to preserve its life.
He is a thing of instinct and emptiness, with fear gnawing somewhere within him, the not knowledge that only pain comes of wishing to be anything more. The desire for companionship is a string tied round his unseen inner being, pulling him onward. He is running from himself. The self he runs from has become very small.
He finds the wolves. The wolves of this pack are strangers to him. There are others close by that he could seek out, wolves he has known from cubs. But while the animal does not know guilt in the way that humans do, there is still enough human in him to be ashamed, to know, somewhere deep within his instincts, that he is not safe for those to whom he owes love, that he is fundamentally broken.
He finds the wolves, and he watches them. Because loneliness is an ache akin to the foreignness of his bones. Because hunger devours him slowly, and his hatred of self cannot entirely contain it. Because a part of him still longs to be killed.
So he finds the wolves and he watches them. He stays among the trees, does not venture among them, doesn’t come into the open, but he does not hide from them either. He watches them, as they play, and as they eat, and he whimpers softly, the animal unashamed of its misery.
He does not know what he expects of them, this pathetic thing encroaching on their home. A part of him still wants to die. He does not expect them to take pity on him.
A wolf brings the bones of a kill to him, what they can spare. He does not accept it at first, despite his hunger. It is not his kill. He doesn’t deserve it. There is still a little of the human in him, enough to know exactly how much he does not deserve.
He does not eat, and the wolves watch him, concerned, displeased. The next time they bring food to him in their own mouths, chewing it first as though he were a small cub, as though he could not eat because he did not know how.
He eats. He is hungry, he cannot resist their insistence. The warmth of kindness eats at his flesh like acid.
It is the human condition to feel superior. Humans, they say, are enlightened. They are orderly and wise and the world is theirs to command by right. Humans are right, goes the philosophy. Morality is what separates us from the animals. Perhaps this is correct. Perhaps animals do not know the difference between right and wrong in the way that humans do. Guilt is a human concept.
He has clung all his life to the shreds of his humanity, refused to be relegated to the status of a beast or a thing. And maybe he believed in it, once, the superiority of humanity. But harm does not come most from wildness, from rage and aggression and unbridled instinct, from the lack of civility. Guilt is a human concept, maybe, because humans have the most use for it.
What animal save the human conceive of slavery, eugenics, the atomic bomb? Of agent orange, strip mining, factory farms? Of revenge?
Revenge. There is nothing quite so monstrously human as revenge.
He has fought the animal within himself since he was a child, denied it, despised it, attempted to destroy it. But now he knows the Man to be worse, more despicable, more evil, more powerful. Of course it is more powerful, Men and power, that has always been the point. But now he cannot be either. He has run from himself. He is nothing.
There is nothing left of him, nothing, save maybe his fear. Nothing. But he is lonely still. He is poison, there is nothing good in him. But the needs of his body remain. Need for food is only a natural punishment. Need for companionship is irresistible.
They are kind to him, the wolves, in the way they know how to be. He follows after them, and they allow him to, this creature in human shape. He is mute, in the way of humans and also in the way of wolves. He watches them, and understands them, but he does nothing to communicate with them beyond signalling meekness. The wolves do not understand him. They are kind, anyway.
He eats after them, when they hunt. His jaws are strong enough to crack the bone and reach marrow. It is enough for him to live on, even though he gives way when other scavengers come.
He does not hunt. He does not hunt with them, for them, though he could. He does not unsheathe his claws. Violence has been engraved in him since he was a child, the hunt in his blood and in his heart, clean and faultless. But now he does not hunt. The violence of his soul has withered, a thing immortal now dead. Impossibility breeds impossibility, and nothing is left. He could not hurt another being now, not even to relieve their suffering, even if he wanted to.
Desperately, with overwhelmed, all encompassing panic, he does not want to.
The wolves do not fear him. They see him as something between an overgrown cub and a brain damaged alien. They allow him near their cubs.
They allow him close, and he is a thing lost in mist, without thought or reasoning, a thing of impulse, instinct. It is instinct, to draw near to the cubs, to touch and hold them, to scold their foolishness. It is instinct, and what is left of his mind catches up too late with the knowledge that he should not be trusted, not with something so small and precious, never again. The wolves, though, do not know this. They have found a way in which he is not useless, and so they leave their cubs to him gratefully. He knows that he is not safe, he knows it and knows it, and he knows that he should run again. But the cubs are so small and so clever and fearless and new, unblemished, and the wolves are so kind for no reason. Love is a thing like heartworm, once infected, impossible to expunge, growing to fill the whole chest. Loneliness is an ache that weighs down the limbs, a gravity impossible to escape. He is not safe. Evil is a human concept, there is a sickness in him that the animal knows nonetheless, understands the need to contain, the danger of it spreading, cubs must be protected at all costs. But still he remains, because he has run past the end of himself, and he has no strength left to run again.
The year turns slowly. The cubs grow, stronger, bolder, more sure in themselves. The weather begins to turn colder, the first snows fall. He feels something within himself begin to settle. It is not contentment, it is certainly not peace, it is continuation, perhaps, and the acceptance of continuing. He begins to feel as though he will remain here forever, as though he could, not alive, but existing.
It is foolishness, of course, to believe that. Of course, everything shatters.
The snowmobiles come in roaring with the scent of diesel in the cold air. The wolves are too late in running. He does not bother to run at all.
They use tranquilizer darts. The wolves fall, but they aren’t dead. The tranqs make him feel a little dizzy and sick, his back sprouting barbs like a porcupine. There is a small distant part of him that is panicking. There is a tiny voice buried somewhere inside that is screaming, that refuses to be caught, taken, used, that reacts to the feeling of being drugged with a desperate clawing need to fight back, to never be taken alive again. An even more distant, deeply buried part of himself knows that these people are no threat to him, could never hold him if they tried.
All of that is underneath. Violence, even now, is not a thing that he has within him, the instinct to fight back expunged and killed, even at this extremity.
The men speak, and he understands the words, but the part that understands is no longer in a position to form thoughts.
Tranq darts are followed by gunshots and the hot red scent of blood. The crack of a gun and a quick sharp pain to his forehead, and for a short, bright moment he is dead.
Something returns to him, as he wakes, slowly unfurling. It is not anger; he will think, later, that they deserved his anger. It is not loss, either; he will think, later, that they deserved his grief.
Thought is a disjointed thing, wordless, incomplete. He thinks: this is my fault. Because that is true, it always has been, no matter how far he runs. He thinks: how did I cause this?
He could have fought back. He knows that. He could have unsheathed his claws, carved the men on their loud machines to pieces. He could have. He couldn’t have.
The ground is covered in bodies. They were kind, in the way they knew how to be, kind for no reason.
The cubs are gone.
The feeling that swoops within the hollowness of him is too final, too complete, belonging to the past tense, to be called panic.
The leader of this pack is young. Young and brave and willing to accept new things. The leader of the pack is alive, a father limping after the trail of his children. He has never seen him look so defeated before.
The thing that unfurls within him is not anger. It is not grief. The thing that awakens is not vengeance, retribution; he has no concept of justice. The thing that fills him, as he watches this father, bereft, these young ones taken, is still and simple and complete. He knows who he is.
Logan runs.
The smells of human places feel foreign to him now, but the cubs’ scent is easy to follow. The snikt of his claws is familiar in the quiet, and Logan feels the small pain at his knuckles like the touch of an old friend, the smell of his own blood a settling of his bones.
When he kills it is human killing. Killing that is necessary, that is righteous. It does not scare him, though he thinks it should. It is natural in the way that killing is natural to all hunting animals.
Logan opens the doors and the cubs run free into the snow, and his heart settles. They know their own way, they are nearly grown and they will find their father.
He smells the human scent, and all he feels is hate, humans and evil equivalent in his mind. He breaks open the second door, and there are children.
They’re children. The oldest can’t be more than twelve. They’re children, and they’re dirty and underfed and maimed.
This isn’t Logan’s fault.
The realization of it falls on him like catastrophe. This is not Logan’s fault. He does not know these children, the men did not come for him, and the wolves did not die for him.
Logan has been in the world a long time. The lesson that it is a place that is cruel and meaningless, filled with cruel people for no reason, is one he has learned many times. And yet somehow, it surprises him, again and again it surprises him, that there were people here, simply going about their business, no supervillains, no plots. That there were people out here in this cold forgotten corner of the world making wolves and children suffer and die for their own amusement, and it is only chance that Logan happened to stumble into them.
It is not Logan’s fault. And if it is not Logan’s fault, then it is eternal, and no amount of running can ever make it better.
The children are afraid of him. Of course they are afraid of him. Logan’s claws snakt back into his forearms and he breathes.
Talking is… hard right now. Talking doesn’t come easy, but Logan manages. He’s not entirely sure what he says, but it works. Children don’t mind that sort of thing as much as adults do, anyway.
Logan carries the ones least capable of walking on their own, and the others help each other. They’re good kids. They’re always good kids, in situations like this. Scared and wide-eyed and untrusting, and they follow him anyway; young and new and the world spitting its ugliness in their faces and still they help each other.
It’s easier, maybe for them to trust him like this. He’s not something too good to be true. Heroes in stories aren’t lost and naked and dirty, barely able to string a sentence together. So maybe that’s why they trust him, because he is so clearly broken, and he’s what they’ve got.
They shouldn’t trust him, he shouldn’t be trusted with anyone’s children, but the entire world can’t be trusted, and he is all they have.
He follows his nose into the town, and then the older children lead the way to their homes. It gets a bit loud after that, but Logan’s job is pretty much over at that point. The police are called, and doctors, and the kids' parents mill around, hugging and crying and all the rest of it. All Logan has to do is keep an eye out in case there’s danger, and glare at people a couple times to back off when one of the kids gets too overwhelmed.
It’s not hard to leave without being noticed. Logan watches over the town from the edge of the trees, and he feels lost, emptied out. There is no point in running. He could go and find the remnants of the wolf pack. He could go yet farther into the wilderness, and try to hide from humans forever. But he knows there’s no real possibility of that working, and he knows that’s not really what he wants.
“Logan?”
Melita’s voice catches him off guard, all his attention on the town and his own sluggishly churning thoughts.
“You okay?”
And it’s entirely baffling. Of course he is okay, he always is. Of course he isn’t okay at all.
“Melita,” he says, “What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you, you big idiot,” She says, like it’s obvious, like she always will, a fact of the universe.
Logan has no idea how she found him, except that of course she found him. It’s a fact of the universe.
Logan has come to the end of running from himself. There are horrors too terrible to face, wrongs that no effort can make right. The world is filled with such horrors, humanity a rolling, inscrutable tragedy. They are not special.
There is no guilt that puts an end to life. Existence is a thing that can be neither destroyed nor perfected, only endured; growth a matter not of improvement but continuation, change.
The only thing that is inevitable is change, the only thing that cannot be escaped is life.
But here, also, is something that he cannot escape. Melita, here like a string tied to the center of him, like a secret channel connecting him to the wider world. No matter how he runs, all along, Logan has not truly been alone. No matter how he forgets himself, he is not forgotten. This is not because of him, it merely is. It is because of the people who choose to make it be.
The world is full of evils, of violence and cruelty and injustice, and Logan counts himself among them. But the world is also filled with children, and wolves, and people who, somehow, manage to be good.
Logan knows who he is, and he knows that those who love him know also. He cannot hide any longer. He has come to the end of running. In this world there is no such thing as deserving. That is a human concept, maybe because humans know too much, maybe because they know too little. There is no such thing as deserving, only being. And Logan has work to do.