It was like a game of hide and seek. A game that he knew had to be done, but she simply did it upon an urge.
He could smell her then as he sat in the path of the downwind, purposely making it difficult to track him. He paid little attention as the gust of wind that came upon him, carrying her scent to him, he had gotten used to living with these heightened senses, even has he could smell her conditioner as if she were right in front of him. She could not detect much of a scent any longer, but relied on the tracks he had left behind for her in case she were to get lost. But he doesn't get lost, so neither does she. There were no trails on the snow, no footprints to speak of, and the scents on the dying trees were wearing away, but she would find him before any of the evidence would be completely washed away.
She was used to games, what one could call games were given to her all her life in the form of training in which there was much punishment if she were to lose. So she stopped losing one day. She does these games because there is familiarity in them. There is method, and what she believes to be reason. She wakes up in the winter's morning, and finds his lingering scent leave the mansion, and she knows a game has begun, and she is pulled to go and find him, urged, and forced. For it is natural for one of a certain kind to go and seek others of it's own.
She feels the rock formation before her and she feels the warmth he left there. And she feels the trees and feels the disruption he caused there. And she goes on to seek him.
She was taught to not think, and as a result she often does not. Why she does these things she does not know, and does not care to know. She was given instinct and intellect and she is used to only using these. And it is upon instinct does she watch him, like watching herself, and on instinct does she go and play these games.
He notes her progress and raises his head to see if there is any danger near, for being what they are there is always danger, and rarely are there these gaps. He smells no alien scents, hears no thunder of alien copters or running feet among the snow, heavy from the carrying of guns. He hears her footsteps, smells her scent, and perhaps two or three deer and a rabbit.
She does not even second guess when she sees the hill above the frozen creek, instinct tells her that he is here, and it is true. She climbs the hill and finds him reclining on a tree stump, reading "Paradise Lost." She waits for him to acknowledge, and only after a few blows of the wind does he look up at her.
"Weapon X." She calls.
He raises his head to this.
"That ain't my name." He tells her.
But for the bulk of her life did she not know his name, and assumed that Weapon X was his name, as X-23 was hers. She did not know much of the project that she was meant to be the duplicate to. She didn't even know his face. But upon holographic training she was forced to sync with the Weapon X to prove herself as a perfect copy to him in every way. She often improved on his times, as she was not a perfect copy. These improvements gave her a sense of distinction between she and he that she was surprised at. For he did not have a toe claw, and he had three claws on his hands, and thus they improvised differently, and had different instincts on how to use these claws. She thought herself a failed attempt to be a copy realizing these distinctions upon the examination of the Weapon X hologram. She thought in some way she had failed, she did not think to be proud of her differences in him.
She knew him only as Weapon X, as the hologram with the mask on its face, and the three claws on his hands. To think things like them had names and not designations, it was almost impossible. Things like them, weapons, unstoppable thinking weapons, who do not know of love, only the numerous ways to kill a person and the numerous levels of injury. She only thought that a desire of love was all she was left to have. It only came naturally to call him what she knew him as.
"Weapon X you have been found." She said again, in a manner he'd call stubborn.
"That ain't my name, I said." He said, with force.
She lowered her head and stepped back in this offence. But she was not one to speak to explain herself, as she was unaware she had to.
He walked over to her and pushed her chin up so that she'd look at him. He saw life in those green eyes, a look he recognized in himself. The eyes that looked upon him, her eyes, eyes of a young animal, domesticated, longing not to be. Sadness were in those green eyes, as well as instinct and intellect somehow coming together, and in those eyes he saw all she wanted was some sort of approval. He looked seriously at her for a moment, as he tucked his book into his back pocket.
"My name is Logan, and yours is Laura." He told her.
To this he backed away from her, for the game was about to reset. She closed her eyes when she saw he was leaving, and put her face to the ground, and covered her ears, so that she could only smell the ground, and hear nothing, and then counted. She felt his footsteps even in the snow, but could not determine in which direction he went. And after her counting was done, she looked up and saw just the forest in winter. He was gone.
The image somehow struck her.
Yet she continued on, playing this game, again in search of him, the only one that is like her in all ways possible. One seeking another, after learning how to search, after learning how to want, and to desire, and how to love and be loved. She told herself that his name was Logan, not Weapon X, not Wolverine, but his real name was Logan. He was not a weapon, she was not a weapon. They were people, with metal claws. They had endured the same, and seen the same. They were the same flesh, and the same blood, and the same DNA. But they were not the same, they were separate people, but of the same kind.
He stuck close to her this time, taking to the tops of trees, watching her downwind again. She gave no expression in those animal eyes, no sign of distress, no sign of anger. She simply played the game, and continued to seek him out, and if he were to keep on hiding forever and ever, she would continue to look for him forever and ever.
The first time he saw her, and knew what she was, he could not help himself but be angry. Again the people of this world had taken something from him. They took his body and shifted it into something terrible, something even below his animal instincts, a puppet. They took his mind, they took his memory, and not even that was enough for them. Not even he as a whole could settle their appetites for power, they had to strip him of his genetic code, and twist it, alter it again, take from him again. But he stopped himself when he found that the cause of his anger had a face, and a voice, and was looking at him with the most emotion in her eyes he has yet to see. Her eyes filled with hope and joy at the sight of him, though her face barely showed it, and she did not move, he knew she only wanted to touch him and make sure he was real.
He could not be angry, he could not hate anymore, not with their creation staring at him as a person. Xavier told him the details as she sat next to him in front of him. And now he saw himself in this person, this little girl, who does not speak, or think, beyond what she has been told to. There is a little difference in them. He has no memory of a life, and she had no life. But still the goals are the same, to be as human as possible for people like them, bordering on humanity and instinct.
She followed him wherever he went, and he saw himself in her. He tried to get her to go away in a sense, there was no good he thought in staying with him. She was a child, she needed to be with others her age, she needed to socialize, to speak, to think. What good would his tragic life do for her? But she was not like the others, and she only saw kinship with him.
She smells so much like him.
He did not let her know how strange she struck him, how eerie he felt when he first looked upon her, and saw himself, his DNA in another form. He gave himself pride in knowing he would have been a gorgeous woman. And with a grin did he take it upon himself to help her.
For there was much he could teach her. He saw a weapon inside her. A need to kill, an urge, and instinct that he had felt many times in his life. An animal inside, domesticated, chained, not believing it is free, and unknowing on how to be free. She was a stranger in a strange land, and she did not know how to conduct herself, she did not know what instincts to rely on, and what ones to never trust again. How to balance herself between who she was and the animal within.
So he plays these games. Teaching her how to feed the animal, how to control it, how to be oneself without it.
He trails her in the tree, as she stops. A sound is heard, a scent is sought for but not found. Thus does he spring from behind her, and thus does his claws descend from his hands.
He drops downs towards her, as her claws descend as well. He lands and slices for what could have been her head, but she ducks and kicks up, with a toe claw to his neck. He goes to grab her leg, but she wraps both legs around his neck and swings down to the ground. He goes down face first, but lands on top of her, grabbing her again by the legs, tossing her over five feet away so he can get back on his feet. He circles her as she rises, she jumps at him, flipping between his slicing hands, and landing below him, stabbing into his stomach. To this he goes to the side, and around her, as she jumps away from his striking distance.
Blood drips to the snow, but soon ceases as the wounds heal and close.
He goes to see four holes in his clothes.
"I really liked this shirt." He smiled.
She merely stared, not knowing to let her guard down. He stared up at her, with a smile, and then motioned for her to continue.
"Yeah, don't worry about me." He said sarcastically.
She waited for him to make the first move now, which after a moment he did. He tumbled towards her, and she jumped out of the way, but he grabbed her foot before she could get away, and brought her back down to the snow. The air left her lugs upon impact on the snow, and two claws enclosed her neck. She stared down the half extended middle one that could scrap her nose.
He smiled at this, having cornered her.
She spat in his face, and in a moment of confusion stabbed his arm with her hands. She rolled away, and stood up. He did not stop this time but continued his onslaught slicing with his good hand across, then down with the now healed one. He struck down at her, and she blocked his claws with her own, but he was much stronger than her, and she began to lose her grip. She let her claws go and backed away out of his slice, and kneed him in the face, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her into his own knee.
She tumbled back, and quickly jumped with an extended toe claw out, he moved out of the way, and she found her foot impaling a tree. She tried to get out but found she could not. Logan laughed as he walked back over to her. She pushed herself up, and put her hand claws into the tree, so she stood within the tree about five feet above the ground. He came close and she tried to kick him in the face with her free foot.
He laughed and motioned to stop.
He then walked over to her, and clawed a hole around where her foot was stuck, gently took it out, and pulled the bark off. He then grabbed her by the hips and pulled her down off the tree, settling her back down to the ground.
He then bowed like her Sensai used to, and she did the same.
And this was all part of the game.
He took her to his side, and put her arm around her, and led her through the snow back to the mansion, where he would get her some eggs and bacon and make her eat it despite her unfamiliarity of it. And later after briefly speaking to the others her age about what they're going to do in the future, and speaking with Jean Gray Summers and her husband, and passing by Xavier, they would find themselves once more in the woods, upon that cliff, over that frozen river.
And in the silence they will hear the melting ice drip down in the distance and Kitty Pryde playing a game with Colossus when they think no one can hear them. They will smell the sulfer of Kurt Wagner teleporting, and swear they could feel the heat of Scott Summers' eyes.
"I just fell into this you know." Logan begins, as he watches her dig into the snow. "I didn't want any of this, and then one day I wake up and I have this costume and it went on from there."
"Did it hurt?"
She remains unexpressive as she looks back towards him, and he is struck back for a moment, but he knows exactly what she means.
"Yes."
"How long did it take?" She goes on.
He shrugs.
"Did they make you kill people?"
"I probably killed people on my own."
She returns to giving him her back and after a moment, she raises her head.
"The first time I saw you. I wanted to kill you." She says. "I wanted you to die for giving them this chance to make me."
He doesn't say anything for a while but then he rises to sit next to her, and force her to look at him.
"We can't forget what they did to us. It makes us stronger, it gives us more to live for, because we weren't given a life, or it was taken from us. But we can't just stay on it. You remember, how far you've come, and how much further you have to go." He told her.
She looks up and nods in unspoken understanding.
Then he pops his claws out very close to her face, it was enough to make her jump and gasp. He laughed at her reaction and she bit her lip as she kicked up her foot and popped a claw near his head that made him slightly flinch. To this she smiled and popped out the claws on her hand and clashed them against his, making a rather odd noise that one can only get when indestructible metal collides with indestructible metal.
"Mine's longer." He grinned.
"So?" She said.
"I'm just sayin'."
"You don't have a toe claw." She tried.
"Why would I want a toe claw?"
"Cause it's better than a third claw that is basically useless when two will do."
"Two won't do."
"They're indestructible metal, one would even do."
"You're gonna get your foot cut off kicking and jumping around like that."
"No I'm not."
"Yes you are."
"No I'm not!"
And she smiled.