Fandom: X-Men (movieverse!)
Pairing: Logan/Warren (yes, you're reading that right)
Rating: Uh. PG-13?
Summary: Oh, forget it.
Notes: Well, this isn't my first X-Men fic. However, it is the first one I haven't wanted to burn/erase from public record. That said, let me know when something sucks? I am a big girl and can take it.
Dinner wasn't bad.
The kids were starting to get back the stomach for it-- even started horsing around again a little. Logan skipped meals for a couple of days after the Professor died; couldn't stand being cooped up in the dining room like a second goddamn funeral, like the guy's coffin was sitting between the potatoes and asparagus or something. But tonight was okay. 'Ro was gonna do good.
He should probably tell her that sometime.
But now he was outside (pointedly avoiding the headstones, and refusing to think about how much he was thinking about them). The sun was starting to sink in the sky, still bright behind the treetops, and all the little sounds and smells of twilight were making themselves known: the buzzing and clicking of insects, distant frogs, the cooler, mellower tint to the air ...
And the flapping of wings overhead.
Logan looked up sharply. Sure enough, it was him-- that kid. Dipping and swooping in the sky like he'd never been anywhere else.
Looks like he stepped off a freaking Christmas card.
He looked, as Kurt Wagner would've said in gentle, German-accented tones, like an angel. Logan was light for all his muscle, his adamantium skeleton designed for speed and efficiency, but now he felt the heaviness in him like an anchor. To just take off like that, just rise up into the air and make your own roads to anywhere, nothing but cloud in your way ... that was something.
That was fucking something.
Logan was pure casual as he walked down the third-story hall (fifteen was the room, Bobby'd told him), sidestepping a kid shooting fireworks from her fingers. Little sparks, nothing big; it looked more like juggling than anything else. He recognized her from the rescue at Alkali Lake, was pretty sure they called her "Jubilee"-- he would have claimed that his memory about that day wasn't so good, what with what happened to Jean, but the truth was that everything was sharp and crystal clear, even the parts of it he wished he could forget.
Now that Jean's death wasn't true and the Professor's was, there were different things to be forgotten, to be reshuffled and thrust away and plain ignored. Because yes, she killed Charles Xavier; but if Logan was sure of anything these days, it was that Jean needed his help-- his help above anybody else's-- and dammit if he wasn't going to help her.
The door to fifteen was open.
Weird.
Through the doorframe, his eyes were drawn instantly to the expanse of snowy-white wings at the window. The kid was standing there, one hand on the glass, fingers spread, and he looked like he was thinking of taking off again. For a second, Logan got a feeling like he shouldn't try to stop him if he tried it.
Or it's just another cage.
But knock knock knock, went his fist on the doorframe.
The kid turned-- startled at first; then, recognizing him, relieved.
"Hey."
Logan cocked an eyebrow. "You gonna leave your door open all the time?"
The kid smiled.
"Maybe," he said with a shrug. "The noise doesn't bother me."
"Not right now it doesn't," Logan snorted, remembering ruefully that one kid-- who the hell had she been, anyway?-- whose screams woke the whole mansion.
The kid shrugged-- and he wasn't such a kid, not really, but there was something about his face that was too ... soft, too delicate.
(An angel, Kurt would've said, to which Logan mentally snorted, Yeah. Right.)
His eyebrow arched again.
"So they call you ... Birdboy?"
"Warren."
"Warren," Logan repeated thoughtfully. "Huh. Usually it's something a little more ..."
"Warren Worthington," he said, smile hesitant and self-deprecating. His eyes, though, were proud-- almost defiant. "The third."
Logan raised an eyebrow.
"... Huh."
And watched Warren Worthington the Third, whose wings gave away a little of the fidgeting his body didn't show.
"Bet that makes for an interesting home life."
Warren shrugged at that, expression closing off.
"I'm here now."
Logan knew pretty well when he screwed up with people.
"Yeah," he said, and shrugged back. "You are."
The pause that followed was a little awkward, even for him. Luckily, he was spared having to come up with a conversation-saver, as there was a scream from the hall-- a completely normal one, if high-pitched-- and someone was storming out of the bathroom, yelling, "Your spikes are in the drain--"
A door slammed.
Logan grinned wryly.
"They're a good bunch. Real welcoming."
Warren's expression relaxed a little-- enough to smile back.
"I like it here. It's good to ... see other mutants, you know? Talk to them."
Logan arched an eyebrow.
"You don't hang out much with mutants?" A nod to the wings. "You seem like the type to get noticed."
One of Warren's wings slid forward, and he looked at it out of the corner of his eye as if just noticing it. A rueful smile.
"I had-- my dad gave me a harness for them. Leather straps." He shrugged, and Logan saw the rippling flutter of feathers that followed in its wake. "They fit under a coat."
Logan raised an eyebrow.
"What about summer?"
Warren smiled. "I was hot."
Logan snorted, and Warren shrugged again, smile not entirely fading as he slipped his hands into his pockets. His feet were planted (bare, with the scent of mud and cooling grass clinging faintly), but there was that little flick again-- almost a twitch-- in the wings. Whatever flying did for him, the kid was still wound up; Logan could smell it. Smell that, and the shampoo in his hair, and the sweat on his skin, and a lower, fainter tang, familiar and unmistakable.
Logan pretended not to notice.
"So, uh ... you just pack up and come here all of a sudden?"
Warren hesitated, glancing out the window.
"It's not a great time for me to be home."
Logan snorted. "I bet."
Warren's gaze flickered to him, harder and more guarded than before. Logan shrugged, one hand raising defensively.
"I heard it'd be safe for me here," Warren said evenly.
"You run out of coats?"
Warren just smiled-- hard like his gaze, and proud-- and his wings spread slowly up and out, seeming to fill the room. Seeming almost to light the room, though that could've been the lamplight glancing off his feathers.
"I'm not trying to pass anymore."
Logan cocked an eyebrow, looking him over-- and he if he noticed Warren noticing, well, he kept it to himself.
"Good for you."
It was full dark now, the kind of dark that wrapped crisp and alive around the mansion and called with its smells and its sounds-- the owls in the trees, insects building up from buzzing to their own symphony between blades of listening grass. Logan couldn't sleep.
He didn't like to sleep much now, when he could help it; he had a habit of slashing up mattresses.
So he prowled around the garden-- wasn't much of another word for it-- letting his nose and his ears and his muscles do most of the steering, and his mind do most of the wandering. Which ended up more like making a list, the names ringing in his head like a litany: Scott was gone; the Professor was gone; Jean was gone--
No.
He knew without a doubt that she was still in there, was in trouble-- and he knew too that a rescue mission was not likely. 'Ro wasn't exactly gung-ho about the idea, for starters; she was furious about the Professor's death. She'd put up a good front for the funeral, and she was putting up a good front most of the rest of the time, but where Logan was concerned, he could never tell what was gonna send the storm clouds rolling in.
Logan stopped and looked around, and smiled humorlessly to see where his feet had led him. The gravestones weren't in front of him, but nearly; he could make out the hedges that boxed them in just ahead.
His subconscious was probably trying to tell him something.
Hey, he told it back, I'm all ears.
He could still feel her voice echoing in his mind, feel her thighs under his hands, and both sent a jolt down his spine hat he hated himself for liking so much-- it wasn't her.
(But it was-- wasn't it? All impulse and joy and hate and rage, but Jean's. There was still a way ... still a chance ...)
Logan!
The whisper shot through his head like a whip-crack. Logan took a sharp breath.
Jean?
He tried to think it loudly, insistently, some way that she could read it.
Jean!
But there was nothing now. Only the hundreds of minute and typical nighttime noises--
And the soft rustle of wings as bare feet touched down behind him.
Logan spun around before the sound could register, claws hissing out; but it was only Warren's face that greeted him, Warren's wings spreading wide with fluttering uncertainty. He calmed by degrees as the look and the sound and the smell of him sunk in-- Jesus. Cool it, bub.
After a beat too long, in a wry growl: "Haven't you heard about early to bed, early to rise?"
Warren hung back, wings half-spread, looking somewhere between stunned and embarrassed.
"Couldn't sleep."
Logan snorted, claws retracting with a snikt. "Join the club."
Warren's lips tugged upwards at the edges, cautiously, and his wings were shifting and fluttering again. Logan watched them curiously for a moment, and when Warren caught him looking he smiled half-apologetically-- and hesitated, wetting his lips. It sent a tingle down Logan's spine, following the same path as Jean's voice, and he focused on him sharply, found what he already knew-- the scent of sweat and tension and skin and fading fear.
Logan arched an eyebrow.
And, somewhere between he's a kid and Jean's nails on his arm and why the hell not, he said, "Going in?"
The wings were not as large they looked-- though what they were was more than enough-- and they were warm and thrumming and alive under his hands, and Logan stroked them roughly to calm the thrashing as Warren jerked beneath him yes like this hissed Jean, and the tang of his sweat was nothing like hers and that was good, and eventually Logan stopped trying to calm him at all and rode it out, anchoring them both down when a wayward flap of Warren's wings would lift them off the mattress--
Crash, went the lamp off the bedside table.
"Oh," Warren whispered raggedly, "shit. I'm--"
He tried to roll over, at least sit up, but Logan held him down by the shoulders and bent close to his ear.
"Never liked that lamp," he muttered against his skin.
Some impulses weren't meant to be caged.