Logan's left leg was gone.
When he thought back on the nightmare, that was the earliest moment he could remember; looking down at his leg, and not seeing it.
There was more to the nightmare, he knew, but that's where his memory started. Whatever happened before it, whatever caused his dismemberment, was lost. Trying to search further back in the fight, all he could find was an endless black wall, turning in on itself.
That isn't to say that he didn't know what happened to his leg; he had a pretty good idea, in fact. He wasn't Hank McCoy, but he wasn't no dummy, either.
In that very first image, the first frame his eyes had recorded, he was sitting up after being knocked on his back. He was looking up at a pair of giant red electrode eyes; a sentinel, its "face" shredded in several places, where Wolverine recognized his own trademark handiwork: a parallel set of three claw marks.
As Logan sat up, taking in his surroundings, he saw the giant metal knuckles of the Sentinel's fist lodged in a crater in the ground, the dust still settling from a mighty blow. The Sentinel had tried to squash Wolverine like a bug. And he had barely missed. The fist, huge as it was, was so close on the cement floor in front of him that Wolverine could see the rivets holding its armor plates in place.
The sentinel hadn't really missed, technically. Logan had jumped backward; he could tell by his position relative to it. He must have seen the blow coming and had dodged the downward hammering fist of the giant robot killing machine. But it didn't miss. Not quite.
As the servos fired inside the metal workings of the sentinel, and the hydraulic pumps hissed, dragging the dozen-ton fist out of the crater, dropping shards of broken cement click-clacking back onto the ground, Logan looked to see what was left of himself. And there it was, as the crater came into view: a red smear, shards of bone, and a glint of adamantium, sandwiched in between two skins of black rubber. His leg had been crushed below the knee.
Rubber?
It was the deep-space uniform. That was the other clue. Wherever he was, whatever was going on in this dream, it was in space. Or maybe just required some space travel to get there. Or maybe just chalk it up to the non-logic of dreams.
Except that it didn't feel like a dream.
Before his eyes, the shards of bone started to snap back into place, adhering to the adamantium that still held the shape of his skeleton, as it jutted out of the mashed red stump like a ghost of what used to be his fibula.
Muscle fibers crawled back into place, wrapping around the bones. Fresh skin cells bubbled up from the exposed tissue.
The sound came back. Wolverine hadn't realized that everything so far had been muted. The impact of the sentinel's attack must have punctured his eardrums, and only now had his healing factor sprung them back into place.
An alarm was ringing. Had been. Electronic, with a robotic voice speaking in an alien language. A few words, repeating over and over in between the blaring alert klaxon.
Sounds like Shi'ar, Logan thought. Not that he could understand it. But it definitely wasn't good.
Logan hopped to his feet, his left leg now back in form, with only the shredded, dangling rubber foot of the uniform left to suggest he had received what to most men would have been a permanent, disabling injury.
The sentinel was winding up for another punch. Logan ran between the steel behemoth's legs, not taking any chances this time, and for the first time in the chunk of nightmare that he retained, he took a good look around.
He was in a hangar. A burning starship was crashed into the far wall, its fuselage ripped open and the guts of its engines scattered in a trail behind it. Looked like a hard landing, or a failed takeoff. Then Logan saw it: another sentinel, pinned to the wall by the ship, ripped in half at the waist, its red eyes flickering as its OS tried to reboot. Sparks, smoke and hydraulic fluid poured freely from a gaping hole at the steel beast's "mouth".
The fight had been going on for a while. Hours, maybe. Bodies of Shi'ar soldiers littered the floor, piling up along the walls, slicks of blood on the floor marking where the footsteps of the sentinels had bulldozed the fallen Shi'ar into heaps.
Orange sirens on the ceiling of the hangar spun slow, creating a dull strobe of light. But the fire from the crashed starship outweighed it, lighting up the whole place in a pulsing glow.
From across the hangar, there was a frantic, muffled pounding. Like someone trapped. But he didn't have a moment to think about what it might be.
"TARGET SIGHTED. EXTERMINATE."
Logan knew the sentinel hadn't given up on killing him. They never did. Not until you were dead. But it helped that they reminded you so often.
*SNIKT*
"Your move, bub."
The sentinel swung wide this time, scraping its forearm along the floor, trailing a broad shower of sparks. It was trying to crash into Wolverine like hitting a baseball, but by the time the sentinel's arm –as wide around as a Boeing 747 – came to him, he was flipping high in the air, upside down, both sets of claws pointing at the floor.
The sentinel's own momentum carried it through six razor-sharp claws, dicing its thick metal hide, and as Logan felt his adamantium blades catch the gears inside, he shifted his weight, dragging them along the rest of the arm, stretching the cut all the way to the floor.
When he landed, so did the sentinel's severed hand.
"Fair trade, bub. How's your healing factor?"
As the sentinel tried to stand again, it faltered and reared back, the sudden loss of so much tonnage throwing off its balance. Logan saw one massive steel foot raise from the cement floor of the hangar, trying to compensate, but then the other started to tip as well.
Logan charged at the lower foot, the sentinel's remaining center of balance, and threw his shoulder forward, tackling it full-force. A final nudge, to dictate the path of an already falling tree.
The sentinel fell backward into the wrecked starship, rupturing its remaining fuel tank and exposing its contents to the inferno, and within seconds the starship, the sentinel, and half-sentinel pinned to the wall were all obliterated in a massive explosion, tinged green by the exotic fuel in the starship's tanks.
BAM BAM BAM BAM!
As thunderclap of the blast faded, Logan heard again the muffled pounding. It was coming from a corridor at the far end of the hangar. Someone was definitely trapped over there. He just hoped it wasn't whoever had called in the sentinels.
Hogan rushed across the hangar. From the burning wreckage, a distorted sentinel voice: "TARGET….zzzzIGHTED. zzzzINATE. *pop*"
"Yeah, heard it before bub."
As Logan neared the door, there was the pounding again, and he saw, through the blast-proof square of glass installed in the steel electronic door, the hand as it smacked against it. The glove it wore, torn and bloodied, was unmistakably X-men blue.
BAM BAM BAM BAM!
Wolverine broke into a sprint, dragging his adamantium-weighted body as fast as it could go. Just as he reached the door, he could hear a voice screaming. Just barely.
"LOGAN! HELP!"
Scott's voice.
Logan looked through the glass. It was an airlock, just a small room between two larger ones. Cyclops looked like he had been set on fire at some point, with half of his deep-space X-Men uniform melted onto his skin. He was hunched over, in obvious pain; shattered ribs, Logan guessed, and he would know from experience.
On the floor were three dead bodies: two Shi'ar shoulders, blasted apart from what must have been Cyclops's eye blasts – they were kinetically based and thus left no burns, another injury Wolverine was well-familiar with – and the third body looked to be a black woman, face-down in a pool of blood, wearing a shredded X-Men deep-space uniform.
Perhaps worst of all, Scott's eyepiece had been ripped off. He was squeezing his eyes closed with all his might, letting out only a few tears as he howled for help. He had been trapped in this room, blind, for who knows how long.
He pounded on the door again, unable to see Wolverine standing just feet away.
BAM BAM BAM BAM!
"LOGAN!"
Wolverine tapped the glass back, and saw that Scott heard it.
"Stand back, Bub!"
*SNIKT*
Wolverine slammed his claws into the door, punching right through the solid steel and feeling his knuckles crash into it, burying his blades to the hilt. As sharp as they were, it took some power to drag them into an arc and create a hold big enough to step through, but he did it.
As he entered the room, Cyclops suddenly fell to his knees, gasping desperately. An airlock – by its design being airtight – did not take long to suffocate in, and Scott had almost proved it.
"Logan! I was starting to think you were dead!"
Cyclops was blind at the moment, and couldn't detect scents like Wolverine could, but apparently he recognized the sound of his old frienemy doing what he did best.
"Back 'atcha, Slim."
Logan helped Scott up from the floor, and saw the bodies again. Especially the one in the X-Men uniform.
"Tell me that's not…"
"Storm. They tried to take us hostage. She fought back and they…"
Gritting his teeth, Wolverine suddenly saw red. He grabbed Scott by his hair and shoved him against the wall of the airlock.
"Why didn't you help her, boy scout!?"
"BECAUSE I COULDN'T SEE!" Scott pointed at his face, his eyes still shut tight with obvious effort. "When I heard the shots, I opened up, but… it was too late."
Wolverine looked down at her still body. "Damn it all."
"We don't have time to grieve, Logan. Can you see the control panel next to the door?"
Cyclops was feeling along the wall the wall, next the second of the two doors that made up the airlock, leading deeper into the base. Logan spotted it.
"Yeah, it's right there. But maybe if we get her some first aid, it's not too late to—"
"Logan! The shield isn't up, do you understand?"
Logan's eyes went wide. Apparently he did understand. The "him" in the dream, he understood what Scott Summers meant.
But now, as he tried to recover this memory, he couldn't summon the context. What shield? Where were they? When was this? He didn't know. Trying to remember just brought up more blackness. All he knew was that, at the time, it must have been of grave concern.
The Wolverine he saw in dream yelled back at Cyclops.
"What?! What about Hank? The transmitter, he was supposed to-"
"I don't know! I can't get Hank on radio, he was on the starship behind us, about to land, and those damn sentinels came out of nowhere, and…"
"It all just went to hell." Wolverine shook his head, finishing Cyclops's sentence for him.
"The missiles are within orbit, and the shield isn't up. Okay? That's what I know. That's what that voice is saying." Cyclops gestured at the ceiling, as the Shi'ar-language voice recording repeated its message yet again. He was too weak to say it with the appropriate emphasis to convey his fear, but Logan could smell it coming off him: Scott Summers, Cyclops, leader of the X-Men, was facing death. And he knew it.
This wasn't how Logan's dreams ever worked. He couldn't figure it out; why, walking through the dream in his head, could he smell Cyclops's fear? He never dreamed like that. Never!
Cyclops stomped his feet.
"Logan! Look we can figure out what went wrong later, we don't have time! On the control panel, the key needs to be moved to the blue slot and turned left. See it?"
Scott handed Logan an electronic keycard, stained with blood. He followed the instructions.
"I heard the guards talking about it just before the shots, but I couldn't see the colors. Didn't want to get it wrong. That's how they got the drop on us in the first place…"
The door slid open. Logan gripped Scott by the arm and led him through the doorway.
"Ain't nobody getting the drop on us, Slim. I promise you that."
What the hell is going on?! was what Logan was really thinking, as he played the memory through. But he wasn't an active participant in the dream. He was just remembering it. He saw himself rush down the corridor with Scott, saying nothing, and could do nothing about it.
They rushed down the wide, steel hallway. Signs on the wall, written in Shi'ar, flashed red. There were no bullet holes or blood or bodies here; they, Cyclops and himself, must have been the first of the landing party to make it past the airlocks. Not a good sign.
They rounded a corner, and up ahead, two sets of steel doors whooshed open, one on each side of the corridor.
"Get yer blastin pants on, Cy."
A dozen Shi'ar troops marched out from each of the doors, weapons aimed at Cyclops and Wolverine. Wolverine planted his feet, blocking Cyclops from any incoming shots, and ducked down.
"Twelve O'Clock, Scott! Fire! Now!"
Cyclops opened his eyes, and a sudden column rich, red energy poured forth, filling the hallway. Logan felt the force of the blast as it passed just overhead, knocking down all 24 of the advancing Shi'Ar troops before a single of their return shots could hit a mark.
A few of the troops struggled to their feet, but Scott simply drifted his gaze over to them, bringing the terrible force of the beam onto them directly, squinting his eyes just so. He must have relished the sudden opportunity to see for a few moments, after having tamped down on his powers for so long.
"Nice work, bub. Let's move."
Cyclops shut his eyes again, and Logan again led him down the hallway.
"The control room is just up ahead," Scott said. Blind as he was, he apparently knew the layout of the base. No surprise there, Logan thought. Boy-scout always did his homework.