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“Kids seem to be getting along,” Remy said, coming up to the balcony where Logan had settled to brood.
“Laura asked Jubilee to kill her,” Logan said, like that was a perfectly ordinary response.
“When was this?” Remy asked, trying to keep the shock or outrage or whatever the hell it was out of his voice, trying not to rise to the bait of Logan’s calmness.
“When we were heading over to find that trigger scent,” Logan said, “Laura figured the both of us weren’t up to it, so she asked Jubilee. Told her not to let her kill anyone. Described how to do the job.”
”Hell. Jubilee wouldn’t do it either,” Remy said, hoping it was true.
”’Course she wouldn’t,” Logan said, “But Laura asked.”
He was quiet for a beat, staring out into nothing.
“When you called,” Logan said, pronouncing the words as though he were trying to sneak along them on tiptoe, and doing it badly, “You said she’d hurt herself, that someone saw the blood she left and worried she’d tried to kill herself. Do you know if that was what it was? Or if she wanted to hurt herself or just… not be alive for a bit?” “How the hell would I know?” Remy said, “That was the point of me calling you out here, so’s you could talk to her. Seems the least you could do, you being her father and all.”
“You’d think,” Logan said, a dull bitterness in his voice as he went back to looking at nothing. At first Remy thought that’d be the end of it. Logan, accepting the role of deadbeat dad, and not even man enough to fight the accusation. But then he started talking again.
“I’ve thought about it,” Logan said, “What it’d take to kill me. Drowning’d be simplest. But then, I know where I’m going after, so death ain’t no escape. You can make it… stop, though, for a bit. Any time you’re blown up, or hit hard enough, fall from high enough up. Doesn’t matter if the skull’s adamantium, you turn the brain into mush inside it’ll take a few seconds to reconstitute. And for those few seconds… it’s like how dying’s supposed to be. There’s no pain, no thinking, no being. And it only lasts a few seconds, but you can keep chasing that feeling, keep chasing the nothing. Just… kill yourself. Over and over again. And you can get caught in the loop of it for a while, where there’s nothing left but pain and no pain, and there’s no space left in your brain to be alive and hurting in the way that living makes you hurt. I don’t know if she knows that yet. I don’t want to let it slip if she doesn’t.”
Logan’s voice was carefully, precisely detached as he said it. This wasn’t hypothetical, and it wasn’t ancient history either.
“Fuck,” Remy said. He didn’t know of anything else to say to that.
“Yeah,” Logan said, breath shuddering on the exhale like the ghost of a chuckle, “Maybe if she was some other kid I could dredge up some kind of wisdom, could figure out what to say that would help. But that shit won’t work with her. It’s not that she’s too much like me, she’s not really, thank fuck, but she’s smart, and she’s like me in the ways that mean she sees straight through me. And hell, she looks up to me, or looks to me anyway. And I just.. I ain’t got anything in me that’s any good for her.”
“So you brought Jubilee instead,” Remy said. And he could see it. He could see the logic of it. He’d thought, when Logan showed up with Jubilee in tow, that it was a gross failure of priorities. Here was Logan’s daughter needing him, and he refused to put her first. But Logan had brought Jubilee for Laura.
“Yeah,” Logan says, “I brought Jubilee.” And he almost smiles as he says it. Says her name like it’s sunlight, like just the word can fix things, makes the world lighter around it.