"Beautiful."
It wasn't that Logan wasn't sorry Hank had gone and hung himself in his own lab. Damn shame that. It was just that he'd apparently decided to do it about a week ago, and he was starting to stink.
"Just friggin' beautiful."
God, it must have been a week ago. Poor guy had been down here all that time, with no one noticing, suspended from the lab ceiling by a pair of iPod headphones and what did he have to show for it? A cross-eyed look that was almost forcing his red rimmed eyeballs out through his nose. And the smell.
He'd miss Hank and all, great drinking buddy when he had to be, hell of a listener, but if anything happened to Storm or Cyclops in the next few weeks, that'd cut the list of people under Wolverine's command who knew what they were doing down to Shadow Cat. The thought had kept him up at night for months.
He considered cutting Hank down then and there, but that was a two man job if it was going to be done with any real respect. He went through Hank's things instead because it might distract him from the smell. It didn't. He found a hastily written note crumpled under a table and held it up to the light.
Help help
I'm ten steps away
From finding a cure for cancer
but Logan is trying to kill me
and I can't keep this door
locked and write
at the same ti
The rest was a Frank Millar explosion where the ballpoint had snapped. Logan carefully crushed the note in his fist and hid it in his pockets. He'd just erase the security footage and go see a shrink in the morning. Not he didn't feel horribly guilty and more than a little worried that, really, he wasn't at all worried that he'd apparently murdered one of his best friends in his sleep or something.
He just really didn't need Charles to yell at him. It'd give him a headache.
---
The weather was beautiful for Hank's funeral. Maybe Ororo had something to do with it but even Logan was subtle enough not to ask. They called Hank's parents up from out of town and the remains of the founding X-Men came to pay their respects. He'd had Warren call them because it was just flat out more appropriate the guy paying for it doing so than the murderer. And technically it meant less paper work for him.
Poets were quoted, words were said, silences were held and Forge cried a lot.
Paperwork in the X-Men, Logan had come to realise, was basically more of a philosophical headache than anything else. You always had to be listening to what everyone was saying, and who was sleeping with who, and listening to everyone cry almost as much as Forge. It got to the point you couldn't even summon the enthusiasm to throw them at a problem like lemmings. And that was another thing! His favourite past time as leader and he wasn't actually allowed to do it! Despite himself he really had to hand it to Cyclops. How he'd done it had been ingenious, the bastard. Firstly, he'd come with a strategy and wrap it in as much rhetoric as possible to the point where team-mates wanted to get the crap beaten out of them by Magneto. Secondly, his powers technically allowed him to run around shooting at things with apart enthusiasm while always maintaining a safe distance.
Logan just didn't have the gift of dressing up his actual bar brawl battle plan as a strategy and his powers were custom made for up close and personal. If he stood around pointing too long people would get suspicious.
Somebody said something, he wasn't sure what. No…screamed something. And then went very quiet.
"Hmm?"
He looked up. His arm had gone up without really thinking about. Claws first. He blinked trying to make sense on what was on the end of them.
"Oh. Oh! Oh crap!"
Old habits died hard. Forge had died all too easily. Logan had stabbed him through the face.
---
24 hours later saw him sitting in the War Room looking at his uniform pants.
Yellow. he thought absently. It really wasn't his colour. Not a leader's colour anyway.
The door hissed open, the scent of fabric softener telling him Cyclops was there before the heavy footsteps did. The guy hadn't finally decided to wash that stupid trench coat, thank God.
"We're having the wake in a few hours. Ororo decided to Forge and Hank's back to back given the timeframe. You could have come to the funeral. There were more lilies. We even managed to catch another sun set. It was all very sad."
"Didn't wanna ruin the moment." Logan leaned back apathetically in his chair. "Thought it'd be kinda inappropriate an' all, seeing as how…"
"Mmm." Summer's toyed with something imaginary from his coat, then threw it away. Whatever it was clanged loudly off something, almost startling Logan out of his chair. "Still. Charles should have seen this coming. Messing around with the time stream, it's natural for things to start going a bit doolally."
"Doolally." Logan repeated slowly. He'd have picked up the scent if this was a shape shifter, right?
"Doolally." Scott launched into a pulse pounding tap dance climaxing in a pirouette to illustrate. Logan felt the familiar itch under the tightening skin of his hands.
"What the hell is wrong with you?"
"Simple, bub. You. By having a steaming pile of Divine Intervention dumped into your lap you have created a vacuum in the natural order of things. To cope, reality has gone from a self sustaining donut shape to a terrified, twisted pretzel. And the yeast is falling. With you gone, I have stepped forward to fill the role of team prick."
He bowed too low to be sane.
"I readily accept. However, neither of us are naturally built to fill either position, I less so than you, and it's slowly eating away at both of us. You can't deal with any remotely similar to actual responsibility so the old killer instincts try to asset themselves when your not paying attention. It's like crushing a soda can or copping a stiffy whenever a red head walks past. You just don't think about it. I've managed to survive so far by shitting a small construction site in the john and going absolutely insane until reality sorts itself out."
"Oh." Logan relaxed. Slightly. "Not the first cosmic crap we've had to take."
"Exactly. And this is the X-Men. They'll probably be resurrected by dinner time. Indecently, we're out of beer and toilet paper."
He was looking expectantly through his visor at Logan.
"But you get the beer and toilet paper…"
"Wrong. The leader buys the beer and toilet paper." Summers shook his head. "You don't get it really, do you? I've got an out by just finding something else to do instead of guiding a bunch of horny teenagers and a bunch of adults hornier than the teenagers. After years of having to hold onto your leash so hard I thought my fingers were melting into one another it's actually kind of a relief. But you have only two real choices because you were built to take the Hulk, not bureaucracy. Either kill everyone until there's no one left to complain or kill yourself. Either way, pick up that stuff before you do. I intend to spend a lot of time locked in my bathroom. For various reasons."
Logan shook his head as he pulled his mask up, reaching for his cycle keys.
"And what the hell will you be doin'?"
"I'm off to stand in the corner looking vulnerable until Frost feels sorry for me and lets me bang her. Toodles!"
Logan waited until the sounds and sent were gone, then started tearing frantically though what was left of Hank's lab. Hank had another set of head phones, right?
Yellow was the cowards colour apparently.
---
"I take it you understand why I requested just the both of you?"
Moira Mactaggert looked between the two men facing her. Wolverine flicked through the rest of the journal, squinting through his mask whenever something caught his attention. It was a crazy mishmash of notes and pictures scrawled across a scrap book of various note sheets and yellowing newspapers crazy glued across each other, and it smelled like something had lived in it.
"Does Kevin know about Charles?"
Scott gave that slight tilt of the head that those who knew him recognised as an attempt to look them in the eye.
"I don't think so. Not on this plane of existence anyway."
"You keepin' the kid's cage locked up?"
Cyclops pursed his lips, a habit he'd picked up from Jean without realising. He didn't know what he didn't like more; the way Logan asked the question or how he'd been trying to ask the same thing without really asking.
"Yes. Thank you fer asking." Nothing in Moira's tone had changed. Which said a lot to both men. "He thinks it's just another dream he picked up from the mainland. When he saw what he was writin' down…"
She trailed off.
"Gentlemen, when I began this experiment it was to gage the extent of Proteus' abilities under controlled conditions. Whenever he accidentally received thoughts from anyone in his sleep he would conjure an appropriate, mostly disturbing representation of these dreams and place it in this journal as a coping mechanism. I never pried, only briefly observing the general theme of whatever the dream was and theorizing how it related to Kevin."
It was strange, Logan thought, how easily she could say her son's codename. And how she sounded like something small and fragile had died in her throat whenever she tried to say his actual name.
"But when I saw how prominently both of you began featuring…not the X-Men, both of you…and what was going on in there…well."
She paused.
"Take care Scott, Logan. I won't go further than that. I've nay right. But for your own good, not the X-Men's, not even Charles…never give up on whatever it is that's keeping the both of you going, no matter how alien it feels now. Don't let the nightmare come true."
Logan only started breathing for real once they were out in the damp air of Muir Island, headed for the Blackbird on the runway. Cyclops stopped halfway there.
"So."
"Don't."
"Come on, Logan."
Wolverine stopped, turned slightly.
"That's progress."
An eyebrow was raised.
"About a year back you'd have just kept walking."
There was silence between the two men for a while, broken only by the sound of waves a distant sea gulls.
"A leader needs to listen." Logan said eventually. "One of the things you pick up when your at he top."
They considered each other again.
"The thing I know about being at the top that you don't?"
For the first real time in his life, the Wolverine waited patiently for something.
"You need someone at the bottom. To catch you if you fall."
Cyclops gestured to the horizon.
"Lead on Macduff."