Logan didn’t even have to think about it. He shook his head, and told them, “Nah. I’ve had enough of togetherness to last me for a life time.”

“Yes,” Bob exclaimed triumphantly, and then explained, “I bet you’d be doing the crazed loner thing again.”

“I am not a crazed loner,” he snapped, although he knew he probably was. He just wasn’t ready to admit it.

Scott was staring at him, jaw taut. “You’re gonna leave me alone - “ he had second thoughts about finishing that statement (What was he going to say? “With these clowns?” “With these freaks?” “With these psychopaths?”), and instead changed his tack. “Who’s going to co-pilot the plane?”

Now that was a lame recovery. He came in alone, didn’t he?

But Chameleon snorted, and said, “We worked for the Org. We can not only fly your goddamn jet, we could field strip it and put it back together again. “

Scott gave him a look that pretty much said “That explains it.” And Logan supposed it did - he could fly the plane, couldn’t he? And he still wasn’t sure how he knew. That had to be it - all the Org members were drilled on it, and they left those memories untouched in his brain, whether he was consciously aware of it or not.

Scott led the sad tag team of mouthy Chameleon and confused Spider off towards the jet, and Bob said, “So where do you wanna go?”

He shrugged, and found that he was really in no mood to tell Bob either. He really just wanted to be alone. “Can you zap my bike here? I think I just want to drive.”

“Zap?” Tom repeated curiously.

“He can teleport.”

“Yes,” Bob agreed. “I can zap you anywhere you want. I’ve gotten better at the aiming thing.”

Tom and Xia both raised their eyebrows at that statement. Logan knew Bob was teasing, but they could hardly appreciate it.

Eventually, they came to believe that Bob wouldn’t kill them or teleport them into the middle of the Atlantic ocean, and they said their final goodbyes. Tom stopped being such a catty asshole, but remained wary of him, and Xia gave him a goodbye hug that remained bittersweet, although at least this time she wasn’t sobbing. Logan felt a twinge in his stomach, but that was all. He still didn’t understand their relationship exactly, but he no longer had a wish to. It was whatever it was, and was probably just messy and ugly and not worth even half the pain it eventually caused. Which pretty much summed up all of his relationships, if he came to think about it.

Jayson took the van - well, it wasn’t so damaged that it didn’t run, and somebody had to get it out of here - which left him alone with Bob and a whole bunch of corpses - which happened a lot, or at least more than it should have. “You gonna be okay?” Bob asked.

Logan glanced behind him, and found that Bob had indeed zapped his bike in. Why would he doubt it? Bob was somewhere in between his concerned grandmother, his guardian angel, his agent, and his parole officer. “Yeah. Need a bath, I guess.”

“No, you need scrubbing down with steel wool. Maybe you should go through a car wash, just don’t get the hot wax. Unless, of course, you wanna give the hairless experience a try.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He straddled the bike and put up the kickstand, aware that Bob was looking at him expectantly. “What?”

“Nothing,” he replied, in that way that did in fact mean something.

“Bob.”

He sighed in exasperation, belying it with a smile, and clasped his hands behind his back. “I’m waiting for you to ask.”

“Ask what?” But Bob continued to stare at him, head canted to one side, pale smile on his lips, and Logan realized he was going to have to ask if he wanted him to stop looking at him that way. “Fine, smart ass - was it me?” Everything that seemed to have any genetic (or prolonged psychic) contact with him went totally bugfuck nuts - Chimera, those demon things, Shrike … himself. Yes, of course he had gone nuts; he knew he was probably clinically insane after he woke up in the woods. He had no idea how or when he got better - if indeed he did. He could still be nuts, but maybe it had subsided to a mellow insanity that just bubbled in the background, as opposed to being loud and out there.

Bob shook his head. “Not at all. Chimera went nuts because they pushed his programming too far; those demon hybrids had incompatible physiology that would - under normal circumstances - have made it impossible to breed with Humans , therefore they were always gonna be damaged in some way; as for Shrike - mate, he sounded like a complete piece of work. What you gotta understand is that, in most Humans or any being, telepathy is not a gift. If you knew what everybody was thinkin’ half the time, you’d be nuts too. Bullshit and lies are not only what keeps the world goin’ round, but it also keeps people from killing one another. And, might I point out, you had prolonged psychic contact with them - well, more jean’s case than Chuck’s, I know - but they’re not nuts, are they? And what about me? You haven’t driven me nuts.“

“That’s because you were crazy to begin with,“ he shot back.

Bob just chuckled, like he was afraid he might. “Well, okay mate, got me there. But you know, Xavier, Jean, all those kids at the school, they’re learnin’ to handle it well. And you had my ability to see into minds for a smidge - would you like it back?”

He was tempted to say yes (and in a way it would have been nice), but he knew there was no point lying to Bob. “No.”

“See? Proves your sane right there.”

“I have a split personality.”

“No you don’t. What you have is an implanted personality, and it’s really just a mutated version - excuse the pun - of some of your baser instincts, so you wouldn’t reject it outright. It’s close enough to the bone that it is you … to a point. And then it diverges, and it’s not.”

That sounded like semantically hair splitting, but he wasn‘t going to get into that with Bob. He had a feeling he was a master of the loophole. “But you can’t remove it?”

“I think it’s imperative that you do. Take your power back.”

Logan glared at him in exasperation. “How the fuck do I do that, Bob?! And what the fuck does that mean, anyways?”

Bob’s look was suspiciously sober. “You find a way to do almost everything, Logan. Don’t underestimate yourself.”

He stomped on the accelerator pedal, and kick started the motorcycle to life. “So you’re not gonna help me?”

“I don’t need to. You can do it.”

He clenched down hard on the throttle as he revved the engine in an expression of his impatience. “Yeah, sure. Way to be chicken shit, Bob.”

But Bob didn’t take the bait - did he ever? He simply gave him a small smile and a mock salute. “Look after yourself, soldier. A lull in wartime only means the enemy stopped to take a piss.”

He almost tried to figure out what the fuck that was supposed to mean, but then stopped himself. Bob was probably just trying to be funny, in an extremely annoying way.

Logan sped off into the cool desert night, happy to leave it all behind. Again. He did his best to ignore that niggling question in the back of his mind: ‘For how long?’ As long as he got away for a little while, maybe it didn’t matter.

Logan woke up to find himself back in the snow. Well, at least he had clothes on this time.

He stood up, brushing snow off his hands and the back of his jeans, and looked around. It was Alberta, certainly - near Alkali Lake? He didn’t see any destroyed buildings or debris, and the topography looked slightly altered. The mountains were off to his left, high peaks so buried with snow they almost disappeared into the winter white sky, while a stand of scraggly, rime frosted scrub pines stood off to his far right, revealing a blanket of snow barely marred by the footprints of birds and animals. But the frigid air was rife with the scent of … him? Yes; he smelled himself all over this place.

Suddenly he had an image in his mind’s eye, of Bob back at that mini-mart, standing in front of the boxes of wine and bottles of Mad Dog 20/20, and he heard him saying, “Okay, remember this when you need to. I want you - when you’re ready - to confront this however you want, and put it to rest. No matter what they did to you, it’s still your body and your mind - take them back for good. And yes, this was the entire push, so you can stop worrying now.” He then waved at him in an exaggerated, beauty queen sort of way, and Logan was back to staring at towering pine trees iced with snow.

So that’s what Bob meant, and why he was so chickenshit about removing the implanted personality; he thought he’d already had it set. Would it have killed him to tell him that?

He heard growling before he saw him coming through the trees, round shoulder and stooped, as if carrying a heavy burden. It was himself, but not himself; it was a Wolverine with a bald silver pate and his claws out, wearing his adamantium skeleton on the outside of his body, like a suit of skintight armor. His eyes were ice blue and empty of everything but a rage that was as insane and aimless as it was painful - this thing hurt, and it lived to take it out on others, in hopes it would stop. “Are you what they wanted, or are you just what I think they wanted?” He asked it.

Its eyes stared out from goggles of silver adamantium, and the flesh just peeked through here and there on it; it could have been a robot, or - more correctly - a cyborg. There was no recognition in it, no trace of anything Human, and yes, that would have to be, wouldn’t it? No memory, no sense of self, no feelings, no conscience, no will to resist them. “You’re me,” Logan said, his breath making vapor trails in the air. “You don’t even know it, but you are. We’re the same thing.”

It snarled at him, lips curling beneath its skull helmet, and Logan was nearly overwhelmed by a sense of pity for this pale shadow of a thing, for himself. This was the best the Organization could do; after all that time and energy, after all those telepaths and torture sessions, this was the best thing they could come up with. It was pathetic.

He’d popped his own claws, the familiar pain making him aware of what he had done, but at the same time he realized he didn’t want to fight this thing. He was tired of fighting with himself. Yes, it was his preferred way of settling things, but he had no desire to do it today, not with this thing, not this way. Logan retracted his claws and let it see that. “Fighting would be like stabbing ourselves in the face - don’t you get that? Let’s just stop, okay? It’s over.”

For a minute, he thought he’d gotten through to it. It stopped growling and straightened up slightly, as if confused. But then it let out a loud snarling shriek and lunged at him, claws first.

It moved fast, but so did Logan, in spite of the calf deep snow. He dodged it easily and it crashed into the trunk of the pine tree behind him, slicing clean through it with its claws. Only then did Logan notice that they were unretractable - but of course, they were on the outside of his body. They were out, and they would always be out. Violence was its only language, its only ability, its raison d’etre; it was built to kill, so that was all it could understand.

The tree fell away from them, but the heavy branches knocked snow from the limbs of neighboring trees, and they pelted down like chunks of glaciers. It turned to face him, snarling, claws out, and Logan shook his head and popped his claws again. It was always bizarre when he was the sensible one - it seemed like a violation of some natural law. ”Fine, asshole,” he sighed, taking a wary stance across from his metal doppelganger. “You wanna settle it this way? Okay by me.” he was aware that, on some level, he must have wanted it this way - Bob had told him to settle this however he wanted. And violence was the neutral ground where he and his engineered personality met; it was a terrain they both knew like the back of their mutilated hands.

But then he had the strangest feeling run down his spine, making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, and the Wolverine thing seemed to freeze in its tracks. They were no longer alone.

“It shouldn’t be like this,” Jean said.

Logan turned so fast he almost gave himself whiplash. She was leaning against a tree, dressed in her black leather X-Men uniform, the jacket open to reveal the red t-shirt she wore underneath. She looked as she always looked, except her eyes were mirrors of flame. “You again,” he said, but didn’t retract his claws. He still had no idea who or what this was, and he knew better than to trust it. (Even though it smelled just like her …) “Get out. This is none of your concern.”

“It concerns you, so it concerns me,” she said, but in such a way it gave him a chill. Well, no duh, it was fucking freezing here! But it was more than that, and he knew it.

She approached him, and his claws retracted of their own accord. But he didn’t even have much time to ponder that, as he noticed Jean was walking on the surface of the snow, and not breaking through; she was not even leaving footprints. What the fuck was she?

“What do you want from me?” He asked, wanting to back away, but unable to. He no longer had any control over his own body. He too had been frozen in place, just like his abused twin, only he still had the ability to talk.

“I want nothing from you,” she claimed, and it felt like the flames that made up her eyes were piercing his skull. “I just want you to be well, Logan. As well as you can be.” She grabbed his face in her hands, and he wanted to pull away, but of course he couldn’t. (It felt like there was fire raging under her skin.) She then did something he didn’t expect at all - she kissed him.

Her lips were as warm as her hands, but he barely had time to notice. It wasn’t just physical contact; he could feel her - her energy, her mind - filling him, a gush of lava pouring inside of him and filling up his hollow spaces.

If he could move he would have reeled backwards from the enormity of it all, try and flinch away from the torrent, but he could not. And somewhere below it all, below the heat and the noise and the images zipping through his mind at the speed of light, he could feel her kiss, and it was pleasant. More than pleasant. It was Jean’s kiss - he knew her touch, her taste, her smell; it was her, down to the last detail. Except …

He lost himself almost instantaneously. Sensations were doubled - he could feel her kissing him, and he could feel himself kissing her - and the sensory input was far too much. On top of the energy filling his mind, it quickly became an overload, pleasure mutating into pain, and he didn’t know which feelings were truly his. If he could have pulled away, he would have screamed.

Logan felt his knees start to buckle, but she wouldn’t let him fall. It felt like the energy was expanding his brain inside his skull, pressing it up against the bone, and it felt like he was undergoing an implosion in slow motion. What was she doing to him? What was -

Logan woke up with a pained shout, sitting up and grabbing his head in his arms protectively. Shit shit shit!

But there was no pain anymore. The energy settled, the heat faded away, and he slowed his own breathing, ceasing his gasping for air. He was okay; it was just a dream. A fucking weird ass dream, but …

And that’s when he realized what had changed, and some memories started trickling through his mind …

… memories that did not belong to him.

At first, Logan didn’t want to make sense of it. He wanted to pretend it was false, or a lie - gods and demons could do anything, and so could other mutants.

But he knew her. And he would swear he could still feel her inside of him.

Holy fucking shit.

Logan knew then that he had to talk to Bob.

17

He thought he was in control of his anger as he approached the Way Station, he really did. It was cold, and the unseasonable rain helped … at first. But it was as warm as blood, and had a slight tinge of pollution to it, obliterating the otherwise pleasant scent of water on hot asphalt. It felt slimy as it trailed down his face, crawled down his neck into his shirt, and he knew it might not have been the rain, simply him, and the way his rage colored his perception of the world. But he didn’t really care.

He opened the door of the glamour camouflaged bar, feeling the guise briefly tingle on his skin, and then he was swamped with music, smells, and noise. The day was gray, so he easily adjusted to the dark wood bar, the adopted disguise of the ridiculously pedestrian for the bizarrely fantastic, and he was glad to find the bar wasn’t all that crowded. Maybe a dark day meant the vampires and other assorted beasties could go out and play.

Lau was behind the bar, tranquilly polishing glasses, and he could hear Bob singing along with A Perfect Circle, sitting in the back by the jukebox, with his ubiquitous iBook on the table before him. Unlike with the unlucky Thrakazog, no one protested when Bob sang, because he could actually carry a tune. But what couldn’t Bob do?