Disclaimer : I own none of the following. This is based on just having seen X-Men Origins : Wolverine. Vixen belongs to me. All other characters belong to Marvel.
Author's Note : This is set towards the end of our timeline. Spoilers for X-Men Origins : Wolverine!!!
Drinking to Remember
Logan was drunk. Vixen smelt him the moment he set foot at the bottom of the drive, thanks to the wind blowing in the right direction. His footsteps were slightly uneven, she knew he was truly steaming drunk from this. Logan held his liquor well, and it took a lot to make him unsteady on his feet. Stood on the steps outside the front door, arms folded against the cold, her sharp eyes watched him walk up the driveway. She was waiting for her husband, as she had waited for him for so many nights these last few months. Vixen knew why he did it. His nightmares, which had for so many years been few and far between, had once more returned to haunt him after a final run in with Sabretooth.
Sabretooth bounded across the short distance between them, claws flexed and ready to kill. For all the world a massive cat, Sabretooth snarled as he bunched all his muscles and launched himself at Wolverine. His attack was cut off in mid-air as a huge Siberian tiger head-butted him, shoving him to one side. Vixen landed awkwardly, rolling her great, orange and black striped body away from Sabretooth, but she wasn't quick enough to escape the stab of claws that pierced her near back leg. She roared her protest, glancing back to see Sabretooth hanging on to her. Another roar cut through the air as Wolverine launched into the fray, the claws on his left hand punching through Sabretooth's rib cage, the right hand ones stopping just short of piercing the feral man's jugular.
"Go ahead." The great cat-like mutant rasped; his eyes cold. "Put an end to it, Wolverine. Finish it at last."
Wolverine was breathing heavily, each breath snarling a warning for Sabretooth to release Vixen's leg. The feral mutant did so, slowly, careful not to raise Logan's anger yet. Vixen limped a short distance away, watching Wolverine and Sabretooth closely. Contented that Wolverine was in no immediate danger, she paused to lick the wounds Sabretooth had caused. Further away from this private battle, her sharp hearing caught the cat-calls of the younger X-Men as they drove the rest of the Brotherhood away. She could stay and watch over her man without fear for the others.
"She's worth having." Sabretooth chuckled, a glance and a leer spared for the Vixen. He made a further lewd comment that served to rile Logan up all the more. Sabretooth only laughed harder. "After all these years, Logan, we're still the same."
"I'm nothin' like you."
"You're still an animal, Wolverine... But I'm guessing that's how she likes it... Am I right?"
"Shut up."
"She does, huh?" Sabretooth caught his breath as Wolverine's claw nicked his throat. He laughed throatily.
"Don't push me, Bub, I mean it."
"Is she worth killing for, Wolverine? Worth dying for?"
With a suddenness that caught Wolverine by surprise, Sabretooth pushed Logan off him, something between a groan and a roar escaping him as Wolverine's claws were yanked out of his chest. But instead of diving after Logan, Sabretooth made a dive for Vixen's tiger form, driving his claws deep into her chest and neck. Vixen cried out in pain, curling up her rear legs enough to scrape her own claws down the full length of Sabretooth's torso. Before Logan could even react, she had thrown Sabretooth off, and leapt after him, her teeth sinking into the feral man's neck as she worried him easily, as if he was nothing more than a rag doll. She shook him for several moments, tasting blood and revelling in it, consumed by bloodlust for her attacker. Paralysed by her grip, Sabretooth could only respond by driving his claws into her softer underbelly, but Vixen barely felt it, such was her anger.
It was a touch from Logan that drew her away. She dropped her prey, surprised by the gentleness of his touch. Sabretooth lay still, blood bubbling at his throat. He laughed at the caring frown on Logan's face as he watched his partner draw away. His attention was drawn back to their enemy as he tried to speak. "At last, I think it ends." He took a deep, shuddering breath. "After all... these... years. Remember... me... brother..."
Vixen ran a tongue about her teeth, grimacing at the memory of the taste of Sabretooth's blood. Logan had slept badly that night, confused by Sabretooth's declaration that they were brothers. Without his complete memories, Logan was unsure as to whether the meaning had been literal or an earlier connection to the comment that they were two of the same... animals at heart. And when he had, at last, fallen into a deep sleep, his old nightmares about his time at Alkali Lake had returned to haunt him. Daring to encroach on those dreams as a method of soothing her husband's torment, Vixen had managed to turn him away from the tank and the terrible pain associated with the bonding of adimantium to his skeleton, only to have him dreaming about a woman's body, lying on the sparse, rocky ground, dead eyes staring at him.
She shook her head to herself as Logan approached. He reached out to her, as he always did when he came home drunk, and as she always did, she turned away from him to open the door. It was not rejection, merely a wish to get him inside and out of the cold and into bed where he could sleep off his drunkenness. She hooked an arm about his waist, supporting him both physically and mentally as they made their way up to their room. She kept watch over him and his dreams, fearful that he would once again be tormented by his old nightmares, but tonight he slept like the dead, snoring heavily. She sighed to herself, glad she had decided to keep watch rather than rest herself. She was surprised that the rest of the mansion could sleep with that racket going on.
Logan woke alone, his head heavy and muffled. He knew from the height of the Sun in the sky that it was late, Vixen would have already spent time with her individual protégées as well as having run a Danger Room simulation with Gambit, which would have been overseen by the ageing Beast. She'd be cross that he'd missed it, he was sure, and now she would be teaching science to the younger students. He also knew that her afternoon schedule was free, and he was hoping that she would spend that time helping him with something he'd been thinking over the day before.
"What's on your mind?" Her question was as direct as ever, spoken after a brief but passionate greeting at the end of her science class, much to the amusement of the departing students. She gathered up her notes and placed them in the drawer before taking Logan's large hand in hers. He sighed, unsure where to begin. He frowned at her, and she nodded. "Let's go somewhere quiet."
They ended up out in the gazebo, far from the house, a six-pack of beer beside them. They drank a bottle each in silence as he allowed her access to his confused thoughts. "You really want me to do that?" Ilehana asked aloud, somehow shocked. "You want me to try to access your lost memories?"
"Yes," He answered softly. "I need to know. I need to know who the woman in my nightmares is. I need to know if Sabretooth is really my brother... I need to know, Ilehana."
"Alright." She sighed. "But both my father and Jean tried this, Logan. What makes you think I will be any more successful?"
"You're the Guardian of Guardians, Vix, you have more power than they did put together." He grinned cheekily. "You're my Guardian."
"Logan, if I didn't know you better, I'd think you were getting soft in your old age." She laughed softly at him. Her face straightened. "Alright, but if we're gonna do this, I need another drink."
He nodded his agreement, producing a claw and flicking the top of two bottles. He said nothing as she settled back against the pillar next to her. She was relaxed, eyes close, and Logan knew she was preparing herself for the ordeal of delving into someone's mind. It was not something she enjoyed doing, even with it being someone so close to her. She could have been meditating, such was her stillness, except for the fact that her hand raised the beer bottle to her lips every minute or so as she took deep draughts of beer. Eventually, she sighed. "If you're determined, Logan..." She paused, her gaze locking with his as she opened her eyes. She knew simply from his adimantium gaze that he was. "Let's do this."
He felt her mind enter his. She drifted through his memories as lightly as she could, smiling with him at the good times, frowning at the not so good. He watched a tear roll down her cheek as she found a memory of her father's death. Radiant light lit up her face as she felt the glory of what it was to be the Guardian of Metal... His emotions echoed on her face so accurately that Logan had to close his eyes. He tried to direct her further back, to the tragedy of Jean's death at Alkali Lake, to Magneto's kidnap of Rogue and the terror of the fight at the top of the Statue of Liberty, beyond that to years of wandering alone, only to come across his very first memory... The memory of the strange woman's body lying dead in the dust and gravel; that feeling of having known her but not being able to identify her. The memory of someone standing over him and trying to persuade him to leave, the sound of sirens...
**The woman, Logan, who is she?**
**I don't know.** He growled the thought. They'd been over this a hundred times.
**Focus on her. When you see her, what do you see?**
**A dead woman.**
**Deeper, Logan.** Vixen's mind voice was amused at his deadpan answer. **Alright, what do you smell, hear, taste?**
**Blood.** This was a more serious answer from Wolverine. **Blood, and grass.**
**Grass? Good.**
**And Sabretooth.**
Vixen frowned at that, both physically and in his mind's eye. What association did Sabretooth and grass have to the woman? She asked Logan to continue concentrating on those thoughts, then asked him for sounds. Birds, he answered, and chainsaws in the distance. Vixen frowned again as she tiptoed about a memory that Logan had had hidden from him for so long. A memory of holding the woman, wounded by Sabretooth, roaring his hurt and terrible rage at the sky.
Revealing that memory caused Logan to gasp and force Vixen from his mind. He still didn't know who she was, but he knew that she had been his world... The one thing that had kept him human when he would have become the animal... The one reason he had stopped running... Gasping, Logan opened his eyes, feeling all the anger, hurt and pain ripping through him as if it was yesterday. He stood up and stalked away from the gazebo, blinded by the bloodlust that was known to capture him but this time without knowing why.
Stunned by Logan's sudden rejection, Ilehana sat back and took another bottle of beer out of the crate. Her head hurt more than her heart, enough to make her close her eyes against the pain. In the absence of Logan's convenient claws, she used a key to flick the lid off the bottle and drank half in one go. His memory was burned into her own mind, but where Logan saw it clearly, as if it were reality, Ilehana saw it as if through a mist, the edges fuzzy and cold as stone. This alone caused her some confusion. She, too, longed to know who this woman was that had captured Logan's heart first, and why Sabretooth had killed her... More than that, if the woman had died in a forest, and Logan had found her there, how did her body end up on a stretch of gravel and stone by a lake, with Logan having no memory of her?
Vixen sighed heavily, drinking the rest of her beer and opening the last. Perhaps now she knew why his nightmares drove Logan to drink. For half an hour, she sat and drank that last bottle slowly, nursing her headache and the bruise of Logan walking away. After that, she Changed into her favourite wolf form and ran about the vast grounds of the mansion simply to clear her head. When she returned to her office, she had the answer.
"Logan..." She had Changed back into her human form and tracked Logan down to the Danger Room. He was sat on a great hunk of holographic metal, chaos strewn all around him, a cigar hanging out of his mouth unlit. He was staring into space, and barely acknowledge her arrival. "Logan, that memory of the forest... of Sabretooth killing that woman... it never happened."
"Never happened?" He grunted, words slightly obscured by the cigar in his mouth, barely glancing at her.
"What you see clearly, I see... as if through a mist. It's hollow... without substance. A telepath, or someone similar, implanted that in your memory."
"And..." He took the cigar out of his mouth, placed it gently on the metal beside him. He smiled as she put a crate of beer on the floor beside him.
"The second memory, on the shore of the lake, is real. She died there for real." Vixen sighed, placing a hand on her husband's shoulder. "I'm sorry."
"I had to ask." He touched her hand gently, which she took as a request to rest her hand in his. She hunkered down beside him, her emotional support as silent as ever. He looked down at her hand, running a thumb carefully over the simple gold band that was her wedding ring. Unlike most women, she wore no engagement ring or eternity ring. Their engagement had been long and unspoken, and both knew they would be together forever. They had been through too much, loved each other too long, to do otherwise. Even when the Ancients had taken Vixen's human life at the birth of the Guardians of Destiny, turning her into a wolf when Logan had believed her dead, he had never stopped loving her. Vixen, in turn, had been unable to keep her word to the Ancients and had watched over her lover and the rest of the X-Men; rarely at first, and then finally a constant vigil that had returned her to the X-Men. After a while, he raised his eyes to meet her gaze. "Sabretooth was telling the truth wasn't he? He was my brother."
"I'm sorry, Logan."
"Don't be." Logan knew she was regretting killing the feral mutant, fearing that he would be angry. "He may have been my brother, but I get the feeling he's been more beast than man for a long time. Maybe he was right, maybe we were more the same than I realised."
"We've had this discussion before Logan." Ilehana stood and drew her husband to his feet. She put her free hand to the back of his neck and kissed him soundly but briefly. "I love you, Logan. I love Logan the man, and Wolverine the animal. They are one in the same, and I am glad of it, as has every one of the X-Men – past and present – been from time to time." She kissed him again, and felt him respond briefly. She knew, even without reading his thoughts, that he was not convinced. He drew away, giving her an apologetic glance. She smiled her reassurance and patted his shoulder as she walked past him on her way out of the Danger Room.
She paused at the doorway and glanced back at him. He had sunk back down into a sitting position, picked up his cigar and lit it. He pulled a bottle of beer out of the box and flicked off the lid with a partially extended claw. He drank deeply, and then glanced over his shoulder. She sighed even as she smiled indulgently at him. "You don't even have to ask, Logan. When you're ready, we'll try again." And with that, she left him alone, musing over old memories he could not remember, drinking not to forget, but to remember.
Author's Note : Two things about this annoy me. One is that Vixen suddenly decided that she and Logan should be married... Hell, I'll run with that, poor Vixen's been through enough in her existence to demand the odd nicety from me. The other is the complete lack of plot. And results. Meh. I saw X-Men Origins : Wolverine the other day and am completely hooked. I figured it was about time poor Logan got his memories back. If people like, I will try to continue but for now, this lack-of-plot bunny is satisfied.