Disclaimer: Nope, don't own the X-Men in any way, shape or form.
Prologue 1: Dreams"You running again?"
-Rogue, X-Men
"If you knew anything about your past, what kind of person you were…You were an animal then, you're an animal now. I just gave you claws."
-General Stryker, X2
Fifteen years ago
Logan Brantford contemplated his empty bottle. He'd already had a lot of beer tonight, but clearly it wasn't enough. Not if he was still obsessing over this. Hell, not if he was still thinking at all. He waved the bartender over for another.
The bartender looked him over skeptically. "Haven't you had enough, buddy?" he asked.
Logan sighed. "Just give me another one, okay?" he said. The bartender shrugged and brought Logan a fresh beer, which he set to work on. If he was going to go through with this, he was going to need all the courage he could get.
If. Still if. He still wasn't sure why he'd signed up for this damn thing in the first place. It sounded crazier the more he thought about it. Some kind of supersoldier experiment. What the hell had he been thinking?
Come to think of it, he wasn't too sure about those people he'd talked to, either—that Stryker guy. He'd been racking his brains and couldn't figure out how they could have found him. He thought he'd covered his tracks pretty well the last time. Apparently he hadn't, though. And to think that he always used to be the one who nobody paid any attention to. Not his classmates, his teachers, not girls. He was never even enough of a threat to get picked on by anybody. He'd figured getting onto that junior hockey team was about the best thing that would ever happen to him. How was he supposed to know that his knee injury in that game against Calgary would heal completely in just a couple of hours?
It had been as much of a shock to him as it had been to anyone else, and it had been even more of a shock when he showed up for practice the next day and the coach pulled him aside and told him that they wouldn't be needing him anymore. And here he would've thought having a player who couldn't be injured was a good thing. But apparently there were rules, and he would no longer be needed on the team. The details didn't matter. He just left, like everyone seemed to want him to, and didn't look back.
He'd left without really knowing what he was going to do, and it showed. He drifted for years, sometimes leaving for no reason at all. Most of the time he didn't have so much choice in the matter. Something would happen—something always happened. There was that mine out in Saskatchewan, the one where he dug out the five-foot cave-in by himself in barely an hour. And to think that in the Soviet Union he would have been a hero. Not here. First the whispers started, like always. Then the funny looks, and then he was told they didn't need him anymore. He could take a hint. He always could. Most of the time he didn't need to be asked; he could tell where he wasn't welcome.
Logan got tired of it after a while, always moving, going so far east that he had to learn French and then back again. But he could never stay. Eventually he'd joined the army, figuring they take anyone. He'd even managed to get past the physical exam. But eventually even they didn't want him. Not even the army would take a freak. Their loss, he kept telling himself. Fortunately his severance pay had held out a while, and then he'd met this Stryker guy.
Stryker. Not really a subtle name, but that was okay. Logan had had enough of subtle people. After all, he wasn't too subtle himself. What he wondered was, could this guy really help him? Logan still wasn't too clear on just what this experiment would be, and that was starting to bother him. They'd said something about "physical enhancements". He'd figured that meant some kind of further genetic enhancements, maybe drugs or something. Well, it didn't really matter. He'd take whatever he could get. What did he have to lose? He was already a freak. He could take being eve more of a freak if it meant nobody would mess with him, if he could fight back.
So here he was, waiting for them to pick him up—Stryker hadn't really been clear on who would show up, either, come to think of it—and getting as drunk as he could, trying not to think about what he had gotten himself into.
He'd made it through a full six-pack of Molson before they came. He could tell as soon as they walked in the door. It had to be them. Who else would wear camouflage into a bar? Sure enough, they nodded to him, and he shoved some money at the bartender and got up to follow them. He was annoyed when they grabbed him and shoved him into the truck outside. Wasn't he coming voluntarily? Ingrates. He glared at them as he slumped in the back, rubbing at his wrists, pretending they'd hurt him.
He didn't know where they took him, but it was a long way from Edmonton. His muscles were stiff by the time they hustled him out of the truck in the middle of the night, down a metal tunnel into some kind of control room. He looked around at all the computer displays. Something about temperature—what the hell was that for? Then he heard someone walk into the room behind him, and turned to see General Stryker. Good. Maybe now he'd figure out what was going on.
Stryker just stood there with a smile on his face, like Logan had brought him a present. It made him uncomfortable. "What happens now?" he asked.
Stryker kept smiling at him in that creepy way. "Don't worry," he said. "It's all ready. Everything should go fine."
Logan wasn't reassured. "That's not an answer."
Stryker smiled at him. "Did I promise you any answers?"
This was making Logan's head hurt already. "Look, just tell me what's going on here," he snapped.
Stryker shook his head. "That would ruin the surprise now, wouldn't it?" he said.
Logan had expected this kind of thing. He'd dealt with this sort of people before. But that didn't mean he had to like it. "What kind of operation is this?" he asked, not really expecting an answer.
"Come on, Logan, it's time to get you ready," Stryker told him in response, and one of the army goons standing around grabbed him and led him in that ever-so-subtle way out of the room and deeper into the complex.
These were areas that Logan had never been in before. Here, as opposed to the meeting room he'd been taken to the other times, there was nothing but iron and concrete and wiring. He supposed that they must be out by the dam operation area, but he couldn't tell. The halls were lined with doors every hundred feet or so, as far as he could figure. They were all iron, heavy looking, with latches like prison doors.
He was pretty sure he could figure out his way back through the maze of hallways for a while, but eventually he wasn't so sure. Everything started to blur together. He wasn't even sure how much time had passed. Then the guards stopped and opened one of the iron doors. "We're here," one of them grunted.
Logan stepped inside. It was like a cavern, with more cement, pipes, and some kind of equipment. It almost looked medical, but not quite. Logan had seen enough medical equipment in his life to know. And there, next to that—tank—was a container of some kind of bubbling silver liquid. No, not bubbling—boiling. Shit, what had he gotten himself into?
"We'll need to start with a few tests, of course. Nothing much, just some x-rays, that sort of thing."
Logan's head snapped around to see the doctor standing in the corner. X-rays and medical tests. Well, that was about what he'd expected. Fair enough. It was just that he couldn't take his eyes off of that bubbling liquid.
There were some standard tests—x-rays, various MRIs and CAT scans, blood pressure and pulse. He even did the running-on-a-treadmill-with-electrodes thing. Apparently everything was going well, because the doctor just kept nodding and writing things down, with a little smile almost as creepy as Stryker's.
Then came the inevitable. Logan had just gotten off the treadmill and was wiping off sweat and that conductive goo they'd smeared on for the electrodes when the still-unnamed doctor walked up to him and said what Logan had been half-dreading the whole time—"That's very good. Next we need to check on your abilities."
"My abilities?" Logan asked, trying to stall.
"Yes. We need to do a few small tests on the extent of your healing abilities."
He'd expected this, but it still didn't sound good. Logan just nodded and sat in the chair the doctor led him to. The idea sounded even worse when he saw the doctor pull out a straight razor and a hammer. It'll only hurt for a little bit, he told himself. Just for a minute. It'll sting, that's all. Then his shoulder exploded.
He stood up and grabbed at the doctor, yelling, "Listen, buddy, what the hell you think you're doing?"
The doctor just laughed. "It should be almost healed already, right? Just some soft tissue damage." He was right, of course, but that didn't make Logan feel any better. Mentally, at least.
Next the doctor cut Logan's forearm to see how fast the cut would heal. This time he grinned at the results. Logan wasn't sure if he liked that. He definitely didn't like the next test. The doctor kept cutting the back of his hand in the same place, between the knuckles. Why would they want to know the effect of repeated cuts? It stung like hell. He also thought it was strange that they didn't want to test his bones, just soft tissue healing. Logan asked what they needed to know all this for, but the doctor just kept writing things down. There was a big pile of paper now. Logan was getting tired. He'd almost fallen asleep in his chair when the doctor glanced over at him and said, "Just one more and we'll let you get to bed, okay?"
"What's that?" Logan asked, fully awake now.
"Well," the doctor drawled, "we'd like to check on how your system will react to just a few more things."
"What kind of things?"
The doctor didn't answer. He stood with his back turned, fiddling with something—Logan couldn't see.
"What's going on here, damn it?"
The doctor turned to him now. "Oh, you'll find out soon enough, Mr. Brantford. Just sit tight." Then Logan saw the syringe.
He didn't feel anything at first, just the prick. Then there was…something. He felt his blood rushing through him, his heart pounding, that stuff—whatever it was spreading. Then the tingling started, like electricity running through his blood. He had to stop himself from rubbing his arm reflexively to try and get rid of it. The burning subsided after a few minutes, and he turned to the doctor, who was ignoring him again, taking more notes. He turned back to Logan, as an afterthought, and said distractedly, "Oh, Smith and Jones will take you to your room for tonight." On cue, the two army guards who had been dragging Logan around the entire time grabbed his arms again and took him through the iron door across the hall from the lab.
It wasn't much, but there was a toilet, sink and bed with something resembling a mattress, so it would do. The goons left, and Logan was alone with his thoughts again.
He was tired, but he just couldn't sleep. He couldn't figure out what these people were up to. Sure, he hadn't expected this to be especially legal or health promoting, but there was something very not right about this. That room he'd been in looked even more like a mad scientist's lab than he'd thought it would. Well, he could handle mad scientists.
That night his dreams began with the hockey game. They usually did. Tonight, though, it happened differently. Tonight, he stood right back up as if nothing had happened. That was when it started. Not subtly, like in real life, like usual. There was the whispering, and the muttering, growing to a roar. Then they started throwing things at him as he stood there, unable to move. Then came the rocks. It was then that he woke up. He sat in bed for the rest of the night, waiting for someone to come, thinking. It wasn't for a couple of hours that it occurred to him to wonder why he hurt from the rocks.
He felt stiff, like he'd barely slept at all, which he supposed was probably true, not that he had a clock in here. He felt funny, on edge. That electricity was back in his blood. He wondered what they'd done to him already, and if he would ever find out. It must have been another couple of hours before there was a pounding on the door, and his goons walked in to drag him back to the lab. Logan thought about asking them for a change of clothes, or at least underwear, but decided not to waste his breath.
They took him back to the same lab, with the same doctor waiting in the corner. They started right away, with the two goons stripping him to his underwear. He tried to protest, but they had a good fifty pounds on him, all muscle. They slapped him onto a big table face up, where the doctor walked up to him and started marking up his arms and legs. Logan supposed this was for the enhancements they were supposed to give him, but the doctor wouldn't answer when he asked. The doctor wasn't telling him anything. He looked around the room for clues. There were the x-rays they'd taken earlier. He could see a label on one of them from where he was. There was no name, just a number and a label: "Wolverine".
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Well, here goes. Don't worry, I'll get to the real story soon, just one more prologue. I do know this is completely inconsistent with anything from the comic books or cartoons, and it probably won't be particularly consistent with the movies either, but I wanted to tell it this way. So enjoy, and let me know what you think!
The story title comes from Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven".
