“What?” He knew he’d heard him right, and yet he also knew he couldn’t have heard him right. “Tony? How is he? Where did this happen?”

“Would ya believe Quebec? He was there for a meeting or some such, and when he was about to leave for the airport, a Yugo did a spontaneous combustion thing outside the place. It was two in the morning, so there weren’t a lot of people out - some people hurt by flying debris, no deaths.”

“So he’s okay?” His heart belatedly skipped a beat. Why did a car bombing sound vaguely familiar too? What a night for déjà vu.

“Yeah, he was in the lobby when it detonated. He got injured by flying glass and shit, but seems otherwise okay. In fact, he called me after they stitched him up, asked to hire you and me as “help”.”

“Ehud fell down on the job, huh?”

“I think Ehud just takes care of the plane and the cars, vehicle shit. He ain’t with him all the time. In fact, I think he deliberately doesn’t surround himself with security.”

“Considering the Yakuza hate him, that’s not wise.”

“I know. But for an old guy, he’s got him some big brass balls.”

“I’ve noticed.” Logan sat down on one of the cement bumpers in the parking lot, those things designed to keep cars from just driving into the motel itself. It wasn’t a busy place tonight - there were only four vehicles in the lot, and lights on in only one of the ground level units, not counting his own. It was just starting to sprinkle faintly, and the strangely wonderful smell of rain of warm, dry concrete waft up to his nose. Made up for all the smell of exhaust and lilac air freshener. “Spider coming with us?”

“Spider bugged out on me - no pun intended. One of his old friends in England died, and he went back for the funeral. He’s decided to stay there for now, or at least that’s what I pulled from the drunken message he left on my answering machine.”

“Self-pity seems to be going around.”

“I know, someone should notify the CDC.”

Logan looked out at the traffic driving by on the street, then glanced up at the sky. It was too bright in the city to see any stars, even if a thin film of gray clouds wasn’t currently moving across the sky. If he listened hard, he could hear the sounds of a hooker negotiating a “date” down the street, someone yelling at some else in Spanish a block away, and some guy was watching a porn movie in unit number seven. When people commented on the “stillness of night”, he wondered what the fuck they meant. “Uh, I gotta get something squared away here, but then I can join you in , uh … ” he glanced at his watch, but it took a moment for his eyes to adjust enough to the dimness of the parking lot for him to see it. “Six hours, tops?”

“Fine. The docs are making Tagawa stay for observation anyways.”

“You in Quebec?”

“Yeah. As luck would have it, I was in Toronto doing a follow up on something, so it wasn’t that long a trek for me.”

He was instantly curious - what the hell could Marc be “following up on” in Toronto - but he knew better than to ask. If it was relevant, he’d tell him. Otherwise, he was a mercenary, and his jobs were relatively confidential. “What’s the info?”

“Royal Victoria Hospital, listed under the name Tom Fujisaki. I‘ll probably be in the lobby, reading a Steve Martin book, pretendin‘ to be waitin‘ for someone.”

“Which one?”

“Book? Pure Drivel.”

“Good call.”

“You read it, huh?”

“I read it. Funny. I prefer his short stories to his novels.”

“You read a lot, don’t cha?”

“Somebody’s gotta do it.”

“Yeah.” He paused long enough that Logan could hear him take a sip of a drink. Something carbonated; if he was in the hospital now, probably soda. “Do you care about the pay?”

He snorted derisively. “No.” Tagawa must have not mentioned the favors he had done for him in Vancouver. But then again, he wouldn’t, would he? Tony was not that kind of guy. “Got any suspects?”

“Yakuza. Good bet, probably an Asian guy. So that narrows it down to what, a few million people?”

“Smart ass.”

“You asked.”

“So I’m guessing you haven’t been to the scene?”

He made a negative noise, and Logan heard a sound like settling vinyl. A distant echo sounded like a hospital announcement in French. Doctor Chamblis was needed in the surgery. “Drove near it. Place was crawling with blues, cordoned off, terrorist squad picking the block apart. They think it was an attack rather than a hit.”

“An attack? A Yugo? At two in the morning? Unless it was filled with a hundred pounds of C-4 and lobbed into the middle of a Blue Jay’s game, I don’t see how that would qualify as an attack.” He watched the small rain drops bounce on the pavement, turning it from dusty gray to uniform black, and he realized he was getting soaked. It was amazing how little he cared … but the phone was waterproof, right?

“Yeah, I know. But most people haven’t been through the wars like we have.”

That was such an odd expression. Especially since he knew now that yeah, technically he had been through at least one war personally. (How fucking old was he?!) “What’s the name of the hotel?”

“The Du Maurier. Heard of it?”

He snorted derisively and got up, ducking under the covered walkway that passed for an exterior corridor to get out of the rain. “It’s one of those fancy ass hotels that I never get within three miles of. I’ll find it.”

“Why don’t you stay in nice hotels? I know from our last paying gig you could afford it. You haven’t lived until you get an in room massage.”

“Yer a fancy man, Marc. Too fancy for me.”

“You’re just too busy keeping low to the ground. You live like an escaped convict.”

He had never thought of it that way before. Marc was probably right, but he wasn’t about to admit it. “I just prefer bein’ off the radar, thanks.” There was then a weird noise on the phone, a sort of dull “blip”, and he nearly jumped out of his skin. “Fuck, the connection’s bugged.”

Marc scoffed. “You’re shitting me, right? Are you that much of a Luddite?”

“I am not a Luddite,” he snapped, as the blip occurred once more. “What the fuck is that?”

“Sounds like call waiting. You got someone else calling you.”

“I know what call waiting is,” he said crossly, shivering involuntarily as the wind kicked up. It was probably a good thing he couldn’t get pneumonia. “I just thought it was only on land lines.”

“Nope. Is that who you were expecting to call in the first place?”

“Probably.”

“Call me when you get in town, okay?”

“Will do. Keep an eye on him.”

“They’ll kill my meal ticket over my dead body. Sayonara, brother.” Marc cut the connection, leaving Logan to figure out how to stop call messaging from bleeping in his ear.

Wonderful thing, technology. Now he knew why he flushed his previous cell phone down the toilet.

2

“Tell me you feel like a complete dick too,” she said, glancing up at the second story window. The curtain was only partially drawn, but from his vantage point, there was too much glare off the window for him to see anything but the bright spring day.

“Actually, I was thinkin’ this was slightly more productive than most of my usual waiting around,” Logan said, inspecting the cards in his hand and deciding to discard a three of clubs. He was hardly paying attention to the game - in fact, it was hard for him to concentrate on anything at the moment, with Mariko’s leg pressed up against his beneath the wooden picnic table.

Ryan had many of the “old guard” Yashida family over for a new business proposal, and even though he was technically head of security, he was relegated to the back garden - where they weren’t - because the “old guard”, as a general mass, loathed him. Mariko was out here with them, even though she crafted the new business plan Ryan was proposing, because women weren’t allowed around when the men were speaking business. Ryan wanted her to stick close by, though, so if he got peppered with tough questions, he could use one of the staff to bring them to Mariko for responses. She was good and pissed off about it all, and he couldn’t blame her one bit. They were the living embodiment of the family’s racism and sexism, loitering in the garden. If they knew he was a mutant, they could probably hit the hate trifecta. Or maybe if they just knew they were sleeping together.

They were still pretending to be friendly to each other in public or around the family, but in a usual way, as Riko had always been his main conduit to the family - the rest of them were just disgusted by his presence in their home, or afraid of him, or both. Otherwise, they were sneaking around like teenagers, and he thought it was kind of funny, in a pathetic way. Sometimes they’d sneak a touch, just a casual brushing against a hand as he walked past, or the small of her back when no one was looking, a type of intimacy that would be confusing but not damning if they were caught. But just the other day, when she walked behind him to leave the room, she briefly let her fingertips trail against the back of his neck, like she sometimes did when they were making love. It sent an electric shiver down his spine that was hard to suppress, and he was so glad he was wearing sunglasses (that was so they wouldn’t catch him rolling his eyes at their bullshit).

Of course lately they hadn’t been able to meet up anyways - he’d been out late babysitting Ryan, or she’d been working, trying to balance the books legally, pretty much putting the kibosh on their usual late night rendezvous. But it made when they did get together that much more intense - if it wasn’t bad enough that they were at that relationship stage where they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. As a result, when they got together last Tuesday, he had to go work crowd duty at an airport with only three hours sleep. If this kept up, she was going to kill him. (But, hey, he’d die happy …)

It was starting to bother him, though. He had vowed to himself the last time this happened that he wouldn’t let himself get emotionally close to a woman like this again. It almost killed him last time, and he didn’t think he could live through it again. Normal people were frail; they got sick, they got hurt, they got ravaged by time. And he could do nothing about it, just stand on the sidelines, impotent and useless, and watch them die. It was time to think of an excuse , to be honest, to leave … but could he leave her to this? The Takabes were getting desperate; if he left now, he’d probably be condemning them (her) to an immediate death sentence. He couldn’t live with that.

It was too late. He couldn’t walk away, not anymore; he was an idiot, he was a moron, he strongly suspected he was in love with her. He knew he should do something … but what? He kind of hoped he’d snap out of it. Love was fickle, right? Maybe she’d learn to hate him. He was freak, after all, and when it became glaringly obvious he wasn’t aging, wasn’t getting sick or weak, it was natural to get resentful - or at least that had been his experience. She’d learn to hate him; they all did, if they lived long enough.

She sighed and put her cards down on the table, glancing up at the window. They would be meeting in that room, or, as was usual, drinking heavily and criticizing each other, just like at any other family gathering. “This is stupid. I should just go up there and demand they acknowledge me as head of the goddamn family. Fuck tradition.”

“You could. Would they pay attention?”

She turned back and glared at him, the muscles in her jaw tensing, and he was reasonably sure it was going to end here now. But she sighed like a collapsing soufflé, slouching like she was giving up - which she was. “Damn it.” The breeze came up, causing strands of hair to fall in her face, while the greenery of the sculpted, meticulously tended garden rippled like the surface of the ocean. He held the cards down, to keep them from blowing away, as he noticed the nodding heads of the roses out of the corner of his eye, smelling their distinctive scent in the air, mixed with the cigarette smoke of the guards on patrol. According to the wishes of their father, the groundskeepers had been instructed to plant a small rose hedge, following his desire for an “English” style garden. But the roses lasted six months, tops, and then they all died. No one was sure why, but Logan always thought of it as a living metaphor: the family was so corrupt at the roots, beauty could only last so long. That was only part of the reason he was so afraid to leave her now - she would either get killed, or get swallowed up by the same corruption that tainted her family. But it was such a painfully arrogant thing to think - he was not the reason she wasn’t as warped as the rest of her family; she was not because she was stronger than the rest of them combined. The only one of them worth a damn.

If he left, she would simply die, along with all the rest of them.

She looked at her cards again, her dark eyes clouded with disappointment. “I don’t even know why I think I could make a difference.”

“Time won’t be kind to them,” he told her, hating to see her discouraged.

She glanced up at him under lowered eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“I mean their time has passed. Slowly but inexorably, things are falling apart around them. They are dinosaurs, and they are becoming extinct. You are the new breed, and you will win, if only because they can’t. You move with the times, or you die. Believe me, I know.”

She studied him, a curious tilt to her head, and sat up a little straighter, a sly smile curving up her pale lips. In the sun, her hair gleamed like black silk. “Sometimes you sound like a wizened old sense in a karate movie.”

He grunted in ill humor, but couldn’t keep the smirk from his face. “I’m just pointing out the obvious. Personally, I love the fact that they’d pass over the genius with the business degree for the drunken wannabe playboy because the wastrel is the only guy. They deserve to be destroyed, the fucking assholes.”

“I thought you liked Japanese culture.”

“I respect it, but that doesn’t mean I love everything about it. The institutionalized sexism and racism is troublesome. But then again, it’s troublesome in all cultures. It’s idiotic, putting people in defined categories due to arbitrary things like gender or race or tribe. It just makes it easy to dismiss anyone different from you, or worse, brutalize and kill them.” He didn’t add “mutantness” to the list, but he supposed she knew he could have.

She discarded the seven of diamonds, openly grinning at him now, her dark eyes bright and laughing. “So you’re the bleeding heart sensei?”

“Whatever it takes to get into your pants.” He shot back, raising his eyebrows in a mock suggestive manner.

She let out a startled laugh, quickly slapping a hand over her mouth to muffle her laughter, looking around to make sure none of the guards on ground patrol caught that. He winced at that reflexive gesture, but until the family learned to grudgingly tolerate him a little better, and Mariko felt brave enough to openly defy them, they would remain sneaking around in the cover of night. But, as she liked to say, it was kind of exciting.

He felt her leg rub against his beneath the table again, a gesture that passed for eroticism under these circumstances. Feeling her body heat coming through his clothes was strangely arousing though - or maybe it was just being with her. “I wish we could sneak back to my place,” he admitted, keeping his voice low.

Her smile faded, her look intense and hungry. “So do I. Got any plans for tonight?”

With a sigh of frustration, he admitted, “I’m getting the entire family back to their respective impenetrable fortresses. I’ll probably be out until at least two, assuming I don‘t also have to wrestle Ryan away from a soapland.” He could feel his libido wilting as he imagined putting up with Hachiro’s snide comments and Izuki’s blatant snubbing.

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she said, her voice still low, her gaze steady and filled with promise. The space between them seemed to crackle with passion, to the point where he could almost feel like it a static charge.

He studied her, and realized there was no way not to love this woman. He was so utterly doomed.....

Logan woke up with a scream stuck in his throat, the sound of water pounding down from the outside.

No, not the outside; Brendan was in the bathroom with the shower on, probably to cover the fact that he was sobbing his guts out in there. Logan sat up, feeling a deep and terrible pain in his abdomen - it was like his solar plexus hadn’t just clenched like a fist, but also turned to stone. He struggled to breathe, but found he couldn’t; when he tried, he realized he could taste her in his mouth, along with roses and stale cigarette smoke. Even just sitting on the edge of his motel bed, he doubled over, the pain spiking like he had been hit. He choked, feeling like there was something physical clogging his windpipe, and tears made the threadbare brown carpet look like boiling mud.

What the fuck was wrong with him? What the hell was that? He remembered … he remembered not only her but … himself? Did he - was that the other Logan? The one that came before? (Who the hell was Ryan?) His heart was pounding so hard he thought it might break his ribs, and he felt like he might vomit.

He’d never had a memory like that before. Was it a memory? Maybe … maybe it wasn’t. How did he know?

Why did he feel like he was going to die?

He grabbed his pillow, shoved it hard over his own face, and screamed to relieve the pressure building up inside him. His solar plexus still felt like it was trying to turn him to concrete, tear through his stomach wall and hit the carpet, but now he could breathe. Just thinking the name Mariko made the pain almost blinding, and he struggled hard to choke back the sobs, not sure he was strong enough to stop them.

Brendan heard none of this. He was still trying to pull himself together in the bathroom and, thankfully,  missed all of Logan’s little breakdown. He gulped in air, tamping down the sudden wave of sorrow that threatened to drown him. What was going on?  Why did that … dream, memory, whatever … leave him feeling like he had to start running now?

(-there was something he wasn’t supposed to remember - his mind didn’t recall it, but his body did.  The muscle memory was killing him -)

He sat up, still fighting back sobs that felt like punches, watching his own tears darken the pillow like the rain stained the pavement last night. What the fuck was this? What the fuck was wrong with him? Did Brendan have an ability no one knew about? Was he projecting his sorrow like a rogue radio broadcast?

He didn’t need this right now. He needed to get Brendan out of here, and he needed to head to Canada. He couldn’t think about this (her), and he knew if he pondered this reaction, this … memory, he would regret it. A puzzling intuition he was afraid not to trust.

As soon as he thought his gut would let him stand up, he did, and went to the door. As luck would have it, it was still pouring outside; he just couldn’t tell with the shower going full blast.

He walked out into the rain, and hoped it would hide his tears well enough to escape notice.

3

Brendan was too bewildered by his own pain to notice there was anything amiss with Logan, which was a relief.  But he knew he must not have completely recovered, as Rags squinted at him (and how disturbing was it to learn that a guy with crystal eyes could indeed squint), and asked him if he was all right (or, as he said it precisely, “Yuh allriht?”)  The claim that he slept bad was easily believed - wasn’t it always?  Didn’t he usually?

Xavier hadn’t been overly thrilled with his proposal, but Logan had been able to convince him that Bren was probably bound to run away again if he dragged him back to the school, and maybe this time, if he focused his energy on it as opposed to drowning in forty ounces of self-pity, Brendan could get pretty far, and avoid them all a bit better. He not only had the basic survival skills and street smarts to do it, but there was that whole remembering everything he’d ever seen or learned. That was proof a little knowledge could be a dangerous thing, with certain mutations.

He then hit the road as fast as he could given traffic, and tried to see if he could outrace his thoughts. It was harder than it had ever been, and he wasn’t sure why.  The more he tried not to think about it, he
did, and the more he tried not to dwell on her, he did.  He got so distracted, he initially missed the exit he needed, and angrily forced himself to think about nothing but his destination.  He owed Tagawa, whether he ever called him on it or not; he had to focus and be there for him, or the next time those assholes after him could score a direct hit.

(But shouldn’t this be old home week?  He used to be a bodyguard.  Hell, he used to work within a crime family - he should know them like the back of his hand.  If he could remember anything more substantive than the fact that he was hopelessly in love with the family’s daughter, and they hated his fucking guts.  So much so that they eventually killed her because of it.)

Those thoughts made his solar plexus clench again, and he had no fucking idea it could do that. But when
it hurt, it hurt amazingly bad.

He chased good weather over the border, and it didn’t get overcast again until he crossed over into Quebec, the mean temperature staying the same, but the humidity dropped enough that he felt colder. He didn’t call Marc right away; he found the Du Maurier instead, deciding he needed to give his mind something else to dwell on.

The street was open again, but then again it had to be; it was a downtown area full of shops, and the car bomb had honestly done minimum damage to the neighboring structures - the force looked as if it was all directed at the front of the gothic style, twenty story hotel, judging from the clear tarps spread over where the large front windows and glass fronted doors used to be. That called for someone who knew exactly what they were doing; this was not a random Yakuza blowing up a handy car. This was a person who worked specifically with bombs and explosives; this was an almost surgical bombing. If Tony had been outside the hotel, or even one his way out at the time of the explosion (all that flying glass in the doorway would have julienned him like potatoes), he would be very dead. Either it was on a timer, and Tony was just late enough to miss it, or … or it was a warning? Perhaps. He had to talk to Marcus about that.

Glancing at the newspapers in a mini-mart on the corner, he learned that the English language paper was speculating that Quebec separatists were responsible, while the French language newspaper was speculating that radical “outsiders” were to blame. Although he knew they meant the rabid non-separatist groups, the French paper was much closer to the truth of the matter. But, of course, they were both ultimately wrong. He did love how politics bled into everything, whether it belonged there or not.

Of course the cops and bomb squad investigators had taken away any evidence worth investigating, but there was still a lingering scent in the air that Logan spent minutes trying to figure out. Of course it was almost gone, and nearly lost in the sea of scents: exhaust, people and all their chemicals (perfumes, deodorants, soap, fabric softener, dry cleaning, cigarettes), the scent of fresh baked goods and coffee from the bakery across the street, the odors dragged along by the equipment used by both police and the bomb squad, as well as the hotel clean up crew now that they were allowed to try and neaten the area up. But there was a lingering scent, tantalizing, oddly familiar … plastique? C-4 was now the explosive of choice, but that was still an old favorite. His stomach clenched in another sickening wave of déjà vu, and he wondered if you could honestly be assaulted by your own memories, even if they weren’t fully formed.

He went over to the bakery and got a mocha and a croissant (well, he wasn’t hungry, but maybe if he ate something the hideous cramps in his gut would cease, or at least taper off), and kept an eye on the hotel’s shattered, broken front from a window table as he called Marcus. “I’m here,” he said, as soon as Marc picked up. “Outside the Du Maurier.”

“Anything?”

“Professional job, maybe a warning. Curiously concerned about collateral damage.” His mocha was still too hot to drink, so he tore an end off the croissant and chewed it, ignoring his stomach’s uncertain flip-flop. They really did make kick ass croissants in Montreal - you had to give them that.

“As in making lots?”

“As in causing almost none. That‘s just not the kind of consideration you get from your casual bomber.”

Marc paused, but he was just considering that. Even over a slightly static-y cell phone, he knew Marc believed him. “So that’s why you think it was a warning?”

“One of the reasons, yeah. How’s Tony?”

“Cool, as in ice cold. He’s out of the hospital, and we’re at a private airstrip right now, in his jet. You need to get here ASAP - he thinks he might know what was behind this.”

“Can you give me a hint?”

“Not really, he hasn’t filled me in on the details. But he did want me to ask ya if you have some time to kill.”

Okay, that sounded bad. “Why?”

“’Cause if you’re goin’ with me on this, you need to know there’s gonna be some traveling.”

“To where?”

Marc’s pause made his stomach clench again. “Hong Kong.”

Logan watched his reflection in the window, saw its eyes widen at the prospect. “Uh, he’s aware that’s right next door to the Yakuza playground, right?”

“Right. But he thinks they - the Yakuza - have good reason to want to punch his ticket now.” Marc paused and sighed, but he sounded vaguely amused. “He wants to meet them half way and get it over with, one way or another. He said he’s too old to sit around and wait for some power hungry thugs to kill him.”

Logan smirked and shook his head, not sure if Tagawa was crazy or just possessed of some of the greatest chutzpah on the face of the Earth. “He’s fucking nuts. I like him.”

“Me too. You in?”

He exhaled slowly and looked down at his hand as he reached for his mocha. It looked like his fingers were still trembling a little. “Hell yeah. Where’s the airfield?”

Getting it over with sounded just like what the doctor ordered.