Disclaimer: I don't own the characters of X-Men or True Blood. They belong to Marvel, 20th Century Fox, Charlaine Harris and HBO.
NB: This is mostly based on the X-Men movies and the True Blood television show, with only a few elements of the original comics and books. I am not trying to follow the original material, that is to say the printed version. This is also an alternate universe.
Chapter 2: Enemy of My Enemy
Well, Logan approved of Marie's cousin Sookie, as far as he could tell, and he had great instincts, he had to say. One didn't survive for as long as he did without having a knack for being able to tell whether others meant him harm or not. Of course, being almost indestructible helped, but that was another point entirely. The main thing was that Logan had never really had prove just how indestructible he was apart from one or two times. All right, maybe seven or eight. He ordered another beer. It was growing dark outside but he was in no mood to go and find a motel just yet. He'd passed one on his way, actually, and it looked as if it had a lot of rooms vacant, anyway, so accommodation was not a problem. Sookie brought him his drink within a minute. "I'd have thought you'd be less than sober by now, Mister Howlett, with the amount you've been drinkin'," she said as she set down his bottle of Molson's on a clean napkin.
"What can I say?" said Logan as he took a sip of his beer. "I've got great tolerance. An' call me Logan, please. Mister Howlett makes me feel so old."
Sookie laughed. Yes, even if she didn't look as if she could be Marie's blonde twin, he would have been able to tell that they were related. They both had the same laugh, although Marie was not half as cheerful. "Well, you are pretty old," she said, and she wasn't really teasing him. Logan could tell. And he could feel something at the edge of his consciousness, something like…
"Excuse me?" he said.
"Oh, never mind," said Sookie hurriedly. The girl looked spooked. She glanced around to see if anyone else had heard their exchange. Marie was busy fetching extra napkins for a family of four children. One of the kids had spilled a drink. The other waitress was taking orders and the bartender was shouting at the cook.
"No, you'd better tell me," said Logan, not being as friendly now. The girl was not normal. He didn't have anything against people being abnormal –he wasn't in a position to discriminate– but he definitely didn't like it when people hid the truth from him, whether it was simply by lying or by not telling him. To him, they were one and the same.
"Why should I?" Sookie wasn't sounding so friendly either. In fact, she sounded very defensive.
"Sookie!" That was the cook. "Chicken salad!"
"This ain't over, kid," said Logan.
Sookie gave him one last hostile look and stalked away.
She cursed herself for having said anything to that man. She knew he was watching her with eyes that reminded her of a predator on the defensive. Somehow, she'd provoked him, and he was dangerous. She'd glimpsed that much from his thoughts. His mind wasn't very easy to read. She'd only seen a couple of jumbled images. If she hadn't inherited an enthusiasm for history from her grandmother, she would not have recognized that image of him fighting in the War of Northern Aggression, better known as the American Civil War. He'd been a Union soldier. That in itself raised her suspicions. Here he was, a seemingly normal human being –he'd eaten human food and his mind didn't read like that of a shifter– and yet he'd lived much longer than any human being ought to have without his age showing. It was as if he was a vampire, but alive, able to walk in sunlight, and…he had claws.
Sookie almost dropped her tray. Claws? Seriously? She quickly set down the chicken salad before the customer who'd ordered it, gave said customer a small smile and ran off to find Marie, or she would have if Bill hadn't walked in through the door. "Sookie," he said, giving her a brilliant smile. Well, as brilliant a smile as Bill could give. Bill wasn't much of a smiler unlike his boss who was the last person Sookie wanted to think about at the moment. The smile faded when he saw Sookie's expression. "Darling, what's wrong?" he asked softly.
"I'll tell you later, but I have to find Marie," she said. Bill opened his mouth to say something, but at that very moment, Sookie spotted her cousin and she departed abruptly, leaving her boyfriend –boy was pushing it, since Bill was a century and a half old, but that was the term– staring at her back in concern.
"Marie, I need to talk to you," she said. Her cousin looked a bit startled.
"Sookie, what's wrong?" asked the younger girl.
"Ladies room," murmured Sookie. She ushered Marie into the small bathroom and closed the door behind her. It was rather cramped in there. She leaned against the door whilst her cousin looked at her oddly. Now, how to begin?
"Really, Sookie, you're scarin' me," said Marie. "What's going on?"
"Your friend, what is he?" Sookie blurted out. All right, perhaps she could have worded it better. This sounded like what Jason would have said.
"I don't know what you mean," said Marie.
"Look, you know I said I have some kind of disability, right? Well, I didn't want to scare you at the time coz we'd just met, but I'm a telepath, and when I glimpsed your friend's mind, I saw some really disturbin' things."
"You went a looked inside Logan's head?" Marie sounded very hostile. "Without his permission?"
"I had to make sure that he wasn't a danger to anybody!"
"Says the girl with a vampire for a boyfriend," said Marie. "Look, if you really want to know what Logan is, then you can go ask him yourself, and I bet he knew you were looking inside his head because he's good at sensing these things so I think you owe him an apology."
"Maybe I do," said Sookie, "but the man has claws!"
"Is that any reason to discriminate against him and probe his mind without his permission?"
"Of course not–wait, you knew?"
Marie gave her a look. "Of course I knew," she said. "I've seen them, his claws. An' he's just like me."
"He's a mutant? They come with claws?"
"They come with a whole lot more than that. Logan's one of my best friends. There's hardly anything he knows about himself that I don't know."
"You know how freaky that sounds, right? You bein' best friends with a man who's as old as…well, Bill."
"And you're dating Bill." Marie crossed her arms.
"Fine, I get your point," said Sookie. Oh, Jesus Christ! This was embarrassing. 'That should teach you, Sookie Stackhouse,' she thought to herself. This new world of mutants and supes was just too strange at times. Who knew what else was out there? Fairies? Werewolves? Elves? Ents? (Yes, she had quite enjoyed The Lord of the Rings.) She really should not have been so quick to jump to conclusions. "So…uh…I guess I should go out and explain to your friend."
Marie nodded, and then she stilled. "Maybe I should go with you," said the younger woman. "Logan's…not known for his good temper. He made the kids in detention do his laundry."
Logan narrowed his eyes as he stared at the pale brooding man with dark hair. The man stared right back without blinking. Usually, people were intimidated by the Wolverine's stare. Logan took a swig of his beer and considered ordering pizza and garlic bread. However, he seemed to have scared off his waitress. Marie and Sookie emerged from the ladies' room. The former looked amused and the latter looked, well, embarrassed. "Logan, you got a minute to come outside?" said Marie.
"Sure thing, kid," said Logan. "I got loads o' time."
"What's wrong, Sookie?" said the pale man.
"Nothin'," said Sookie. "It's just a misundestanding."
"What sort of misunderstanding?" said the pale man.
"Why don't you come along, Bill?" said Marie. "You don't mind, do you, Logan?"
"I can't exactly mind if I don't know what's goin' on, kid," said Logan.
The four of them went outside into the relatively cooler night air. Apart from the chorus of bullfrogs and bugs, the murmur of conversation from the bar and the sound of someone having sex on the ground somewhere in the distance, the parking lot was quiet. "Look, Mister Howl–Logan," began Sookie. "I'm sorry I read your mind. I don't usually do that but you felt different and I had to make sure you weren't dangerous."
"Too bad, kid, coz I am dangerous," said Logan. Marie raised an eyebrow at him. "But apology accepted," he added. "So I guess you realized that I've got more to me than meets the eye?" That obviously had an inappropriate connotation because the pale man–Bill– had placed himself in front of Sookie in an instant, almost as if he'd, well, teleported.
"You will treat Sookie with respect," growled the man.
"And you'll get out of my face, bub," Logan growled back.
"Bill! Logan!" said Sookie.
"Guys, just back down," said Marie. She approached them warily. "This is all just another misunderstanding and we don't want anyone gettin' killed here."
"A bit late for that, Miss Marie," said Bill. Miss Marie? Really? What century did this guy come from? "I'm already dead."
"Wait a minute…" said Logan. He narrowed his eyes at Bill as an idea formed in his mind. "You're a real living vampire!"
"Is he serious?" asked Bill.
Logan might not have been the brightest guy there was, but Marie didn't like it when people implied he was stupid, because he definitely was not. He just tended not to think, and given his circumstances, what with the amnesia and the nightmares and what had happened in the past few years, it wasn't hard to understand his reluctance to think. She scowled at Bill, who realized his mistake. "I apologize," he said.
"It's an oxymoron," said Logan. "Literary device. I was helpin' to mark the English papers before I came." It was Marie's turn to be shocked. Just because she knew Logan was smart in his own way didn't mean she thought he could, well, mark essays. No one let him mark essays because he never actually read them. He must have caught the look on her face because he grinned. "It was the multi-choice part. Ain't nobody in the world that can mess it up, right?"
"Until you get bored with matching up the answers, Logan," said Marie.
The rest of the evening would have gone on fine had the television in Merlotte's not been turned on. Unfortunately, it was a bar and therefore the television was almost alway on, unless there was actually no one in the bar. Thus, the evening was effectively ruined when the newsreader announced that Congress had passed new laws to protect 'good regular citizens' from 'non-humans'.
The violence started soon after that. Mutants had been harrassed, both by citizenry and by authorities. The news suddenly carried dozens of reports about vampires killing humans, no doubt to convince everyone else in the country that the government was right to introduce such laws. Nan Flanagan, the spokeswoman for vampires on television, had been assaulted with questions that had been twisted to portray vampires in a bad way. Senator Hank McCoy, Secretary of Mutant Affairs, had 'resigned', although it was more likely that he had been sacked. Logan thought he would call Hank to find out the minute details when he was less likely to crush his phone in anger. No, he still hadn't registered himself as a mutant yet, even though the law required it. He wasn't sure he was ever going to do it. If regular people didn't have to register specific genetic traits, then he didn't see why he had to either.
Now that the laws had been passed, he wasn't sure if he ought to leave Marie alone in Louisiana. What if she got harrassed because her cousin was dating a vampire? Marie had made it quite obvious that she had no problem with that, and that she even considered Bill to be a friend, which he was. No, he had to stay. He lay on the bed in his motel room. Usually, he'd have been watching television, but lately that just made his blood boil. Boredom was better than growing angry at what he could not change. The majority of the population supported it. Even the international communitysupported it. There was nothing a bunch of minorities, undead or otherwise, could do about it. He'd much rather save his energy for survival.
His phone buzzed in his pocket. He didn't need a ringtone; those nauseatingly cheerful and electric tunes merely annoyed him. He would rather not assault his sensitive hearing with such noise pollution. He considered sending the message straight to voicemail but when the caller ID indicated that the call came from the school, he knew he just had to answer it.
"Yeah," he said, after placing is phone to his ear.
"Logan, it's me," said Mystique. She was a metamorph; a mutant who could change her appearance according to her will. Usually, she went with blue scaly skin, red hair and no clothing, although she had been obliged to wear clothes in the school. Children did not need to see their teachers naked and teenaged boys could certainly do without the distraction of her…uh…assets. "They've closed the school."
"They've what?" He was sitting upright in a second. His blood was roaring past his ears and anger made his vision hazy. They couldn't do that! Where would all the kids go? Most of them had run away. Theschool was their home now!
"Don't shout in my ear," said the woman on the other end of the line. She sounded annoyed, as she had every right to be. "I might not have your hearing, but I'm not deaf."
"What are we gonna do? Those kids have nowhere to go!"
"Why do you think I'd be calling you if I had any idea?" said Mystique. "Storm's called me. They can't leave Europe until their papers have been cleared, and God knows how long that will take, given the fact that every other country seems to have been waiting for the signal to pass their registration laws all at once. Do you want me to try and locate Erik?"'
Erik meant Erik Lensherr, the metal mangling militant mutant who liked to throw Logan around. Literally. However, considering the fact that everything had gone to hell already, what harm could there be in making friends with the devil? "Do it," he said. "We've already got too many enemies." He hung up without saying goodbye. He was never very good at saying goodbye, and he was much too busy thinking. They really did have too many enemies surrounding them in every direction. Congress, the Senate, the media, their neighbours. They needed more allies. And since the laws targeted not only mutants, but vampires as well… Well, the vampires were very powerful. He didn't know much about them but he knew that they were strong. However, they were not altogether invincible, since they could only operate after dark, leaving them extremely vulnerable during the day. Mutants, as a group, were probably neither as organized nor as strong, but they did have the advantage of not burning to a crisp in the sun. Perhaps if they joined forces…
Logan checked the sky. It would soon be dark, which was just as well, because he needed to pay Bill Compton an urgent visit.
A/N: We've seen the introduction of one Erik, although probably not the one everyone wants to see. The other Eric will pop in soon.
