14

Logan lived outside Tokyo, in an area that wasn't so much rural as primeval – it was like time travel. The forest was green and unspoiled, like Humans had never been here. The only signs of trespass were the roads and an occasional sign. Angel followed them to a large but still humble house that existed in a clearing amongst the trees, which continued sprawling out beyond the grounds. If he thought the birds were bad in Los Angeles, he had no idea – it sounded like he was in an aviary now.

He had just passed through the wrought iron gates and was on his way up the crushed gravel path towards the house when Logan stepped out from beneath the shade of a blossoming cherry tree. “You usually call first.” Now that Angel remembered his past life – er, no, the correct timeline – he remembered Logan used to have pretty prominent sideburns, and his hair was a little more rigid in shape. Now he was clean shaven and his hair was a bit softer around the edges, and his eyes seemed to have lost much of the intensity and wariness, as did his posture and the way he carried himself – he was no longer ready to fight at a milliseconds' notice, no longer haunted or hunted. He was a very handsome man, which was sort of a shame really.

Angel sighed, not sure how to start or what to say. So he just threw himself on the grenade. “I know, Logan. I know about Bob.”

Logan didn't look surprised, but he did look mildly disappointed. “The Powers, right? I thought they might get upset with me at some point.”

His blase reaction was so stunning he scoffed, although it was really only to keep from shouting at him. “You don't care about what you've done?”

“Made everyone's life better? Made the world better? No.”

Okay, he'd fallen asleep and woken up in bizarro world. “You killed Bob, and you made a deal with Yama. What's he getting out of this?”

“The satisfaction of keeping Bob in limbo.”

“Bullshit. No god comes that cheap.”

“You're underestimating how much he hates him.”

“And you're trusting a death god who started erasing the names from a book of the dead. Logan, you're smarter than that. None of this is like you. I think you're under the influence of something.”

He smirked sourly at that. “Like me? Like the violent, doomed, miserable man I was? Like you were? I wised up. I was tired of being a pawn in a game I didn't create and didn't want to play. We thought Bob was better than the rest of them, but he wasn't. He was a god, and we are nothing to them.”

“You killed him.”

“I put him in limbo. You know he'll be back.”

Angel just stared at him, shaking his head in disbelief. “We have to reverse this, Logan, we have to fix things. This is wrong.”

“It's a hell of a lot better, isn't it? Do you miss being a vampire?”

“It's a lie!”

“Which would you rather have – a beautiful lie or the ugly truth?”

He hadn't really expected this, but why hadn't he? If Logan had gone this far, did he expect him to just come to his senses and fold? He'd lived as a god for so many years – or had it been years? He honestly had no idea – it probably wasn't something he was going to give up. The Logan he thought he knew, then and now, didn't exist anymore. Maybe he'd never really existed in this reality. But when he came down to it, could he blame him? Logan had to be one of the most fucked over guys on planet Earth, screwed up and over by almost everyone who crossed his path. If he wanted to rewrite his own history ... who was going to blame him? “It's wrong. These wrong timestreams have a way of collapsing in on themselves.”

“Don't be so sure. Bob could play with time in ways neither you or I could imagine. Aren't you happy? You're Human now, Cordy's alive, Doyle, Wesley, Gunn, Keir. Even Cressida's alive out there somewhere. All our friends who died and didn't have to are getting a chance to live their lives. Do you really want to take that away from them?”

He just knew he was going to throw that at him, and he had no real response. Of course he was glad they were alive; their deaths were so horribly wrong. But he had thought of something – someone – he had no recollection of seeing or knowing. “What about Saddiq?”

Finally, a genuine reaction: Logan winced. “I couldn't save everybody.”

“All the Eden kids. They don't exist.”

“The program never existed. It was an abomination.”

“Saddiq wasn't. None of those kids were.”

“It couldn't be helped. I wasn't going to let them design kids as weapons. I saved who I could, Angel. I'm not perfect, I'm not even sure how much of these powers I've mastered. Maybe I can do something retroactively, fix something - “

“No! You need to stop. We need to figure out a way to get Bob back, or at least do an end run around Yama. Wesley thinks that - “

“Wesley?” he interrupted. “You told Wesley? He's not with you, is he?” But the way Logan was staring at him, the way he felt something twist in his mind, he knew Logan wasn't really asking, he was seeing for himself.

“You could ask, you know, not just mind fuck me.”

“Sorry. Habit. You've had magic used on you recently.”

“Yeah. Did you forget I'm still hunting demons in Los Angeles? And by the way, why the hell did you do that to me? You made me a Human, why not give me a peaceful life?” Okay, so now he was trying to distract him, but he couldn't have him see everything in his brain.

“You want to atone. I'm letting you.”

“Then why change me to a Human? Wasn't that what I was working towards?”

“Do you really want me to change you back to a vampire?”

“You're missing the point!”

“And you're hiding something from me. No matter. Once you forget, you'll tell me.”

Logan's eyes started to glow blue, and Angel's worst fear was confirmed: there was no reasoning with him. He was gone. “Logan, don't -”

And then he completely forgot what he was saying.

Wow. When Angel told them all of this, he didn't believe him. Logan, some kind of god killer/god avatar? Well, killer he might believe, but avatar was a weird thought. Still, he was a Chosen of the Gorgons, and how inexplicable was that?

Brendan stepped out on the gravel path, and Logan reacted in genuine surprise. He probably wasn't used to people sneaking up on him. “How did you -”

Bren held out the pendant hanging around his neck, and didn't bother to gesture to the bloody symbol drawn on his chest, just visible through the open neck of his shirt. It looked like three parallel lines branching out from one – Kier thought it looked like a tree branch – but it was, according to Wesley, a very sacred symbol, and in his blood brought the protection of the Gorgons right to him. It hurt a bit, but he'd had worse. “I've invoked the protection of the Gorgons. No other gods can have power over me, including, it seems, you.” He sighed wearily. “Jesus, Logan, of all people. I looked up to you.”

Logan looked at Angel, who seemed confused. “Huh? Bren, what's going on?”

“Go home,” Logan said, and with a dismissive wave of his hand, Angel popped out of existence. Bren kept a good distance away from Logan, although he wasn't sure why – he was assured that no god powers could be used upon him while he was invoking direct protection. “I was wondering what he was hiding. It was you. It was Wesley's idea, wasn't it?”

“He said the best way to fight a god was using another god.”

He chuckled, but it didn't seem nearly as warm as it should have. “That's true. Good old Wes. If he doesn't have the answer, he has a book that does.”

“You have to stop. Okay? I don't know who Bob is, I don't know who Saddiq is, but if you've changed the timeline, it's wrong.”

“You've been told that it's wrong.”

“Don't. Don't do this.”

“Kier would be dead, you know. Do you know what happens to him? He's made a vampire in a snuff film. He works as a bite club whore, catering to Humans who get their kink from being bitten by vamps. He is initially sent to seduce you and work his way into the good graces of Angel Investigations as a mole. I'll admit, he seems smarter and less shallow in his vampire incarnation, but being murdered is going to make you wiser. Ask me, I know.”

He was trying hard not to listen to him, but tears were clouding his eyes, and his resolve was weakening. Oh god, Kier was a vampire? And Wesley was dead, and Cordy, and Cressida, and Gunn ... no, they told him he might hear some awful things, but they had to save Logan from himself, and the world from Yama. He had to keep focused on the true end game. He shook his head and tried to blink the tears from his eyes. “What about Yama, Logan? I've read about him, he's -”

“Not the point. They were trying to trick you into doing this. They know with your Gorgon protection you're the only one who can really stand up to me, so they told you what they wanted you to hear.”

“They wouldn't do that.” Would they?

“Do you know who else is dead? Scott, Xavier, Jean ... Matthew, your ex-boyfriend.”

It felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. He was gasping for breath. “Wh-what? All of them?”

“So many bad things happened in that world. This is paradise compared to it.”

If that was true, it was. It was a world of death. So what if Logan did a deal with a death god to prevent it? But then he remember what he saw of Yama lore online, and almost shuddered. Even if only half of that stuff was true, it was too horrifying to contemplate. He shook his head firmly, grabbing on to his stone pendant like a lifeline. It was the size of a large pebble and a strange opalescent grey, like a special kind of granite. But Rags had told him it was actually a drop of Gorgon blood, and yet he was so drunk when he told him this he had no idea if he should believe him. Sometimes he wondered if it was just radioactive waste, because it was always weirdly warm. “Maybe so, but you can't deal with a death god. Or even just a god! Have the past few years taught you nothing? These fuckers screw us over first chance they get!”

He smirked in an incredibly unpleasant way, a way that Logan had never done. “Like the Gorgons have screwed over you?”

“That's not the same.”

“No? Have you ever even seen them? Did you ask to be their chosen? What do you get out of it? Just some markings that guarantee you will be hunted down by other demons and feared by others. Sounds like you've been screwed over to me.”

He couldn't help it, he sneered. This was a side of Logan he'd never seen – smug, arrogant, self-satisfied. Still hot in his loose black linen pants and tight white tank top, but all that made him was a great looking prick. “I'm not leaving until we solve this, Logan. By the way, Angel asked me to ask you something in case you made him forget before he could bring it up. Where's Marc? And Xander, and Matt, and Giles. He also said the Helga we know isn't the real Helga, whatever that means. So where is she?”

Finally a crack in his arrogant mask. He grimaced in embarrassment. “I haven't mastered inter-dimensional travel. I think they're in another dimension, but I can't find them. I will.”

“Haven't you figured it out? Yama must have them. Why I don't know, but he's obviously a vicious asshat, so we h -”

Bren felt a sharp, incredible pain in his back and chest, and he looked down to see a fist dripping blood sticking right out of the center of his sternum. He was wondering where that had come from and looked to see that Logan was staring at him in wide eyed horror.

Well, at least he could die knowing Logan hadn't killed him. But who had?

Now that was gonna bug him.

He was a god, he should have seen this coming. Why hadn't he?

Logan heard/felt an enormous electric hum in his head, and it seemed like he was suddenly blind and deaf. He wasn't, but everything his powers let him take for granted – being able to see everything down to the molecule, being able to hear thoughts and feel other peoples' (and things) feelings like they were just a breeze brushing past him – disappeared. It was almost instantaneous with the moment the man appeared behind Brendan and put his fist through his chest.

As he withdrew his fist from Brendan, he fell in a messy heap to the ground, and Logan could get a good look at the intruder. He was almost seven feet tall, sun bronzed (?) and muscular enough to make a gym bunny jealous, all emphasized by the fact that he was shirtless and only wearing jeans, his broad, muscular torso a mocking impossibility of statue like perfection. He was bald, with a perfectly dome shaped skull, and his eyes were perfectly black – no whites, no irises, no corneas - just liquid ink with lightning like pulses of thin, electrical gold veins in them. His smile was all alabaster white teeth, and was just as evil as a scowl.

“Yama,” Logan said, wondering where the hell his powers went.

“My ears were burning,” he said, his voice like a gong given speech. It made his eardrums hurt.

“You didn't have to kill him!”

“I kill anyone I want. Death god, remember? I take who I want when I want. And while it's been fun, Logan ... I'm kinda bored.”

Here it was. He wasn't an idiot, he knew Yama would probably try and betray him someday, but he'd been trying to concoct a contingency plan. The problem was, almost none of Bob's god friends would talk to him, and no one who would wanted to go against a death god of Yama's stature. “Was he right? Do you have them?”

Yama arched a single bronze eyebrow at him. “Have who? Living Humans are really starting to annoy the shit out of me. If I had them, they'd be dead. Much like this world will be, in five minutes. I'm gonna have so much fun keeping you as my bitch.”

“That wasn't the deal.”

“It's the deal now,” Yama said, and in the space of a blink Yama was right in front of him, and drove his fist straight through his chest with a wet, tearing sound. Logan thought he could actually feel his hand close around his heart. He grinned down at him, his eyes storm clouds, and reminded him, “Can't heal from a death god, meatbag.”

The worst part was, in spite of the wonderful life he'd had these last couple of years, an actual permanent death remained a great relief.