- CHAPTER ONE -
Awakening
It was the astringent burn of antiseptic in his nostrils that woke him. They say smell is the sense most closely linked with memory, and this scent awoke a nightmare of memories. Pain. Fear. But mostly pain. The kind of constant, excruciating pain that becomes a part of your life. That you feel hollow without. In those first few days of freedom, how he had missed and yearned for it. When the emotional pain had final burst through and flooded him, he had been drowning in its crushing surges. This was a new pain, and he had no idea how to deal with it. At least, with physical pain, you could scream, grit your teeth, clench every muscle in your body until the exertion became too much and you collapsed back into sweet oblivion. No amount of screaming had silenced the thoughts coursing through his head.
His throat and mouth were dry, sticking together. He licked his lips with a tongue coated in sandpaper. A deliberate action. An action you might have done a thousand times before; a simple action, a comforting action. The kind of thing you did to occupy your mind and keep it from guessing what was going on beyond its bodily limits. Because if it did, you'd go crazy.
"Good morning, handsome."
He tenderly raised a hand to his face. Beneath the course prickle of stubble, his flesh felt bloated – tender, aching. He moaned.
"Well, it's not your best look, darling."
He recognised that voice. Not that it put him at ease though. It was merely the elimination of a variable in whatever twisted equation he was caught up in.
He could open his eyes now. It would be alright. Not good. Not fine. But alright. His imagination had trapped him in a million torturous possibilities. Hearing this voice eliminated a fraction of them.
The searing pain of harsh light on his sleeping retinas burned right through his eyes and into his brain. He forced his eyelids wide open, stiffening his jaw through the stinging transition, until the explosions of blackness had faded, and he could see again.
White. The whole room was white. White plaster ceiling. White tiled walls and floor. Starched, white sheets tucked around him. Beside the metal bedrails was a cluster of machinery, all emitting a cacophony of noise to his sensitive hearing. Shrill beeps from the heart monitor. Lazy humming from the ventilator. Hollow drips from the IV.
He let his head loll sideways, now.
There was a single window precisely cut into the tiles to his left, opposite the machines. Strange sheen – probably tinted. No curtains. Just bars.
It was in the window where he was finally able to see his reflection. The whole right side of his face was inflated to twice its size and smeared with blue and yellow bruising. Half his forehead was held together with a neat row of stitches, clear fluid gentle seeping out between the serrated edges of flesh. As his mind cleared – a combination of the brightness of the room and the physical pain within – he realized he was only seeing with one eye. The other was shut – lost behind a balloon of inflamed tissue on the right side.
"You look a mess, but otherwise your insides are ticking away like clockwork. Priorities, you know. Your healing factor took care of the more serious haemorrhaging, my doctors tried to make themselves useful with their primitive little needles and scalpels, and now here you are. Alive. Your face is fatter than a model loosed in a cheesecake factory, but your bones have knitted together, your organs regrown…Nothing serious."
She was standing by the window. Blonde hair pinned back very neatly, not a strand had escaped besides the sweep of bang across her forehead, and that was carefully styled and sprayed in place. She had angular features: sharp cheekbones, straight nose, defined jaw line. It was one of those typically gorgeous faces, except for her eyes. Framed in a prim pair of glasses, the lenses did little to filter the untouchable coldness of her ice blue orbs. They seemed to freeze you in place, suck your breath away like the plunge of glacial water.
"Where are we?" He asked.
"Welcome to the most famous clinic in the United States that doesn't actually exist. Staffed with the most brilliant surgeons who don't officially exist either." The woman's naturally pouty lips curved into a sly grin. "You're currently in Room 207, which can't technically be a room at all, since it's in a facility that isn't real. And registered as Mr. Smith, who in this instance, is a figment of my imagination."
Count on Emma Frost to keep a man squirming like some pathetic bug with a pin through its belly.
He said nothing.
"Oh, fine, Logan." She folded her arms in mock disappointment. "But you're no fun. We are in the building known only as The Clinic. It's a state-of-the-art medical centre that caters to, shall we say, some of the more discreet needs of the rich and famous. Anything from a nose job to full medical treatment; no questions asked."
"And you managed to get us rooms here, how exactly?"
"Let's just say the cost of my present reality will soon outweigh the realization of the director's wildest fantasies all those years ago." She turned abruptly, shutting out further questions with the silent wall of her back, as she faced the window.
Logan grunted, shifting stiffly beneath the crisp bedclothes. "The others have their own rooms? Fancy like mine? With equally charmin' company?"
Emma's back stiffened. He could hear her swallow. Hear the rapid leap and panic of her thudding heart. Smell her sudden sweat mixed with expensive perfume coil through the room – sickeningly sweet.
"We're the only ones here." Her voice was a soft, sharp whisper, like a feather with razor edges.
"Ok."
For three or four seconds, there was only the gentle hiss of the ventilator and the steady bleeps from the heart monitor.
Beeeeep.
Beeep.
Beep.
Beep. Beep.
BeepBeepBeepBeep –
The roar of a crazed animal echoed down Emma's spine in cold shivers of dread.
Logan ripped the ventilator tubes from his face and threw the air pump across the room. It banged into the tiled wall and crashed to the floor with a dying gasp of air leaking from the pump.
ARRRRRGGG! He leaped from the bed, tearing sheets and trailing shreds of linen. Ripping the IV needle from his arm in a spurt of blood and clear liquid from the drip, his two foot long spikes of adamantium then punched through the heart monitor screen in an explosion of rancid smoke and sparks. The remains were thrown, crumpling on impact.
Emma stayed perfectly still, unflinching even when the over-turned stainless-steel side table dented the heavy plastic-glass windows, inches from her head.
Suddenly, he was in front of her. A hand as unforgiving and strong as the adamantium that laced its bones clamped around her throat and hoisted her effortlessly into the air. Blood wrapped in rivulets around his thick arm from the puncture of the IV needle. Her hands flew to his arm, nails clawing desperately at the fist around her neck and its crushing hold around her windpipe. Her hands were soon slick with his blood, while her stiletto heels scrambled uselessly against the white walls. The world was whirling in a shower of black stars.
"Where are they?" He growled, hot breath and gnashing teeth inches from her cheek.
Concentrating against the natural terror that had infused her body, Emma willed herself into crystal form. Weak flesh frosted into diamond, supporting her bruised trachea. She choked down her gasping coughs until her eyes watered, but took one studied and slow breath after another, clearing her head. She glared defiantly through her crooked lenses – knocked askew on her face and hanging at a perilous forty-five degree angle.
"Not here." She rasped.
Snikt. A quiet cloud of plaster was the only indication that knives of adamantium, their hilts buried in Logan's knuckles, had plunged into the wall on either side of her neck.
"Try again."
"What do you want me to say, Logan?" Emma croaked. "What do you want to hear? That they're all back at the bloody mansion sipping tea and having a jolly good time?"
"I'm gonna give you till the count o' three –"
"Or what? I get put in the corner for five minutes? I'm punished?" Emma pursed her lips in a sultry kiss. "Have I been a bad girl? Are you going to spank me Mr. Logan?"
"Three." He had the crazed look in his eyes Emma recognised from the rare occasion she had seen him kill. The thirst, the lust for blood, to free it from the confines of veins and arteries in a sacrilegious but glorious fountain of death.
"Dead!" Emma shrieked in his face. "Dead! They're all stone-cold dead."
The animal's eyes glazed for a moment. She lashed out her crystallised knee as hard as she could, propping her other foot against the wall for extra force. She connected squarely at his groin and toppled them both.
Stillness. Silence. The coldness of the sterilised ceramic against her cheek felt unreal. The whole world felt unreal. She was just a discarded porcelain doll, thrown in a fit of temper and shattered into a million beautiful pieces.
She could hear Logan moaning beside her.
Time to pick up the pieces.
"Get back to bed." She pushed herself up, wiping bloody hands on the sides of her white trench coat – leaving two smeared, caressing handprints of dark red. "When I dragged myself out of the X-Jet, I didn't so much as chip a nail. Pulling your pulpy, battered corpse from the rubble ripped off three. Do not make me regret it."
"Still hiding under the dumb blonde cover-up?" Logan managed.
"Still think you're a paragon of virile manhood after your little PMS tantrum?"
Emma took hold of his arm and helped him struggle to his feet. They stumbled over to the now bare mattress, where Logan gruffly brushed off her hands. He fell back down, closing his eyes. Emma watched his chest heave with shaky breaths.
"Nice kick." He muttered after a while.
Forcing herself to relax, Emma untensed her tight muscles and loosened out of her rigid diamond form. "Beauty, brains, and a thorough knowledge of anatomy," she shrugged off his reconciliation, instead rolling back her shoulders and straightening her glasses. "More than one man has learned that lesson in more than one way."
Logan had turned his head away from her, but she could see him nod. "That's maybe the only thing I like about you, Frost. You know when to say nothing, and when to talk about nothing."
"You're bleeding everywhere." Her voice was disdainful.
"Yeah," the white on white room was blearing into itself. "You might want to do something about that." His throat was aching and curiously tight.
The mattress was damp. Not from blood. He had felt the stitches straining but knew they had held. There was also a strange, cold dampness on his cheeks. A prickling in his eyes. Before he could figure out what it was, the white kaleidoscope around him had spun itself into black.
Emma slumped against the wall as soon as she saw him slacken into unconsciousness. Well, that went well. And there wasn't even a hint of sarcasm in that thought either. As she massaged her throat, she knew full well that she had narrowly warded off further, more serious injury. And she wasn't even sure whether she was relieved or not because the empty ache in her chest and stomach was still there and it felt like it would split her apart.
Listlessly, she punched the red button on the wall next to her. It would summon the doctor and his team. They could heal Logan's newest wounds, tidy the room, put everything right again with professional efficiency.
If only everything was that easy.