8

He seemed to be blind, lost completely in darkness, but there were glimpses of … something in the black surrounding him. Flashes of skin, subtle gem tones like fragments of a prism. But none of this was as vivid as what his other senses were telling him. He could smell her, feel the weight and warmth of her body against him, her skin like silk. He felt her breath against his face, and heard her voice, faint but growing stronger. “ … have to go?”

“I will in a minute,” he murmured in reply, holding her closer to him, burying his face in her neck. “I’d rather stay with you.”

Her lips felt cool against his forehead. “Slacker,” she teased. He could fell her fingertips on the back of his neck, stroking his skin.

Mariko. Her name was Mariko. She called him “my tiger” and refused to kill spiders; she usually caught them under cups and let them go outside. She preferred extremely sweet coffee to green tea, and she made him feel loved and wanted - Human. She made him feel like he was really a man, not just a freak. How had he ever forgotten her?

Things shifted, and suddenly he was walking down a long white hallway with lots of anonymous doors, and the strong, rank scent of illness and death choking the air, hiding beneath the sour, cloying smell of antiseptics. It wasn’t just a hospital, but the wing where the terminal patients came to die; it wasn’t just in the smell but in the general atmosphere in the place. It was as quiet as the grave to come, and funereal in its dark oppression.

He came to the door he wanted and pushed it open, revealing a small private room, lit only by the lights of monitors and a small reading lamp over the bed. There was a woman in it, so slender as to be swallowed by the snow white sheets; her scalp was perfectly bald and gleamed under the dim lights like marble. Her head lolled on the big white pillow, and she opened eyes that were hollow, sunken pits, so dark he couldn’t make them out. “So they sent you,” she said, her voice raspy and dry. He realized she was speaking French as an afterthought.

He sat heavily in a chair by her bedside, and scooted up close, so he could at least look her in the eye. She was so wasted away, so ravaged by illness, that he barely recognized her anymore, and the sickly sweet smell of cancer eating her away from the inside out was overpowering. “I’m so sorry Juliet.” He was speaking her language - it seemed like the least he could do.

“Why? I wish you’d come sooner. Only the cruel bastards at the Organization would keep me alive this long for no point at all.”

“They were hoping you could be saved.”

She snorted, or at least tried, but it was too weak, and sounded like she was clearing her throat. “Why? I don’t even have my powers anymore.” She held up one shaking hand, and supposedly tried to trigger her powers, but nothing happened. She let her hand fall limply to the bed. “I’m too weak. It’s pathetic.”

He grabbed her hand, held it in his, and was shocked by how cold it was. No woman whose power involved becoming a human flamethrower should have ever had ice cold hands. He could feel the small bones beneath her skin, which was as thin as parchment. “I’m sorry this occurred because of a mission I sent you on.”

“The Organization sent us all.”

“I was in charge.”

“No. You and Keogh were both in charge, and I can still remember you two arguing over who went into the base, and how far. He never went in, did he?”

“No. The bastard was too afraid of radiation poisoning. “ For good reason, clearly, but he didn’t want to give him points for being a coward with no qualms about sending others into peril while he wouldn’t go.

“You were burned pretty bad. I remember you spitting out teeth and losing skin in the chopper home.”

He shrugged, grimacing at the memory. Teeth really hurt when they grew back. “I could take it. I’ve been dosed with radiation before and survived.”

“A shame that’s not true for all of us.” She said it in a wistful way, not mean or vindictive, but it still made him feel incredibly guilty.

“Juli-”

“How are you going to do this?” she interrupted. Juliet was never much for sentiment; she was as tough as they came, and that’s what made her rapid decline to this so shocking. Illness humbled the strongest person.

Inexplicably, he felt tears coming to his eyes, even though he knew this was the most merciful thing he could do. He knew she was in a great deal of pain; he could smell the morphine in her i.v. drip, and yet her pain was great enough to leave her lucid and unaffected by such a heavy narcotic. “I … I have a dose of Toxin’s venom. I’m gonna inject it in your i.v. - it should kill you the instant it hits your bloodstream. You probably won’t feel it.”

She nodded, both agreeing and understanding. “Concentrated, her venom’s more toxic than ricin. A good choice.”

He blinked back tears, and absolutely hated himself. “I’m so sorry, Juliet. I don’t want to -”

“Stop with the apologies, Logan; I don’t want them,” she said, with a surprising amount of force. “You don’t need to convince me there’s a good man in there somewhere. We all know that, or you wouldn’t have been sent to do this.”

That took him by surprise, so much so that he forgot to wipe the tears from his eyes. “What?”

She sighed, and her looking was scolding. “They keep trying to burn it out of you, brainwash it out of you, but it always comes back. I don’t know why they refuse to get the hint that you won’t permanently conform to their needs. You’ve done it before, you can do it again.”

“Do what?”

“Escape. Go, Logan, before they decide you’re a lost cause. Consider it the last request of a dying woman.” After a brief pause, she demanded, “Are you going to kill me already or what? Do you know how long I’ve been waiting? Jesus, do I have to do it myself?”

He almost laughed, but couldn’t quite. “Unsentimental ‘til the end, huh?”

“Sentimentality is for the weak. And those with functioning bone marrow. Get a move on, before I push you over and get the needle myself.”

There was a reason Juliet was considered frightening, beyond the fact that she could light herself on fire and never actually feel it. For a woman of fire, she was always ice cold where it counted, and he was going to miss her. It didn’t seem fair that she had to die, but there really was no saving her now. He didn’t need to see a medical chart; the rotting smell had overtaken her normal smell, and he could scent the failure of her organs. She had a few days maybe, and all in complete agony.

He patted her hand once more before putting it down, and wiped the tears from his eyes as he took the preloaded hypodermic needle out of his pocket, and found the appropriate nodule in her i.v. tube where they injected medications. “Goodbye, Juliet,” he told her, as he plunged the tip in. “Rest in peace …”

Logan jolted awake, his healing factor still making his skin and eyes burn, and it took him a moment to figure out where he was. A night sky showed a hundred bright stars overhead, but it looked like he was viewing them through a veil of gauze. His eyes were still healing, but had enough that he could basically see. Sloane crouched down beside him, and asked, “You okay?”

“Yeah, I think -”

His answer was cut short by her hauling off and slapping him hard across the face. It stung if nothing else, and it was pretty shocking. “Hey! What was that for?!”

“For punchin’ me, jerk off,” she snapped, gesturing at the rather ugly bruise on her temple. But her frown disappeared as she looked around them, and he joined her.

He was laying in the dirt, just beyond a rather large pit, which was maybe a quarter mile across and twice as deep. It took him a moment, but he figured out that’s where the base used to be. It wasn’t obliterated; it was simply gone. By simple deduction, he figured out he was out where the fence used to be, but wasn’t anymore. How did he get here? Did Nova figure out how to teleport him out to relative safety?

“Holy shit,” he gasped, not really all that surprised. But he had a feeling that Sloane would expect him to be.

“I know. Nova went off, huh?”

“Nova went off.”

“Weird. The thing didn’t even explode. There was this … would it sound weird to say a very loud hum?”

“Not at all.”

“Okay then, a loud hum, and then a bright flash, and everything was gone. Weirdest damn thing I’ve ever seen. I thought it got you too, but then I found ya here. “ She gave him a slightly sardonic look. “Your luck again, I guess.”

“I’m a lucky man,” he agreed, his voice dripping with irony.

There was the noise of rotor blades, a helicopter rapidly approaching the scene, but he knew from the engine noise it was one of theirs - their back up far too late to do any good. (Not that they would have shown up on time. How upset were they going to be to know he was still alive?)

“They’re gonna hate our report,” she said ruefully, eying the hole in the ground where their objective used to be. He grunted an agreement, but didn’t otherwise respond.

He had finally figured it out. He didn’t know if Nova had somehow helped him or what, but he now knew what Phan had hit him with.

He had been afraid of something without realizing it, and Phan found it; his last act as a living person was to curse him with it.

The truth; he was afraid of the truth. And now that he knew it, there was no going back, no going on as he had been.

But how on Earth did he get himself out of this without killing the few friends he had?

9

There was a greasy spoon in Washington D.C. called Roman’s Grill, where the diner looked old fashioned and slightly questionable, with red vinyl booths and chromed napkin holders, a Formica counter and black vinyl swivel stools that had seen better years. It was open very late, until three in the morning, so the clientele could get questionable as the night wore on, and the night cook had a tendency to listen to a station that specialized in old R&B hits, on a radio that was tinny but still could achieve an impressive volume. The place generally smelled of hamburger grease and burnt toast no matter what time it was. And he was terribly fond of it, and ate there whenever he could. Yes, it was in a bad neighborhood, and as a white guy he had a tendency to stand out among most of the customers, but they knew him there and tolerated him - the head waitress, Rosa, would even jokingly flirt with him - and he knew that no one else from the Organization would risk coming here! , because there’s no way they wouldn’t feel conspicuous. It was Logan’s variation on hiding in plain sight.

He had finished his first barbeque sandwich - a “specialty” of the house - and since he wasn’t sure when he would eat again, he ordered up what they called a “late night scramble”: basically scrambled eggs with everything but the kitchen sink tossed into it. It often looked like scrapings from the garbage can, but it tasted great.

Finally Xia came in as the cook turned up the Earth, Wind, and Fire, and she made a face at the cigarette smoke. Most places didn’t allow smoking indoors anymore, but at Roman’s, no one cared if you lit up or not. Sometimes it covered up the burned meat smell, so he didn’t mind so much.

Xia was the loose end he couldn’t quite reconcile. She was just a kid still, and he felt responsible for her. He did remember saving her from that “mutant training facility” in China; she was an emaciated waif, exceedingly pale from being kept in the dark for so long (her power fed off UV rays), shaking so much it seemed like she might break into a million pieces. It turned his stomach how they could mistreat a young girl, made infinitely worse by the fact that he was ordered to leave her behind, because Stryker figured she was too frail and ill to be of any use to them. He disobeyed the order, and now every day it must have grated on Stryker to see her, because that sickly girl turned out to have a valuable and enviable power. He had vague recollections of training her, teaching her English, and he thought of her as a sort of daughter, although … something weird had happened to them, hadn’t it? He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there had been some sort of shift in th! eir relationship. She avoided him a lot, so he couldn’t get her to talk about it, although she still felt some tie to him - why else did she call him when she was upset or in trouble?

That’s why he knew, when he secretly slipped the note into her coat pocket, telling her to meet him here at eleven thirty, she would come.

She slid into the booth seat across from him, pulling her green corduroy coat around her as if she was cold. She was twenty two now, but she looked barely seventeen; it was heartbreaking, and some instinct in him still wanted to protect her, even though he knew she could take care of herself better than he could. She had an impenetrable force field; he just had claws and a healing factor that wasn’t ready to let him die.

He was going to a base called Alkali Lake tomorrow, for what Control called “counterintelligence training” - did he need more? Stryker had been giving him a look he didn’t trust, and Logan suspected that wasn’t what was really going to go down at Alkali Lake, but that was okay. He was going, because it was Canada, Alberta as a point of fact, and he knew he could get lost there so easily. It was winter, for fuck’s sake; all he had to do was get to the higher elevations, and they’d be hard pressed to follow him. It would be a perfect and ironic place for him to finally disappear, to shrug off the yoke of the Organization once and for all.

And Xia, surprisingly, was his guilt. He would be leaving her alone with those people, and ever since he’d rescued her, he’d been a fixture in her life, and vice versa. She was an adult now, and she could take care of herself; she was a valuable operative who didn’t like to make waves, making her extra special. The Organization saved her from an awful fate in China, and she didn’t forget that; they depended on her being grateful, and she never failed to oblige them. But if he was going to abandon her to them, she deserved an explanation.

So he told her, “After I check out Alkali Lake, I’m goin’,”

She looked startled, as he expected. “Going? Going where?”

He shrugged, and did a surreptitious scan of the room. “I don’t know,” he replied, in perfect Cantonese. It was doubtful anyone here could speak Chinese. “But … they took my mind, you see? I’ve been trying to find out who I am, but … I think they’re starting to suspect something. Maybe I said too much to Sloane, I don’t know, but I’m starting to feel the noose tighten, you know? I have to get out while I still can.”

“They took your mind?”

“They took everything, my whole life,” he said, with a breathless laugh. He ran a hand through his hair, and she seemed to realized he was distraught; he could see the surprise in her dark eyes. “I thought I could make them … I thought I could find a way to get it back. But I don’t know who I am, Xi. I always wake up thinking I’m some place other than I am, and sometimes I scare myself when I look in a mirror, ‘cause I don’t recognize myself. I … I can’t do this anymore; I can’t pretend to be what they want me to be.”

“What … why are you telling me this?”

“Because I want you to come with me.” He reached across cigarette burned table and put his hand over hers, an avuncular gesture as opposed to a romantic one. “You remind me of someone.” And that was true, although he wasn’t perfectly certain who. It wasn’t Mariko … but he didn’t know who it was. Just another frustrating fragment of memory.

She seemed constantly shocked; her eyes were almost comically wide, and he could feel her pulse in her wrist, thumping almost in time with the bass line. “Who?”

“I don’t know. But sometimes I look at you, and I think I knew … I knew someone like you, once, a long time ago. And I brought you into this, Xia; I should help you get out.”

For a long time she stared at him, her eyes filling with tears, and finally she looked down at the table, grimacing as if in pain. “I can’t. I don’t want to go out there, into the world.”

He squeezed her hand reassuringly. Her whole life had been spent in a Chinese mutant prison, and then the Organization. She‘d never been out there on her own, and he couldn‘t imagine how scary the prospect must have been to her. To him, it sounded like an overdue taste of real freedom. “I’ll take care of you,” he whispered, reverting to English. He meant it too. She was like his daughter, and he would look after her. God help the organization if they tried to hurt her, because almost nothing else could.

She shook her head violently, not looking at him, and he knew she was trying hard not to cry in front of him. She slipped her hand from beneath his and climbed to her feet, still never looking at him. “I won’t come after you,” she said, her voice cracking under the strain of holding in the tears. “I’ll never find you.” She quickly ran out of the diner, and although his first impulse was to run after her, he made himself stay where he was.

She was a good kid; she wouldn’t tell anyone of his plans. He felt a twinge of guilt over not telling Sloane - there was no getting around the affection he had for her - but he knew it really wasn’t in his best interest to tell her his plans. He finally remembered who her boyfriend was: Control, or as she called him, “Paul”. Sloane did like him too, he knew that, but if it came down between him and Control, he would probably lose. It wasn’t a theory he was going to test. It was possible he’d been a fool to trust her as much as he had all along.

He knew what he had to do now. He would pretend to be what they wanted, he would be Stryker’s dog, until they got up to Alkali Lake, and then he would let go. It was a strange and troubling revelation, but a valuable one, and in retrospect, painfully obvious.

He was insane.

Functionally, anyways. He was fighting himself constantly to seem somewhat normal, to keep a tight reign on his frightening and overwhelming temper and bridge the gaps in his shattered and incomplete mind, but now he was asking himself why.

They wanted him that way. An indiscriminate killing machine, not lucid enough to care about the people he was hurting or why. So why hang on? He would let him go at Alkali Lake, let them have what they wanted, and hope it made them happy … for however long they survived. The flaw in their logic - if you could call it logic - was that it was impossible to control the insane. He knew as soon as he unleashed the beast, it would take down anything between it and freedom. Commands wouldn’t work, and telepathy often didn’t work on the fractured minds of the insane. They could have what they always wanted, and they could choke on it.

The problem here was he had no idea if he’d ever come back. He wasn’t just looking into the abyss of psyche, he was diving in head first, and he had no idea if he’d ever hit bottom. He could be a raving lunatic for the rest of his life. But he had no choice; he could only depend on himself to extricate himself from this lose - lose situation; it was just a damn shame that the part of himself he was trusting to take care of this was something they built, a slavering Mr. Hyde to his Doctor Jekyll. But he healed from everything eventually, right? He had to believe that his healing factor could even heal a fractured mind eventually, given time. ‘Beware what you wish for’ was a cliché for a very good reason.

He stared out the window, as grimy as it was, and watched the cars driving by on the street. Why would Mirage and Nova, two mutants he killed (well, perhaps not in Nova’s case, but he didn’t help it at all), help him? He figured it really wasn’t a case of them helping him more than it was a case of them getting posthumous revenge on the Organization by robbing them of one of their top level soldiers. But Juliet’s words came back to haunt him. Was he a good man? Had he ever been a good man? He honestly didn’t know.

But he wanted a chance to find out.

The first thing he heard was music.

Loud and raucous, strangely intense and tuneful heavy metal in close up, with a familiar sounding singer. Tool? Yes, it was Tool. But there was someone else singing along. “Staring down the hole again, hands upon my back again,” Bob shouted along with singer. “Survival is my only friend, terrified of what may come ..”

“Do you ever just shut the fuck up?” he groused, opening his eyes and trying hard to remember where he was. The steel ceiling and wall seemed to suggest he was in the medical bay under the mansion. How had he ended up here?

He sat up, scowling, only to find Bob sitting on the edge of a counter, dressed in black leather pants and a Surf Coasters t-shirt, giving him a big shit eating grin. His scruffy brownish blond hair was almost shoulder length now, making him look like a slumming rock star. “I knew if I started singin’ along, it’d get you up. Welcome back to the world of the conscious, sleepin’ beauty. I bet you gotta pee like a racehorse.”

He sat on the edge of his gurney, letting the blanket covering him fall to the floor. How had he ended up here? It took a moment, but he finally remembered: Alkali Lake, Rogue, Saddiq. “Oh shit. Did -”

Bob didn’t even let him finish. “Fine and dandy. Your suicidal squeeze play worked beautifully, and you guys have taught these kids well. They can take care of themselves and run a rescue party. Xavier was impressed, after he stopped bein’ pissed off.”

He dry washed his face, feeling pretty good in spite of the fact that Rogue had just about drained him dry. Of course, did he have any idea how long ago that was? “Did you give me that?” he wondered, referring to his disorienting trip into the past. Could he trust it? Bob could have made something up - he was capable of anything.

“What? The Tool CD? No, that’s mine, go buy your own.”

He glowered at him, which Bob met with his usual aggressive cheerfulness. He wasn’t going to tell him, but Logan felt it was pretty clear - Bob had dredged up a memory for him, or had created one, using the elements he could find. The Powers weren’t the only ones with that kind of power. He really didn’t know if he should be grateful or angry. “Is that why you’re here? To get me up?” He slid down to the floor, which was cool against the soles of his feet, and realized he did indeed have to take a monster piss, but he wasn’t about to admit that.

“And get rid of Saddiq’s implant, yeah, but I had my own ulterior motive for coming here.”

“Don’t you always?”

Bob’s smile quirked into a smirk, his neon cobalt eyes sparkling. “Well, yeah, but at least I’m admittin’ it this time.”

He leaned against the edge of the table, weary but still feeling surprisingly rested. Maybe he needed to have a quality near death experience every now and again. Or maybe just a memory that felt solid somehow, not like the remnant of some colossal psychic cluster fuck. “What do you want, Bob?”

“Personally? Nothing. Oh, except you won’t remember meetin’ Angel as a Human in Dublin; you’ll just have a vague recollection of Mordred actin’ like an asshole. Okay mate?”

“Huh?” What did he just say? He couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it …

“Great. I’m here on behalf of someone who’s in trouble and needs your help.”

He glared at him. “What the hell am I, a Saint Bernard? You’re the god, you help them!”

He turned away, headed for the bathroom, when Bob said something that made him freeze.  “It’s Angel - he’s back.  And he needs your help.”

Oh fuck.  It was always something, wasn’t it?

To Be Continued ….