"Retrospect" - Part 12

Author: Notmanos

E-Mail: notmanos at yahoo dot com

Rating: R

Disclaimer: The characters of Angel are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy; the
character of Wolverine is also owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright
infringement intended. I'm not making any money off of this, but if you'd like to be a patron of the
arts, I won't object. ;-) Oh, and Bob and his bunch are all mine - keep your hands off!

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She snorted in disbelief. “This place is dead, man. No pun intended.”

“Well, it’s Kamloops. Kinda goes without saying, huh?”

“Yeah.” She crossed her arms over her chest, and cocked her hip, her stance equally wary and defiant. “You gotta be a Watcher. Why are you looking for a dead guy? If he vamped, you know he ain’t there anymore.”

“I’m not a Watcher,” he sighed. “And this guy couldn’t have been vamped, because I killed him.”

That pronouncement didn‘t faze her, but why would it? She was a vampire, and may have had a larger body count than him. “Some kinda demon?”

“No, just a Human moron.” The more he thought about it, the more he realized that someone - someone intensely stupid, or possibly high - may have saw that vial and thought it was something else. Liquid ecstasy perhaps? A steroid, a strength enhancer? Shit, maybe he just thought it was Gatorade. But it did occur to him as a rather bizarre thought - what if Stoff didn’t know about it because one of the guys decided to keep it for himself? What if - since it was in a suspension fluid - one of them drank it or shot it up? The autopsy - if one was done - wouldn’t show nanites, because no one would know to look for them. Except, oddly enough, him.

“Human morons are a dime a dozen. So why’s this one special?”

“Because he may have swallowed a deadly weapon.”

“Wow. That is stupid. On purpose?”

“Think so.” The scan had finished, and he looked at the screen, reading it carefully, as he was sure he had gotten it wrong. But no, the data was pretty clear.

The grave was empty.

Oh, there was wood, perhaps from a collapsed coffin, and more dirt than anyone needed, but no “Human” material, not even that ubiquitous polyester. He pressed down on the weedy grave top with one of his boots, and felt it soften, want to give.

“Found something?” The vampire asked, trying hard not to sound interested. Kamloops must have been more boring than he thought.

“No, I found nothing - the grave’s empty.” Now, it was possible there had never been anything in here; bodies had been known to be buried in the wrong plot, or left out to the fucking wolves in the case of several very cheap, overloaded funeral homes. Also, the Org could have already taken it … but, if so, why had they kidnapped him and asked him where the nanites were?

“Maybe some culties dug him up. Sometimes they need dead people for black magic ceremonies.”

“You really think there are black magicians in Kamloops?”

She snorted a laugh. “Ain’t nothin’ that interesting round here.”

“Heard of anything like a zombie in the surrounding area?” What if - what if the guy took the nanites somehow? And what if they did nothing, because they were meant to work on mutants alone (if in fact they worked at all)? But then he died (Logan had no idea if he had smashed this guy’s skull or broke his neck - that night was a big blur), and maybe the nanites were “shocked” into working? But not as fast as his healing factor, and not with so much damage to repair even if it was. What if it eventually put him back together, and took over his nervous system, possibly bypassing the brain altogether? What if the machines animated him enough to get up and leave?

Now, see, that really made no sense. But would the Organization bother looking for the nanites if they didn’t work on some level? What if a dead guy was out there, walking around, because he had machines in his body keeping him going? The world’s first high tech zombie.

“Oh yeah, there’s zombies all over the place. Check the Tim Horton’s at quitting time.”

“Nobody likes a funny vampire. Especially when they’re not funny.”

“Fuck you, blood bag.” She stepped closer, as if trying to have a look at the screen, and asked, “So, you think someone turned the guy you killed into a zombie?”

He checked the readouts once more, then shut off the scanner. He supposed he should check the other grave on his list, just to make sure two of the guys didn’t share the spoils, but his heart wasn’t quite in it.

This could mean nothing - this could mean everything.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. And he knew he might never know for sure, one way or another.

Bob sat on top of one of the eternal bookshelves of the dead, the living vines avoiding him like the plague. The sky above was more blue than white, only because he gave it a more azure hue. If he was going to have to wait for that asshole, he might as well entertain himself. “Chain chain chain,” he sang under his breath, swinging his legs off the side. “Chain of fools…”

Finally, down below in the black marble canyon that made up the limited world of Osiris, the fiend himself appeared, his skin and hair bone white against the dark of the floor and the liquid inkiness of his clothes. “Hola, muerto,” he exclaimed, jumping the thirty feet down to the floor.

Sy started a bit, odd golden bird eyes growing wide before his bloodless lips twisted in distaste. “You. Haven’t you been killed by the Powers yet?”

“They don’t kill their own - you know that.”

“So they’re actually admitting you’re one of them?”

“Not publicly, no.” Bob reached out, randomly pulled a book of the dead off the shelf, and tore it in half, straight down the spine.

“Augh!” Sy gasped, an anguished noise more than a word, and he jolted as if hit with eighty thousand volts. He waved his bony, clawed hands around uselessly, wanting to approach him but not daring. “What the fuck did you do that for?!”

Bob tossed the halves of the book aside, and grabbed another one randomly off the shelf, never looking away from The panicky Sy. “You think I’m a complete fucking idiot, Sy? Who could have aligned all those morons to work more or less in concert for the end of the world, whether they knew it or not? Well, it was easy to figure out who one you broke it down to the common denominator: death. All of them fed on Humans in one way or another - and the only entity that would benefit the most from that is you.”

He crossed his slender arms over his concave chest, and tried his best to look both innocent and offended. “There are more death gods than me.”

“But none tied as closely to the Earth plane anymore, and none quite as petty and malignant.” He slowly tore the book half way down the spine, making Sy’s face contort in varying intensities of agony, his baseball sized eyes bulging out slightly.

“Stop doing that!”

“Why should I?” He continued ripping slowly, letting the sound echo in the cavernous dimension.

Osiris was frantic now, nearly jumping out of his skin, flinging his hands around like they were trying to detach from his arms and fly away. “What?! Do you want me to admit it, is that it?!”

“It’s a start.”

“What the fuck else do you want, you pestilent waste of energy?!”

Lovely - when he was calling names, it was time to talk. “I want - no, I demand - you help me solve a problem you probably helped, in some small way, to create.”

His look was pure murder, but even Sy knew he couldn’t move against a Power, even one as disreputable and fallen as him. “And what exactly is that?”

But Bob wasn’t about to tell him until he established just how far he was willing to go to insure his cooperation. He tucked the half torn book of the dead under his arm, and said, “We both know that, being death, you yourself can’t die, not until the dimension you’re tied to completely packs it in. But I could still obliterate you. Sure, you’d pop up again a day later, but just think - I could show up and do it every day. Think of how much time you’d lose! And sick your Mum on me if you wish; I have friends who will happily obliterate you in my place. Ammit, Degei, Khshathra Vairya -”

“I get it. You could burn down my library and waste all my time. Now get to the point and stop destroying my books!”

“As a death god, as a thing tied into the very fabric of the universe, you have access to some specific things out of my reach. Like … eaters, for example …”

Osiris actually reared back, a sour look on his face as if he smelled something bad. “An eater? What do you want one of them for? Who are you trying to destroy?”

“No one. I just want you to help me bring back as much of Jean Grey as divinely possible, at least enough so that she can return to the Earth realm without ending the world.”

“Yeah, but … an eater … besides, how the hell do you think you can do that? This sounds like yet another exercise in futility.”

“Probably, but the great thing about being virtually immortal is you have lots of time to kill. Besides, I’m not askin’, Sy - I’m telling.”

His eyes narrowed to the size of tangerines. “I hate you.”

“And I hate you too, so we’re even. “

“Gonna give me my book back?”

“Get to work.”

He snarled a curse at him in a very old Aramaic, and then went back to the book on the spot lit plinth. He flipped a page or two, then asked, ”What the fuck am I looking for?”

“I need to get in touch with Eingana. I want you to find her for me.”

Sy’s jaw dropped, and that was a perfectly disturbing sight. “You’re insane. She’s in self-imposed exile!”

“I’ll bring a bundt cake. Everybody likes cake.”

“She’ll crush you, you stupid piece of shit.”

Bob rolled his shoulders, not quite a shrug, but close enough. “I’ll take my chances. Look at it this way - I die, you don’t have to worry about your library getting trashed.”

His eyes narrowed anew as he scrutinized him brutally. “Oh yeah? Knowing you, you told your “friends” to come after me if something happened to you.”

He gave him his best, insincere shit eating grin. “Would I do that?”

He glared at him a moment before looking away, muttering an even more obscene curse in Egyptian. “I don’t see why you want to do this anyways. Who cares?”

“Do I really need to tell you what happens when a Human gets god powers?” It was a rhetorical question, and Osiris didn’t respond. Bob didn’t bother to tell Sy he knew this was probably like bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon, but he had to try something before he gave up completely.

And before he had to enact what very well could be the “final solution”. At least the Powers would back him up if he had to take out that kind of god.

He headed off to New York, and didn’t know why. So many ghosts -Xia, Yasha, Leonie - were at Xavier’s waiting for him. But somewhere between Ontario and Maine, he realized that he was an idiot - his ghosts weren’t tied to a single place. They were with him, in him; he never went anywhere without them. As guilty as it sometimes made him feel, he sometimes wished they would leave him be, if only for a little while.

By the time he reached Xavier’s, the sun was down, and he wondered - for the millionth time - if he really wanted to be here. But the Organization thought he was in Canada; it was in his best interest to be elsewhere.

With a sigh, he parked his biked on the edge of the main drive, and walked up to the house, which seemed strangely imposing and gothic in the blue light of dusk. He felt even more like he didn’t belong here.

As soon as he opened the door, he was hit by a blast of noise - television, video games, kids talking over one another, overlapping - while the odor of many people in a confined space washed over him (somebody cleaned the windows today; they had also ordered pizza for dinner, and he idly wondered if there was any left. He hadn’t had anything to eat since that disappointing “maple candy” he munched at the gas station in Maine, waiting for his tank to fill). He walked in anyways, adjusting all the while (what couldn’t he adjust to, given time? Actually, he found the concept just a little frightening) and cast a glance over at the kids in the front room when someone exclaimed, “Wolverine.” Some of them jumped up or shifted position, as if afraid they’d be caught doing something they shouldn’t. Like he actually cared?

He did see a familiar face among a sea of female faces over by the Playstation 2. Logan gave Brendan a familiar nod, and he said, back, with strained casualness, “Logan.”

It wasn’t hard to guess why he seemed to hang out with the girls more often than not (unless he was hanging around with his boyfriend), and his fluctuating sexuality had nothing to do with it. Logan knew from his own experience - with a few obvious exceptions - women were much more accepting of men who were “different” than men were; there just wasn’t any macho bullshit to get in the way. It wasn’t sexist, it was just the way it was. Men kind of had to learn to play well with each other, and some never did. (He could probably nominate himself for that.) “How’s the leg?” Logan asked, and then, just to add to Brendan’s cool factor, added, “Been shot again lately?”

He blushed slightly, embarrassed at the mention of his injury (and if anyone cared to notice, his blush was oh so slightly greenish), and said, “No, I’m shot free. You?”

“Yeah. They couldn’t hit the broad side of an elephant’s ass,” he replied, causing some titters among the younger set. He then wandered into the main house, hearing people suddenly pepper Brendan with various questions, some related to him.

He was half way down the main hall, when he could smell exactly what was coming towards him from a cross corridor. Great.

“You,” the Boy Scout said with contempt, smelling faintly of axle grease and anti-freeze.

“What, no kiss?” Logan replied sarcastically, wondering what had gotten his panties in a bunch this time. Oh hell, did they need a reason to bunch?

Scott started towards him, and he added quickly, “Hey, I was kidding about the kiss.”

But Scott grabbed him hard by the collar of his jacket, and snarled, “Why didn’t you tell me Jean came back?”

Logan shoved him back violently, breaking his hold on his jacket and putting a lot more space between them. Scott staggered, but continued giving him his rigid jaw, pissy look. “She didn’t come back.”

“Fuck you,” Scott hissed, his voice dropping to a sudden, savage whisper. Didn’t want the little kiddies to hear him deploy the f bomb? “The Professor told me about Mexico.”

“Did he?” He suddenly felt monstrously annoyed, and knew he should have never come back here. Maybe he should have gone to L.A. - Angel would’ve let him crash on his couch. “Then you know, so leave me the fuck alone.”

“You should have told me. You knew -”

“That wasn’t Jean!” He insisted, almost but not quite yelling.

Scott went rigid, as if he was physically appalled. “How can you just lie like th-”

“You know what happened, huh? Do you know that she fucking killed everyone, and screwed their computer over? Huh?”

Muscles in Scott’s rigid jaw jumped beneath his skin like they were receiving electric shocks. “She wouldn’t do that.”

“And that’s my point, Scooter: she wouldn’t. Whatever showed up while I was flat out on that table wasn’t Jean anymore, not the one we knew.”

“But you saw her-”

“I didn’t see shit. I only saw her in my head, when the base’s resident telepath was mentally raping me.” The use of that term made Scott flinch, and he was glad. Did that remind him what it was like? Good. If that was the worse thing that had ever happened to him, he was damn lucky. “Jean walked in on the whole thing, and stopped it. When I came to, there was no sign of her, but everyone else was dead.”

Scott visibly paled and looked down at the floor, shaking his head very slightly. “No.”

“Yes. And you know what else? You want the details, bub? They weren’t all peaceful deaths, either. There was blood all -”

“Shut up!” He snapped, looking like he was about to get sick. “Jean wouldn’t do that!”

“Yeah, I know. Face it, Scott - she isn’t the Jean we know anymore. Not after what’s happened to her. She’s got enough power to wipe us both off the planet, and let’s face it, most things that powerful ain’t good.”

“She is not a thing.”

“No, she ain’t. But she ain’t exactly a Human anymore either. And you and I are just gonna have to get used to that fact.” He started walking away, done with this conversation and with Scott’s pointless lashing out, when Scott said, quietly but forcefully, “This is your fault.”

Logan paused and fixed him with the evil eye. Those were fighting words. “What?”

“You brought him here.”

‘Him’ could only be Bob. “I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep those parts of my life separate. But … hell, man, don’t you remember? He saved Xavier’s life if not ours too. We needed him then.”

“But he never left. Jean’s life was too high a price to pay for him.”

He really didn’t know how to answer that. “If Bob knew Camaxtli was going to betray him, he never would’ve gotten near him. Maybe you don’t believe that, but I do. He would have never let her be hurt.” Logan didn’t add “Because he knows I’d have killed him,” because it seemed unnecessary.

Scott shook his head more emphatically this time, and half heartedly made a gesture with his hand before letting it collapse to his side. He didn’t believe that, but he didn’t know what to think, or even say. “I wish we never met him,” he finally said, then added, as an afterthought, “Oh, the Professor wants to see you. He has something for you.”

“What d’ya mean he has something for me?”

“Angel sent you something while you were gone.”

That was curious. “What would he send me?”

But Scott started walking away, and made an airy, dismissive gesture. “Just some papers.”

Well, that was illuminating. Maybe he was suing him.

Scott paused, though, and said quietly, “I’m sorry about … your daughter. I -” he trailed off, not sure what else to say and clearly uncomfortable. After a pause that Logan didn’t deign to fill in, he just walked on.

Logan didn’t stop him. He felt an uncomfortable jolt of pain at the mention of Leonie, and really didn’t want her spoken of in that way, not to mention her personal tragedy used as something to get pity from Scott. Now he was all pissed off again.

Great - and on top of it, he had to go talk to Xavier. He wondered what wonderful new bit of shit he had for him.

Two Days Later-Portland,Oregon

The second time he tried, he made it in through the front doors of the blandly named “Chesterfield Assisted Living Facility”. Sometimes Logan was astounded at what a chickenshit he could be.

The place smelled strongly of chemicals, ammonia and bleach, Lysol and lemon, which couldn’t quite cover the undertone of human urine and decaying flesh that had probably soaked itself into the pores of the building. He had to shake his head to get past the overwhelming smells - and the brief bout of nausea that accompanied it - and then walked up to the front desk.

In spite of “assisted living”, really this was a combination nursing home and hospice; as far as he could tell, people came to Chesterfield to die. He supposed this place was enough to make it seem like the best option.

The floor was blond wood, the lobby of sofas and chair done up in neutral tones with some hint of cheerful pastels, but it still felt sterile to him, like the happy face just would stick onto the mask of your imminent demise.

He couldn’t do this; he was a fool to think he could do this. His heart was pounding so hard he was surprised the nurse behind the desk, with a crochet pink cardigan over a white uniform shirt, couldn’t hear it from where she was sitting.

She didn’t look up until he reached the face oak desk, shaped like a semi-circle, guarding her from the constant siege of mortality. “Can I help you, sir?” She asked, in a friendly enough voice, but there was a guarded look in her dark eyes. They probably didn’t get that many new faces around her, which made them instantly suspicious.

His mouth was so dry he had to clear his throat, and then he forced out the words, which threatened to lodge in his windpipe and choke him. “I’m here to see Julius Easton,” he said, suddenly aware of what it was like to feel faint.