An Institutional Fairy Tale
Chapter 3

This is after Weapon neXt. I wasn't originally going to be posting it yet, but I need to post something.

Sometimes, you don't want them to cry weeweewee all the way home. You want them to run, shrieking in terror until they can bar the door.

-iy

Logan hated the mall. Too many people. Too many different smells. Too many different hiding places. He'd worked a table top exercise just a few weeks ago with some of the kids where they were in the mall, and a bunch of assholes with guns and explosives took the whole place hostage.

All the little marks on the map for the hostages died. It wasn't that the X-men had done the wrong thing. There was no right thing to do. Too many hostages, too much space, too much openness. It was the same problem the Russians had had with their theater a couple years earlier. He and Scott and the other team leaders had puzzled over it, and decided that they wouldn't want anything to do with a mess like that unless the hostages included Xavier Institute students.

As always. They would not intervene unless metahumans were involved. That was Xavier Institute policy.

There were more reasons to hate the mall though, like there was an entire store devoted to perfume. As sensitive as his nose was, it was like being stomped on by an elephant made of flowers just walking past. He remembered a time one of the workers at the store had sprayed the air as he walked past- Logan's eyes were itching, his nose was stuffed up, and it felt like he'd gargled with battery acid. The effects passed in a second once he was out of the noxious cloud, but he'd debated tossing the young man (he was pretty sure it was a guy- it had been a rather androgynous person) over the railing. But only for a second.

But the worst part was that the young ladies liked certain stores. Yes, he did like what Storm bought at some of those places, but the same part of his brain wanted to just nuke the entire county because he knew that the guys liked it when the young ladies wore that kind of thing to. At least Laura didn't shop there, she was too practical. It was nice/horrifying, but not practical At least he didn't think she shopped there... He hoped she didn't...

He knew that he was probably over protective of the girls- weren't they X-men? They were also ladies. The contradiction didn't bother him in the least. At home, in soft clothes, they were young women and his manners said to treat them a certain way, even when they yelled at him that they were 'big girls' and that this was the 21st century. Fine, once they were in uniform, they were X-men, and he could knock them down, make them sweat and chew them out in training the same as he did the guys.

Growling, he sat on the bench at the corner of the mall, where he could watch all of the upper promenade level, the escalators, and the main floor at ground level. He'd wait, and think about something that didn't make him think murderous thoughts.

After a while, he heard a voice. "Hey there. Looking for a good time?"

He looked up- she looked about 18, which meant she was anywhere from 14 to 25. He hated modern fashion. She was about his height, blond, green eyes, about a hundred pounds of congealed cute, he could tell she was bubbly and perky. " 'Scuse me?"

"You just looked kinda lonely. I know a place, if you wanted some company."

Yep, he was being propositioned. By someone young enough to be his daughter. He raised an eyebrow. Was she stupid, crazy, or had someone dared her. "What did you have in mind?"

She leaned down closer, stroking her fingernails from his shoulder to his elbow. The were glittery pink with white tips. He could smell her strawberry flavored gum she'd been chewing, the hibiscus scented shampoo she used. "Anything you want, if the money is good."

Part of him wanted to shout out if anyone had lost a daughter and would the please come save him from her. This was like something in a bad dream. "How old are you? How did you get here?"

She grinned. "19." He could tell she was lying. "I have a car."

"Prove it, show me your keys."

She smirked as she pulled them out of her purse. Ford, looked like the type of keys they use for sedans. They'd bought a couple of their Taruses for the Institute at repo auctions- plenty of space, easy to fix, decent fuel economy, cheap to fix, good solid frames, not embarrassing, but not showy either. Good cars for a bunch of young drivers to have access to, and common enough that they didn't stand out if one was used for something else like surveillance.

"Ok, darlin'." He felt a cold fury. If she was serious, she was placing herself in more danger than she knew. If it was a game, she'd find herself biting off more than she could chew one of these days. Damnit, Sabertooth would... "What if my idea of a good time is to screw you to death, screw you some more, then slice you up into little strips that I'd turn into beef jerky and sell it to truck stops?"

She went about the color of the grey paper tabloids used, her eyes wide. She didn't move, like a rabbit hypnotized by a snake. He felt a little queasy but the words were out of his mouth, but he could see Victor doing that. And while Sabertooth was crazy, he wasn't the only one that crazy- there were normal humans who would do that and worse. Time to follow through. "Consider yourself lucky: I'm not that kind of guy. The next guy might be. Go home. Tell your parents you love them, and go to bed- it's a school night."

She nodded, and stepped back, trembling lightly. She almost tripped over a potted plant before she could turn her back on him. She kept glancing over her shoulder at him as she made her way to the elevator. He gave her credit, she didn't run.

Logan couldn't go back to his paper. He half expected to see people in uniform wanting to talk to him any second. A few years ago, would he have done that? He didn't know. He felt someone watching him from across the open area- Ororo and several of the girls. He didn't let his embarrassment show as he got up. He did not want to think about what was in the pink and white striped bags the girls were carrying when he met them half way there.

"Logan, what was that about? It looked like you scared that poor girl half to death." Ororo's eyes were narrowed and suspicious. That girl couldn't have been more than 18. He'd done... something.

"I'll tell you later. I'm just glad none of our young ladies are that stupid." His voice dropped to a mutter meant only for his own ears. "We're raising them better than that."

-Authors notes:

This is based on a true story. The dialog is almost unchanged. I'm not proud of what I did. But I'm pretty damn sure she'll never do anything that damn stupid again. I'm in my mid-30s and look older. I've got the kind of body language you associate with a cat at a mouse convention, a limp, scars, long hair for a guy, and the start of a ZZ Top beard. I'm taller than average, and a lot wider through the shoulders- I have to take some doors sideways. I keep work gloves on the strap for my jack sack, and every so often someone looks at my bag and asks if I've got a cannon in there or something similarly half-witty. I can look like a very scary dude when I'm having a bad day, and that is most days that don't start with S.

Worst part is, I'm not that scary. Just often annoyed with a world that can't get it's stuff together. But she didn't know that. For all she knew, she was trying to pick up a guy who made Jack the Ripper look like the Toothfairy.

She probably thought she was being funny, or she'd been dared. But I live in a college town- lots of young ladies wake up strange places. In the past five years we've had two girls kidnapped and killed, and two just disappeared off the face of the planet that were popular enough that people missed them. And my town could fit into one section of Yankee's stadium, even with two universities and three colleges in it. A couple thousand people disappear every year in the US. They aren't all kidnapped by aliens or bigfoot, killed by the mob and ground up into sausage or otherwise disposed of cleanly, or disappeared by the government as politically inconvenient- that only accounts for about 40, 200 and 500 people respectively. So where are they all going? They aren't all running off and restarting their lives, or dropping dead of heart attacks or anaphylactic shock on the backside of some mountain. In an era when you can't get a job or a bank account without an SSN and tax reporting, unless you are completely living in the informal economy, it just doesn't happen.