IV: Napalm and Wolverine

Howlett, British Columbia, 1970

I: Logan

Being so close to the old mansion where he'd been born and raised that the town bore the same name as he did had an effect on Logan that wasn't altogether melancholy.

He knew, of course that he and Liv were going backward before they went forward; she had some debts to pay in the small town of Howlett, British Columbia, where she had livened things up in the sleepy logging town presided over by an old crumbling haunted mansion in the hills by crashing into the town's only bar in the early morning hours with a .45 calibre hole in her chest and a big howling dog at her side.

As for the town of Howlett, Logan had some shaky but positive memories of living in there, for awhile, after the Big One, and any memories, let alone positive ones were hard for Logan to come by.

He had worked as a logger and he'd come back, here and there, over the past thirty years to that old life, and to the old homestead, when what his father called "the world of men and men's things" became too much for him.

He had dreams he never spoke of to anyone of, for his old hometown.

A little place out in the woods, a little further up the mountain than Pa's homestead.

A home of his own, nestled in the mountains close by the logging camp.

Settling down there with his lovely young wife, Jean Grey.

Was it so bad for him to want to have a nice, quiet retirement in the mountains from which he had sprung?

Logan knew it was a pipedream, but that didn't stop him from building his picturesque cabin in the mountains, even if he knew he was going to be the only one who ever went there.

No one knew about the place any more than they knew about his dreams for it, but thinking of it, he got a funny tingle in his arm where he'd let Liv's bad blood mingle with his own.

Liv was a killer, a savage, an animal.

The intellectual part of her big jumped-up brain was too much for her to handle and the irrational part was too frightening, so she lived outside both of them, by a strange combination of reason and instinct, and a code of wild outlaw honour that she discovered in a dusty old book that no one had sworn by since he was taught it at his father's knee when it flourished all over the North American West.

She knew damn well that the bonds of blood were the strongest bonds of all under that code; his blood flowed in her veins and her blood in his, and even if they had to satisfy the condition of their oath that the reparation for betrayal was death; it would not sever the bond.

Strange to meet one of your own kind after so many years, strange she was so young, strange she was, indeed compared to most of the boys and girls her age.

He rubbed his arm where it tingled, thinking about their hands touching inside Sabretooth's violated chest; it all meant something, something to do with blood and honour and savagery and humanity; but he couldn't puzzle it all out at once.

"Darlin', you think this baby can go alright on an ol' dirt road?" he asked her.

"Yeah. Sure. Why?"

"There's one comin' through the brush, right here. Just keep on it. It's gonna wind up the mountain for awahile, but at the end of it, there's a place we can stay."

She didn't ask him any questions about the cabin in the middle of the tall trees, and parked the Wildcat next to a dark green 1947 Ford half-ton pickup truck.

"This your truck, Logan? It's a real beauty. '47, right?"

"Yeah. It quit runnin' on me a coupla years ago, though. Leaks oil and water."

"Oh yeah? I bet I can fix that. If you didn't crack the head, I won't even need to take it to a garage. Pop the hood for me, willya? Get in and start her up."

It took Logan a few tries, but the old truck eventually roared to life.

Liv pulled up a big rock, stood on it, and peered under the hood.

"Battery needs charging. Try the brakes. Yeah, I'll have to do an adjustment. Drain the fluids, change the oil, and the plugs. I don't have to take the engine out because I think I can fix the head rthe way is is…maybe…now what do I need…lemme crawl under here and…yeah, those brakes are shot…"

Liv finished her once-over on the car.

"No problem. Kid stuff. I just gotta go into town, buy a few things, I can fix 'er up right here. And when I get done with that engine, shit, you'll have the fastest truck in the Great White North. Just like new."

Liv went and got her tools and a pair of coveralls out of the trunk of her car and started braiding her hair.

"You gotta jack?"

"In the back of the truck."

"Good. Nice place you got here."

"I built it. You're the first person I ever brought up here, Liv."

"Really? Shit. Look, my lips are sealed. But I gotta get this truck workin' for ya. I'll be right back."

Liv came back from town with a lot of work to do.

She said she'd be a few hours working on the truck, and informed him that the best place for anyone to be while she was working on a head gasket was at least a mile away from where they could get hit by flying tools, so Logan went into town to buy some things at the store, and to stop by the bar to make a couple phone calls, check in with Charlie, that kind of thing.

He could have taken her car, but he decided to walk, instead; it was a good day for a walk and he wanted to give Liv plenty of time to swear, curse, throw things, scream and fix the car.

He went to the bar and the usual guys were there, a few years older but otherwise pretty much the same, and they were all glad to see him.

Bill didn't mind him using the phone in the back room, and he sat down on a keg and dialled up the X-Mansion.

One of the advantages of being one of the world's most powerful telepaths is that you don't have to wonder who's on the phone.

"How bad was it this year? Is Napalm dead? She had better not be dead, Logan. Everything I said about her, I meant, but she's my friend. You better not have let him kill her."

"Hello to you to, Jeannie. Yeah, it was bad. Bad for Sabretooth. She shot him about thirty times, and sliced his chest open with an adamantium machete, just as I was comin' round from the back, rippin out a lung or a kidney or two. Then she put her little hand with the skull and crossbones tattooed on it right in his chest, gave my hand a friendly squeeze, and tore Creed's beating heart right out of his chest. She looked at it, beatin' an' looked at me, and handed it to me an' said, Happy Birthday." Logan explained.

"What did you do?"

"I kinda wondered about him callin' her "Red" and her callin' him "Vic". There's somethin' more to it, I think."

Jean was almost sure he was going to say that he took a big bite out of it at Liv ate the rest.

"That's not what I mean, Logan! What did you do after she…handed you his…his…"

"What he's done to me about a thousand times. I stomped all over his heart. Then Liv blew his brains out and we put him in a coupla trash bags and tossed him down a canyon. I had a pretty nice birthday. Went to the drive-in. Saw Alice in Wonderland an' Fantasia with a buncha hippies at this campsite. There was so much reefer in th' air I ended up high as a kite, myself. I could tellya about the rest, but I'm sure you wouldn't want to hear."

"You're right. Are you ever coming back, Logan?"

"When school starts. Why? You miss me, Red?"

"Does everything have to be about sex with you?"

"No. I like beer, an' I'm partial to havin' two or three meals a day, when I can get 'em, too. An' I do enjoy a good book. How's Mel?"

"That dumb whore? Here, Professor. You talk to him."

Logan was still laughing when Charles Xavier took over the line as Jean stalked out of his office.

"Logan, that wasn't very nice."

"I know. But I can't help it. Doesn't take much to get Jeannie mad, an' I can't resist goadin' her. Seriously, though, how is Mel?"

"I'll transfer you to her room when we're done talking and you can find out. I heard about your adventure with Sabretooth. Was that…necessary?"

"From where I'm standin' it was. But I get what you were tryin' to tell me about the Wildcat. She's a real killer. And yours truly has just became her blood brother, so I guess my taste in women and friends isn't improving."

"Don't sell yourself or Liv short. Where are you now?"

"Howlett. We came back so Liv could pay the vet who fixed her shoulder and pick up her dog. I'm going to try and get her to go to a real doctor and get checked out, and then we're really going to start to make tracks for Ontario."

"Have you seen the groundskeeper?"

"You mean my Pa? Not yet."

I smelled him, though. He's been up at my place. I guess he looks after it, too. Sure he does. There's never any trash around, any animals moving in.

Can't tell Charlie.

He don't even know I got a place.

"Logan, you don't know for sure that Thomas Logan was your father, or that he's still alive."

Gotcha double on that one, Charlie.
"He's alive. I know. He's still up on the hill, the old bastard. Anyway, I'm lookin' forward to seein' some of the guys I used to work with in town. If I know them, they got somebody for me to fight. Probably someone for Liv to fight, too."

"Don't let her kill anyone."

"I'll try, Charlie, but I don't think I can promise you, anything." Logan chuckled.

Professor Xavier frowned.

Logan still wasn't taking the Harlequin seriously.

The Troubles would show him, otherwise.

He was going to say more, but he realised Logan had some unfinished business with Melanie, and, considering that, he wouldn't be listening, anyway.

"Well, I have a summer class to teach, so I must go. Would you still like me to transfer you to Femme Fatale' s room?"

"That's Mel's handle she picked? It fits. Charlie, do yourself a favour. Don't even think you can handle her powers."

"I believe I told you that. How bad was it?"

"Worse. I tried to saw my own head off with my claws. Good thing I passed out before I could finish. Don't tell Mel that, though."

"I won't. Good bye, Logan. I hope to hear from you again, soon."

"Seeya, Charlie."

Logan switched his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other, nervously.

"Hello?"

He didn't say anything.

"Hello?"

"Hiya, Mel. How ya doin'?"

"Logan? Logan! You're still speaking to me?"

"Sure I am. Charlie told me the whole story. I know ya weren't tryin' ta double cross me. You gonna be there when I get back?"

"Yeah, but I hear you got pretty tight with the Harlequin."

"So?"

"Really? Look man, I've got my powers almost completely under control. So it won't fuck up your mind forever for you to touch me. If that's cool with the Harlequin. I don't want her to kill me."

Logan was about to tell her that it was blood between him and Napalm, blood and unbreakable bonds of friendship and a common understanding as two mad dog killers tempered only by their code of honor, and that romance had nothing to do with it, but that wouldn't make Mel feel any better.

Even with her powers under control, he was the only man in the world who could make love to her and not shoot himself in the head a few minutes after.

If she thought he wasn't interested anymore, she might shoot herself in the head.

And besides, he liked Mel, and he really wasn't mad at her, at all.

"She won't mind." Logan replied, simply.

"You sure?"

"I'm sure."

"That's cool. So, uh, when are you coming back?"

The tone of her voice made the hair on the back of his neck stand up, and he felt his balls tighten up.

Jesus, when the fuck did I become James Bond?

Logan wasn't used to having pretty young women chase after him like this. But that's' the way it seemed to be. Sometimes a man can't get a girl to even look at him, and then, all the sudden, they're all over you at once.

That was another good thing about these crazy little girls; they didn't give a shit what you did and who you did it with when you weren't with them.

It was going to take Logan some getting used to, these modern woman, they were every bit as crazy, maybe wilder than their grandmothers had been in the Roaring Twenties, but being the man he was and having two pretty young girls on his social calendar, he wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

"You miss me, Mel?"

"Well, yeah! I mean you're my old man, right? Why the fuck wouldn't I miss you?"

"Your ol' man? huh. Guess that makes you my ol' lady."

"If that's cool with you."

Logan laughed.

"Christ, Mel, ya make it sound like I got a whole buncha women beatin' down my door and I got no time for you. Sure it's alright with me. When I found out you didn't double cross me, I was glad. Shit, I can't figure out what you want with an ol' canucklehead like me, anyway? Other than you got no choice."

"Hey, man, don't say shit like that to me! I don't just want you to come back because I can't get anybody else to fuck me. I mean it's not like I'd actually kill' em. At least I don't think so. I really dig you. I mean, you're a real man. An' my real friend."

"Yeah. Real mean, real ugly, real hairy and real short."

"I don't give a fuck about you being short. You know the kinds guys I've met, on the road since I was 13? Fuck, some of 'em, they deserved what they got. And you're not ugly like, oh man, that dude should put a bag over his head. You're just not pretty. Shit, men aren't s'posed to be pretty. So, when are you coming home?
"In a coupla months."

"Months! What am I gonna do for a coupla months! Fuck!"

Logan found himself laughing again.

This must be what it's like to be Tony Stark.

"Take long walks and cold showers?"

"Yeah, right. Fuck that noise. Oh well. It's better than years. Umm, so, you wouldn't happen to be alone, now, would you? Cause I'm up here in my bed, an all I got on is my panties and it's, like, gettin' really hot in here, man…"

This is definitely what it's like to be Tony Stark.

No sense wasting the opportunity.

Logan got up and locked the door.

"Oh yeah? Tell me more."

When Logan got back, he noticed Liv wasn't in the truck or up on the porch.

She wasn't in the kitchen when he put the food in the fridge and found the generator was working fine, it was cold.

He walked into the main room, and she wasn't in there, either, but the bottom of the tub in the can was still wet, and there was a black ring around it and a pair of dirty coveralls wadded up in the corner.

It was a small place, there was only one room left.

Logan opened the bedroom door.

There she was, naked as the day she was born, spread all out over the quilt on the bed pretty as a picture.

A dirty picture.

"Well helllloooo, sailor! Your truck's all good as new. Purrs like a big kitty. Now, it's time for you to pay me." She announced.

He took off his shirt and unbuckled his belt.

"I dunno, darlin'. I'm all sweaty from walkin' around all day long, an' I'm sure I don't smell too good." He chuckled.

"You're only gonna get sweatier. An' you smell good to me. You wanna take those pants off, chief, or do I have to get rough?"

It sure was a good couple of decades to be a man.

II: Liv

I wasn't too surprised that the local yokels at Howlett's one and only bar had arranged a bare-knuckle cage match for me; I was pretty famous in the area for being able to kick anybody's ass.

It was when they told me who they wanted me to fight that I was more than a little surprised.

So was Logan.

He objected, violently, grabbing Bill, the bar owner by his shirt and pulling him down to our level.

"Are you out of your fuckin' mind, bub? You think I'm gonna fight my friend, here with these?"

Snikt!

"Calm down, Logan. Don't go callin' me "bub" the way you do before you'tre about to knock the shit outa somebody, eh? You don't have to hurt each other. Hell, everybody knows whoever we put in that cage with your girl Napalm, here is gonna get their ass handed to them, and the same goes for you. Nobody's gonna bet on that. You can do it like wrestling. Whoever gets a fall, and stays down for a count of ten loses. Nobody said the two of you had to rip each other to pieces."

"Bullshit! I spent the evening doin' the only kind of wrestling I'm goin' to with the Wildcat, an' my plans for the night include more of the same, not some kinda fight."

I wasn't quite so opposed.

I mean, I was at the beginning of my superhero career, here, only 22 years old and trying to make a name for myself, and how often do you get the chance to prove you can hold your own against the Wolverine?

And if I got a little clawed, and took a punch or two, so what? It's not like I never had a shiner or tasted a little metal.

Wounds heal.

Shit wipes off, yunno?

"I want a hundred bucks just for getting in the cage. A hundred bucks for Logan, too. I won't take any less that double or nothin' on Logan to win and triple or nothin' on me. Then I'll do it." I agreed.

"Are you fuckin' crazy?" Logan asked me.

That was a stupid fuckin' question.

"As a shithouse rat. C'mon, it'll be fun." I said.

Fun.

Some fuckin' fun.

I'd like to say that was the booze talking, but I was about as close to sober as I get when Bill made us the proposition, I just am fucking crazy as a shithouse rat.

Runs in the family, right?

Well, I may be crazy bit I'm not stupid, and I started to think maybe I was fulla shit when they put us both in the cage, me in my shorts and undershirt and my dog tags, Logan in just his shorts and his dog tags.

Then the crowd started screaming for blood.

This would be bad.

I see my blood, I go nuts.

Logan sees his blood, he goes nuts.

All that bravado I was feeling while I was having a drink and patting myself on the back I could take a punch and a slice or two had left me, and I felt sober as a priest on a Sunday morning.

It wasn't worth the money, or anything else.

We started dancing around each other.

"Logan, I'm fucked. I never fought anybody for fake, before."

"You never spar?"

"Sure. Alla time. But these yobs don't want sparring."

"Relax, kid. I teach combat. I do this shit all the time. Follow my lead. Just keep on the defensive, keep blocking whatever I throw at you, and trust me, I can stop the claws about a centimetre from you. Okay?"

"Well, who wins, then?"

"I don't know. This was your big idea."

Logan rushed me with everything he had; I could feel the air whistling by my head as his fist almost connected with my face.

He trusted me to be good enough to get out of the way of it and I was, and we danced around like that for awhile, taking shots at each other and blocking them.

The natives were getting restless.

They wanted to see some real action.

I was stuck.

You can't bring down somebody who's short and stocky with a head butt, and I wasn't about to resort to a shot in the balls, and I knew he wasn't going to fall for a leg sweep.

We got into what looked like a fighting clinch.

My heart was hammering in my chest, and I know I smelled like fear and nerves and fight; I was about ready to just hit him some kind of low blow and bust out of that cage.

"Keep it together, Liv." Logan told me.

"I'm trying. They aren't happy."

"I know. And I'm not punching you."

"Go ahead. I can take it. Anything's better than this shit."

"I'm not punching you, goddamit!"

"Then it's time for claws."

"Liv, you're good, you know fightin', but you never…"

"I wanna see just how good I am. And if you don't give these people claws, things are gonna get rough in here, and then you will have to give them claws, right up their asses so we can get outa this dump in one fuckin' piece. "

Snikt!

Now I saw those claws a million times if I saw them once. Logan doesn't use them just to kill with, they come in handy for a lot of little jobs. Like having your own built-in Swiss Army knife. They never bothered me.

But when I saw those claws, and Logan in his fighting stance, I couldn't help it, I started to get scared, that kind of scared even people like me who aren't scared of much get, that knee-jerk instinctive feeling of mortal terror every living creature instinctually gets when it knows its being threatened with death. And when I'm fighting and I get scared for my life, I also get mad, real mad. And when rage meets mortal terror and they pick up cold, brutal and calculating along the way, you get Napalm.

And Napalm burns everything down.

Logan could smell trouble.

Big trouble.

"Don't lose it on me, Wildcat."

If I got hostile enough, he'd get hostile too, and then?

Then I wished I had told Bill to shove his cage match.

We were both antsy and edgy, using all the will we had not to go berserk.

"I'm gonna rush you. Take evasive action." He told me

Logan rushed me.

I saw those claws coming at me and something snapped inside my brain.

I went into a roll and got behind him, up on his neck.

I was pretty sure Logan wasn't going to claw me, and even if he did, even if he clawed me right into my fucking bones and out the other side, the only way I was getting off his back, or my arm was getting off his neck was if he went down.

"Get off me! I'll throw you!" he yelled.

"Throw me, then!"

He threw me.

Yeah, it hurt, but I'm sure having me all over his windpipe wasn't making him feel too good, either.

Still had the claws out.

I got up in a hurry.

"What the fuck was that?" he snarled.

"Don't rush me with those claws, again! I can't keep my cool when you do that."

People were cheering, now.

Logan was mad, and I was mad too, we both of us had blood in our eyes, and that was no good at all.

"Stay the fuck off my neck! You know how close I came to rippin' your arm up?"

"Then put those fuckin' claws away!"

I had a knife strapped to the inside of my thigh, and I was thinking about getting it.

We were eye to eye, mad and frustrated and snarling, and both of us were about to get hurt.

The only difference was Logan would be all better in a few minutes.

"One of us hasta take a dive." He said.

"I know that."

"I never take a dive."

"Me neither."

"Fuck! This is why I didn't want to do this, I knew how it was gonna end up. Bloody and bad!"

Then, I had an idea.

Like the Old Man always told me, if you can't win fair and square, cheat, as long as you can get away with it.

"Logan, I wanna tell you in advance, I'm real sorry about this, but, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."

I put my hand inside his shorts, and not in an unfriendly way.

That confused the shit out of him, and his claws retracted and he just looked at me like I was right out of my fucking mind.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he asked.

"They one of us had to be on the floor for ten seconds for the match to end. That was all they said."

He was so surprised I had my hands in the cookie jar you could have knocked him over with a feather, so I did knock him over and then I jumped on top of him.

As far as I was concerned, if these rubes wanted a show they were going to get it, and better fighting than fucking because fucking wasn't going to get either of us hurt.

Logan rolled me over, and then I rolled him over and we got to rolling each other over so after he tried to count to ten two or three times the bar owner drew the curtain over the cage and made everybody leave the room.

"Darlin', it don't say much good about you that fightin' me got you this turned on." Logan chuckled.

"Aww, we was never fightin' for real. If we was, that would be different."

We may not have been fighting for real, but as soon as the room was empty and the curtains went around the cage, Logan had his cock out and my underwear off and I got say it was a better way to end my big idea than the alternative.

We got dressed and came out about a little later, thinking we might have to fight the whole crowd, but they were all pretty drunk and jolly and they laughed and cheered for us and poured beer on our heads and hooted.

"I shoulda known what would happen if I put you two animals in a cage together." Bill said.

"So, was that a draw?" Logan asked.

"I s'pose it was." I said.

I gave the man back the hundred dollars and so did Logan and we agreed all bets were off.

Everybody was so happy we didn't collect they kept buying, and me and Logan kept drinking and he had to carry me out the door.

The next thing I knew it was morning and I was tucked up in that old fashioned brass bed under the old-fashioned quilt with Logan, in his old-fashioned cabin in the mountains, so the night turned out better than it seemed it would.

But, I am fucking crazy.

I swear to God I am.

II: Logan

After Wolverine put his travelling partner to bed, he wasn't tired, so he went out on his porch.

To think.

It had been a long time since he could get his mind right.

Too much time worrying about other people's women.

Hell, even Liv was somebody else's woman, the Bat was going to deliver her unto Eddie, but Logan and Eddie went back a long time, he didn't think he'd object to them staying friends.

Liv wasn't the problem.

She'd saved his ass.

Hell, even Mel wasn't the problem.

He asked her to let him have it, and Mel was waiting for him, in New York.

So, she was his old lady, now, that was something Logan didn't object to.

The problem was Jeannie.

He let her get to him, and there was nothing, nothing worse in the world than letting a woman who didn't belong to you that you would never have get to you.

That was when he had a funny thought.

Liv seemed to like Howlett well enough, she seemed to like BC well enough, and she seemed to like him well enough.

Maybe they could stay.

The more Logan thought about it, the better it sounded.

He built his little dreamhouse for two for himself and a red-haired superhero to retire to live the simple life, why not do it?

Just what was waiting for him in New York?

A spandex costume and another lifetime or two of protecting and defending people who hated and feared him?

And what about Liv?

More knife scars and bullet wounds and black eyes and drunken blackouts, until she bled out in a dirty street somewhere, alone and in pain, surrounded by papers and trash.

And for what?

Wouldn't she be better off, wouldn't they be better off in his little cabin in the mountains? He could go work at the logging camp, and Liv could get a job at the university; it wasn't that far away.

They could have a nice, quiet, normal life.

One thing Eddie could never give her, one thing Bruce could never give her, one thing Jack Napier could never give her.

Something he could give her, and if it wasn't exactly love, there was blood between them, wasn't that enough?

Sure she'd still want to go to Toronto and get the son-of-a-bitch who shot her, but after that, what was to stop them from coming back to Howlett?

If anything, Bruce would probably be relieved, and as for Charlie, he had a whole school full of mutants to help him save the world.

Logan got up off the porch and went back to bed, where Liv was still sleeping.

It was a helluva long shot, but, you never know until you try.

London, England, later that month, Brotherhood of Mutants Headquarters

I:Erik

Jack was so right, when you are a supervillain, good help is very hard to find.

Magneto could count the number of truly intelligent and useful members of his Brotherhood without taking off both of his gloves, and Victor Creed was not among them.

Mystique came first to his mind.

Raven was such a wonderful woman. She had beauty, brains and cunning, a rare trifecta in any woman, indeed, in any person.

Of course, most men found her to be a cruel, devious, heartless, self-serving evil sociopathic nymphomaniac, but he considered those to be good points rather than bad.

As far Victor, he had never been anything more than a poor substitute for Logan, who had gone over to Charles' side when given the opportunity.

Not that Erik really blamed him.

Logan wasn't the drunken skirt-chasing, bad-tempered fool people saw him as.

He was a very shrewd and intelligent little man, who had, in his long life learned the lesson that he had to look after himself because nobody else was going to do it for him. The X-Men had at least the partial support of the US government, and, as such, Charles had better facilities and he could offer the mutants under his aegis a greater degree of safety and security, not to mention steady work, a steady paycheck and a very nice place to live.

Combine that with a steady supply of nubile young girls wanting to know if Mr. Logan could show them a certain combat move, and only a fool would turn down an offer like that so that he could remain loyal to an organisation labelled a terrorist group that could never stay in one place for any length of time that represented a feared and hated race.

Victor Creed was just such a fool, and Magneto did not suffer him gladly, so he was almost relieved when the idiot failed to return promptly from his birthday rendezvous with Wolverine.

He made inquiries as to whether Sgt. Mjr. Creed had returned to Vietnam early from his furlough, and found out he had not.

Perhaps Logan had finally devised a method to kill the big dumb bastard.

But no, Creed returned to New York, but with an amusing story that Magneto, who was the Vice-President of the Society of Supervillains, would tell Jack Napier over brandy and cigars, and then to the Society's whole Presidium Council (Lex Luthor, the Green Goblin, Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, the Penguin, Loki, and Braniac) much to their mutual amusement.

"Victor, I had almost given you up for dead. I must say, you don't look well."

"I'm not. Did you know the runt was running with Red?"

"Red?"

"Yeah. Red. Y'know, Napalm."

"Oh, you mean Jack's daughter, Trivelino. The Harlequin. Victor, I will not stand for you referring to the Harlequin by that crude nickname. She's a brilliant young woman. She's a bit high-spirited and a little wild, but she has the makings of an excellent mask, if she survives her adolescence. Jack tells me that she and Logan have become quite friendly, so I take it your meeting with her did not go well."

"It never does. At least not in the end. But this time was the worst. She fired a whole clip of hollow point bullets with full metal jackets into my hide from two .45 autos. That was before she sliced my chest open with a machete at the same time as the runt sunk his claws into my lungs from the back. But she wasn't done until she put her hand in the big hole she made in my chest and ripped my heart out. She told the runt happy birthday and handed it to him. When I protested, she shot me twice in the head and the last thing I remember seeing was her laughing while the runt ground my heart under his heel. I woke up at the bottom of a canyon with my neck and almost every other bone in my body broken to boot, and considering the pieces of it were all around me, I figure they stuffed me in a few Hefty bags and tossed me out of the car and over the guard rail." Sabretooth confirmed.

Magneto suppressed a laugh.

"You do realise that you can't mount any kind of reprisal."

"What?"

"Revenge, Victor. No revenge on your President's daughter."

"Revenge? I ain't lookin' for revenge. She didn't kill me, did she? Did I mention she was completely naked at the time? And I'm not callin' her Red for the hell of it, she's a real redhead, one of the few real redheads I ever met that wasn't ugly as sin. What the fuck is a woman like that doing with the runt? I mean, it takes a lot for a frail to impress me, but this time Red's done it. I'm fuckin' impressed. I mean here's an alpha bitch a guy like me could really learn to like. You could have a good time with a girl like her. You think Jack would get mad if I made a serious play for her once she gets back to New York?"

"You want to see Trivelino on a regular basis, Victor?"

"Hell yeah! What a woman. She's got a heart as black as midnight in a coal mine. My kind of girl."

"What did you do to her that made her so furious?"

"I scratched up her car. I didn't know it was hers. I thought it was Jimmy's. And she didn't gimme time to explain. I'm tellin' you, Erik, I think I got it figured out. All I gotta do if I want Red to stop rippin' me to pieces is lay the fuck offa her cars."

It was the last part of the story that got the Council rolling in the aisles.

And no one laughed harder than the Joker.

The story began to circulate not only amongst supervillains, but amongst superheroes, and at his next futile meeting in search of rapprochement with Charles, the Professor asked Magneto if the story was true.

"I doubt that Victor has the intelligence to make something like that up, Charles. How fortunate you all are that she's on your side."

"Fortunate is not the word I was thinking of, Erik."

"Now, now, Charles, you know how difficult the adolescent years can be. Especially for a person of genius who has madness in equal parts. With proper supervision by an established mask., a little time in a world-class rehab facility, and her passage into the calmer waters of her mid-twenties, I'm sure Trivelino will shape up, nicely."

"Would it be terribly wrong for me to admit to you that I fear what's going to happen when she and Logan get to Toronto?"

"I wouldn't worry, Charles. You work with the government. Whatever they do, Nick Fury will see to it that S.H.I.E.L.D. gets it all cleaned and sanitised. Don't be such an old fuddy-duddy. Let them have a little fun."

II: Logan

I guess you can call this "What I Did With My Summer Vacation".

I'll tell you what I should have done with my summer vacation.

I should have made Little Miss Ultraviolence drive us to Vancouver and got both our asses onto an airplane and her car into the belly of it and made sure we were both safe and sound in New York.

New York, where I have a nice cushy life, compared to the kind of shit I'm used to.

Yeah, every once in awhile I have to put on a spandex suit and a cowl and go out and kick some ass and gut a few badguys, and save the world a little, but I live in a three-room suite in a mansion, I get three squares a day and most of the time all I'm doing is teaching mutant teenagers how to fight, some of whom are 16 year old girls in tank tops and gym shorts.

Not to mention a certain drop-dead gorgeous blue-eyed blonde 20-year old named Mel Reinhardt who's really a very nice girl waiting for me, the only man on God's Green Earth who can touch her without having to die for it.

So, what the hell am I doing roughing it in a tent with Jack Napier's drunken psycho mask daughter, about whom I have been warned by not less than her own stepfather, the Batman, that if she can find a way to kill me and she gets a wild hair lying across her ass just right, she might do it?

Am I just as fucking crazy as she is?

Crazy as a shithouse rat?

You had better believe it, bub.

Now, I like my life with the X-Men, and not just because of the mansion and the three-squares a day; when you been on your own as much as I have, you really appreciate family, and that's' what they are to me, family.

I don't remember my life ever being better than it is now, and sure, I don't remember much, but most of what I do recall isn't very nice, so I think it's safe to say this is the best I've ever had it.

And I like Mel, too. Shit, I like Mel a lot. She's a beautiful girl, we're good friends, she's a good woman and she makes this ugly old man feel pretty goddamn good.

But, a guy like me gets bored having everything slow and nice and easy, and pretty goddamn good is alright, especially for an old Canucklehead made out of hair and stink, but when I get a shot at shit-hot great balls of fire claws out and roaring like a wild animal in full rut not knowing if I'm comin' or goin', I'm gonna take it, and if I'm gonna die for it, fuck, everybody has to die sometime.

Keeping that in mind, I guess I got what I deserved.

Jeannie and Charlie, they tried to reason with me one more time, but I wasn't seeing their point as to how it might not be too healthy for a man to travel with a woman who can roll out of bed stark naked , shoot a man to pieces, slice him open like a Christmas turkey and then rip his heart out and laugh at him all before she puts in her contact lenses.

Even the Bat begged me to watch out for his little girl, reminding me that I knew the Comedian better than most people, and I should know that if the JLA decided he was Liv's only hope, that should mean something to me.

It didn't.

Hell, I should have had warning bells like air-raid sirens going off in my head when, even after she'd seen me in a rage with my claws up to my knuckles in some poor stiff's guts, she still wanted to get into a cage with me and fight, and she was as close to sober as Liv gets, at the time.

So, yeah, you're right, when you're travelling with a girl whose closest friends and relatives have nicknamed her "Napalm", you should expect the worst, but after travelling with her for awhile and the lengths she went to in order to see to it I had a decent birthday, I was beginning to wonder just what the fuck was going to be so hard for me to handle about her, and just what made her so damn terrible.

I know she's crazier than a shithouse rat, but if you ask me, Liv Napier's as good as gold. A man couldn't ask for a better friend than her, and you can take that to the bank.

Maybe I hadn't sworn in blood since I was a little kid, but maybe I was a little kid the last time I met anybody who was worth swearing in blood to.

Anybody who comes out of this crazy twisted century knowing enough about honor, duty, loyalty or decency to know what it means to swear by your blood to anyone was goddamn hard to come by.

Not to mention she could make me, for a little while, at least, forget about Jeannie.

You know what Napalm does?

It burns everything down.

So I had plenty of reasons to stick with Liv on her quest, and plenty of reasons to tell myself that good ol' Logan had everything under control and everything was gonna be just fine.

Sure, she had nightmares, bad ones, bad as mine, and that's probably why she wanted to sleep alone, in the first place, but if I moved over next to her and got close to her while she was having them, she calmed right down.

After we started sleeping in the same sleeping bag they dwindled just about to nothing; it's amazing what a little kindness can do.

And yeah, she liked to have a few shots and a few beers, but nothing out of the ordinary, and sure, she drove pretty fast but she knew that car like the back of her hand, and she drove it well.

We got into a fight or two in a bar here and there, but nothing to write home to mother about, and sure the kid was hotter than hell and hornier than a rabbit in springtime, but that wasn't anything I couldn't handle, either, let me tell you.

Maybe she's too much for some guys, but not me, I may be a whole lot of things, but I'm a man, goddammit.

So she was a little rough around the edges? The kid was a superhero, not a beauty queen. You could expect that.

On the whole, though she was a lot like the Bat told me she was on her good days.

Pretty and smart, a grown-up tomboy in a woman's body with a sunny disposition, pigtails and Keds and Levis and a thousand-watt smile.

I just got to thinking that mere mortals and non-masks and young guys who only grew their hair long and smoked reefers and pretended not to be the ramrod follow-the-leader bastards their fathers were so they could get laid and not go to war couldn't handle or understand a complicated woman like Wildcat.

But, then there were the Troubles.

I just figured, shit, how bad could it be, when she's in a safe, green, quiet place?

I mean, after I saw what she did to Sabretooth because he scratched her car and he was going to ruin another birthday for me, and maybe over some personal beef she had with him that I didn't know about, anyway, I figured I'd seen her at her worst.

I was wrong.

Yeah, sure, just about everybody who knew Liv all told me it wasn't all going to be fun and games, but it was pretty much fun and games so far.

We stayed in Howlett for a week or three, and I managed to convince her to go see the local doctor, who examined her shoulder and pronounced that she'd healed well.

He told me that he'd been in the Army for ten years, and that Liv had the kinds of scars and injuries you usually associated with Rangers or Marines, and that she had to be in quite a lot of pain, all the time, and must have had an amazing tolerance to it just to get out of bed in the morning.

Her dog, Baldur, was waiting for her at the office of the vet who patched her shoulder up.

He's just the kind of dog you would expect a girl like Liv to have. A big, shaggy beast who's part wolf, part malamute, part husky and about a hundred pounds of completely loyal to Liv.

Me, I get along well with dogs better than people, and as soon as he figured out I wasn't trouble, me and Baldur were alright.

We continued on our way to Toronto, me and her and the dog.

We camped out mostly, and stayed in a few motels, or at a few campsites, and the sun shined almost every day. When it didn't, we stayed in the room or in the tent. She brought a big box of books with her in the trunk of her car, and some of my old favourites were in there, and we were living out our own private version of Walden, except the esteemed Mr. Thoreau didn't find himself alone with the beauty of nature and the horniest hellcat just this side of paradise.

When it started to get really warm and she brought out the cutoff shorts, let me tell you, bub, a woman like Liv in a pair of short shorts makes you goddamn glad that you're a man.

I couldn't figure out what the hell she was talking about when she told me that men didn't usually stick around as long as I had.

I suppose it had something to do with the femininity factor.

On the scale of sweet, feminine and girly, Liv's about the same as the Hulk.

I mean it.

For one thing, she's heavily tattooed.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Liv's tattoos. They tell her story, that's why she has them. And the work's really good; the man who does it for her, Eddie's brother-in-law, Ivan the Bear, he's a genius with a needle, has been ever since he was at Kolyma.

I spent a little time there, but not when the Bear was around.

But, good work or no, when you think of sweet and feminine, you don't think about somebody with tattoos on their knuckles, hands, wrists, forearms, biceps, neck, shoulders, back, and even across her chest.

"You can die today—I'll die tomorrow" right across her collarbone in Gaelic, between the straps of her tank top, with a pentacle and runes between the phrases, right at the top of her breastbone.

I mean, the girl has "Hell" tattooed across the knuckles on her right hand and "Fire" on the other, she's got a skull and crossbones on the back of her right hand and an eye in the palm of her left, and this extremely intricate four color Celtic knotwork tattoo on her neck and the upper part of her chest that's like a choker, a medallion, and a collar that links up with the other tattoo on her chest.

Serious shit, but not very feminine.

At all.

And Liv doesn't dress like a girl.

She doesn't even wear bras and panties, she wears military surplus A-line shirts and army surplus boxers with the waistband folded over around her hips.

The rest of the clothes in her knapsack were a pair of mechanic's coveralls, Levis, the cutoffs, a couple of tee shirts with bands on them, a couple of lumberjack shirts, a couple of fatigue shirts and a OD pullover. As it was summer, most of the time she just wore the Levis over the boxers.

She had three coats shoved into the trunk, a canvas blue welder's jacket, a beat-up sheepskin and leather bomber and a fatigue jacket.

Okay, so she dresses like a Nam vet with shell shock, and I'm pretty sure most of her clothes are actually men's clothes, not women's.

But in the time I've been on this rock, I've seen a lot of women's fashions come and go, and every kind of dress and skirt and slacks and underwear, and I've spent many nights walking home with my balls as blue as Dr. Manhattan's because I couldn't convince those fine ladies to take their pretty clothes off.

And Liv's got a whole lotta woman under those Levi's stained with mud and the undershirt with motor oil on it and those folded-over boxers, and as long as she doesn't have any trouble sharing it with me, I don't care what she wears.

She doesn't act like a girl, either, but you'll forgive me if I say that's a relief.

I'm not the most mannerly of guys, and you get tired of women telling you to use a napkin and quit belching and did you just fart and don't put those ashes everywhere and change your shirt once in awhile and don't touch me, you're disgusting, which is usually followed by you never pay attention to me anymore, am I getting fat?

I could even swear as much as I wanted, and Liv was usually either in the mood, or real easy to get in the mood.

What more could a guy ask for?

And the grass was green and the trees were green and the birds were singing and yours truly, being half-drunk and well-fucked, which is exactly the two states of mind every man wants to be in, all the time, no matter what kind of lies he tells you to the contrary, was a happy man.

I hadn't killed anybody in two months, either, and I didn't miss it.

I guess Jeannie was right, but she wasn't just right about me, she had Napalm pegged, too.

And I can try to put a nice lacy doily around it and say we were just taking a long vacation from the usual grind of blood and brutality, but the plain fact of it was that me and Liv were both half-drunk and well-fucked, and in no hurry for a change.

Then, just like the hellacious prairie storms that sent Liv and I running for cover out of a warm and sunny day, the Troubles came.

The Troubles came with no one to look after her but me, and no place for me to lock her away, to keep her or the rest of the world safe.

And they came with a vengeance that showed me why such precautions were necessary.

I was awakened from the deep sleep of a man who is half-drunk and well-fucked by one of the most horrible screams I've heard in at least fifty years.

Liv was sitting up in her sleeping bag, she wasn't awake, just sitting up and screaming. This time I hardly had to touch her and her eyes flew open and I from the look in them for the first time in four weeks of travelling with her that she wasn't the cheerful psychopath she pretended to be.

"Daddy! Daddy, save me!" she screamed.

And she had this look on her face, this look of screaming, helpless terror like there was death and pain and fear stalking her and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Have you ever been that afraid?

I have, and I can tell you, it's no picnic.

Hindsight being 20-20, I guess that dream is the gate that opens up the cage and frees whatever I was warned lived inside Napalm, whatever it is that comes out and makes the Troubles.

But, I didn't know that at the time.

Maybe I should have.

I guess my problem was that I was half-drunk and well-fucked and I didn't want any trouble to come along and interrupt my peaceful dream.

I sure as fuck didn't want the Troubles.

I got them just the same.

Anyway, As soon as she came around from whatever she was seeing in that hellacious dream, she started to look like she was really awake, and started fumbling in her knapsack and cracked a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels.

"Don't ask me, Logan! Just go the fuck back to sleep." She snarls

She grabbed the bottle and walked out of the tent, barefoot and naked as the day she was born.

When I woke up the next morning she was sitting outside in the dirt by the ashes of the fire pit, wide awake, and the bottle was empty.

The next night she said she was going to sleep in the car, and that's where she was when I got up to take a piss, but in the morning she was nowhere in sight and I had to go look for her.

I found her wandering around in the woods, drunk and naked with scratches all over her from sharp branches and thorns.

She didn't even realise that they were there, and I think it took her a minute or two before she remembered who I was.

Now the first sign of the Troubles was for Liv to start having more nightmares, and withdrawing into her own private hell and to begin drinking more heavily.

But I was kidding myself, because I didn't want to have to deal with it.

So when she'd wake up in a black mood muttering about the hair of the dog that bit her, and started drinking at breakfast, and kept slugging it down until she was drunk as a bum under a bridge, and then go wandering off naked into the brush, I hoped the kid was going on a tear.

People do, you know, especially drunks, and the Wildcat was one of your more functional drunks, a fact she made no bones about, and I don't know if the woods of Great White North is the best place to dry out or if I'm the kinda guy who's qualified to help.

So, like a dumb ass, when she had a reasonably lucid moment and asked me to, I just got in the car and went and bought more booze.

I figured that might quiet her down.

Meanwhile, things were getting worse every day.

Liv was at the point where she was puking on her shoes and when I suggested maybe she should ease up a little she gave me the finger and went off into the woods again with her old buddy Jack Daniels.

She didn't come back all day, this time. When it started to get late, me and the dog sat there in the tent for half the night and looked at each other, and then sat outside half the night and looked at each other, and then we went off into the woods to find her.

We found her in the facedown on the ground outside in a puddle of piss, puke, and whiskey, and that poor dog just sat down beside her and howled, mournfully.

Now I know that doesn't sound like a pretty sight, and that's because it wasn't, and I gotta tell you, I wasn't sure what the hell to do next.

I carried her back to the campsite and then to the showers to wash her off.

She didn't wake up.

All of the sudden, it wasn't all fun and games, and I got the picture that my task, and I had been crazy enough to accept it, was to shepherd home a violent, half-mad alcoholic who had parted ways with much of her sanity and her humanity a while back, and was hell-bent on destruction, both of herself and anyone else she might run into, and had the training and the strength to kill just about anyone but me, and might just be in the mood to do it.

Napalm.

The next day, I said something to her about how drunk she got, and she gave me that devil-eyed look and asked me how I would feel about getting shot multiple times with the chopper.

Whatever she was going through, it wasn't over, yet.

I didn't know what the fuck was happening.

For a week, she didn't do anything but drink.

All day long and all night until she passed out.

I had to make the food and drive the car and take care of Baldur, and when Liv drank herself into a stupor and passed out, I had to take care of her, too.

And then, she woke up in the morning and she seemed just fine.

No drinking until she was cross-eyed, no wandering around in the woods naked so I had to go and find her before she tumbled down a canyon, no death-threats, nothing.

I figured the binge was over, and I'd made it through the Troubles, so I decided I'd let her alone, give her some time for the hangover from to wear off.

That night, she wanted to go out to some bar and play some pool and listen to some records, and when we got in the car she was even sober enough to drive.

And I didn't notice the bar she pulled into was a dive, not even when we were in it.

I'm used to dives.

Now that the kid wasn't too drunk to drive, screaming all night, or threatening to penetrate my hide with multiple calibre bullets, I figured the Troubles were over, and I gotta confess that I was so relieved that I was pretty goddamn drunk by the time the shit really hit the fan.

I was just about as wrong about that as a man can be.

I have seen some things, and I have seen some more things, and I thought I had seen it all in my long, long, long life, but bub, I have never seen anything like what the Harlequin did.

I'm not sure if somebody dropped an H-bomb in my lap that it would kill me, and just because I'm not that fond of pain, I can tell you I wouldn't do anything like what the she did.

And when I say that, I mean I would have had a whole helluva lot better approach.

Just about any kind of goddamn plan would have been a better approach.

But, then again, I'm not the Joker's little girl, and let me tell you something that Black Tom Logan was right about.

Blood is blood, and blood rules out.

You know the last guy in a dive you would ever want to fuck with?

The one who looks like he keeps rotting heads in a bag in his trunk so he can skull-fuck them?

Sorry about putting that picture in your head, but I just wanted you to know what kind of asshole this asshole was.

So, imagine a guy like that, and imagine he has about twenty skull-fucking, pushing-smack-to-children, old-lady-murdering, baby-raping, kiddie-porn trafficking, dog-buggering, shoot you just to watch you die, heavily armed psychotic goons high on speed and cheap booze surrounding him.

Now imagine that you are a woman five foot two with your shoes on, tipping the scales at about a buck forty-five, with no superpowers to speak of, and these guys, though lowlives not deserving of the oxygen they suck up, haven't even so much as looked at you.

"You see that fat motherfucker? And his butt buddies? I don't like 'em." Liv says.

"I don't like 'em, either, Wildcat. But it's not up to me to kill every asshole in the world, tonight." I joked.

Now don't get me wrong.

You know me.

If that fat prick or any of his goons started any shit with me, well you got a pretty good idea of how that would come out.

But what the fuck did I care if they were just gonna sit there?

I just wanted to have a couple of goddamn beers, and maybe a few shots, that's all.

"Fine. You finish your drink. I'll be right back."

I thought she was going to get a fucking drink, but instead, and if I'm lying , then that that fuck Victor Creed is my brother or my father or whoever he says he is, she calmly walked up to the head honcho.

"Hey, fat boy! Yeah, I'm talkin' to you, you fat fuck prick! I'm not sure I like you stinkin' up this pristine wilderness. I'm gonna give you to three to haul your ass outa here and take your goons with you…and then I'm gonna shoot you, cut out your goddamn liver like Jeremiah fuckin' Johnson and eat it, and leave ya on this floor to die. Slow."

You could have heard a pin drop.

The fat bastard laughed, Liv counted to three, and then she pulled out one of her .45's and blew his kneecap to Buffalo.

You can imagine that the big fat piece of shit went down like a ton of bricks.

His goons, however, were not amused.

Three or four of them turned around and ran out the door.

They were smart enough to realise that anybody who had did something like what the kid just did wasn't fucking around.

That still left about sixteen guys for her to fight, and they weren't fucking around either.

The whole place went up.

The last thing I saw before they converged on her was Liv breaking a bottle and giving one guy a face full of glass while she smacked another one's head off the bar, repeatedly, until blood started squirting out of it.

This is how the Harlequin does it when she's not fucking around.

Some of the local yokels wanted in on it, but when they saw my claws, most of them decided to go sit the fuck down and finish their drinks and watch the show.

And after I sliced and diced one of the goons who was shooting at me first and figuring fuck questions and I didn't seem to die, that gave the rest of them something to think about while I did some good old-fashioned pounding on them.

Like the Professor says, you shouldn't kill unless you have to, so I just pretty much beat them like I owned them.

Tossed a couple through the window, just to show I was serious.

But, if good old Napalm was the one with the claws, all those fuckers would have been dead.

Sometimes when I think about it, I think she really didn't need me. I probably could have sat there and not got shot, or beat, or stabbed, or stomped and it would have turned out the same.

Bloody.

Real bloody.

Like slipping in blood and puke and piss on the floor bloody.

Imagine if you took a bunch of assholes, and put them in a blender and turned it on.

That's what it looked like.

One of them after another came flying or staggering or falling or away from her, blood splattering and teeth flying through the air, pukin' on themselves from getting a steel-toed boot in the belly, or having their ribs punched in or their larynxes crushed by a fist that packed a lot more power than it looked like they would.

Some on 'em holding their useless broken arms with the bones sticking out and the gun still in their hands and screaming in pain, looking at what happened to their buddies and literally pissing themselves in fear.

I'm the best at what I do, and what I do isn't very nice, but the Harlequin, she's the best at what she does, too, and what she does is show bad guys what Hell is going to be like by bringing it to them right here on Earth.

By the time I fought my way over to her to save her, she was all done, and the place looked like a Hurricane had hit it.

Hurricane Liv.

She didn't look too good either, but she was standing and walking, which was more than I could say for Fat Boy and most of his goons.

Between the two of us, we laid them all out.

She leaned over to talk to Fat Boy, who was still on the ground, holding onto what was left of his knee.

"Bet you wished you woulda got the fuck out when I toleja, chief." She chuckles.

Now I'd like to say that I'm a hundred per cent sure that she was just flashing that knife at Fat Boy for effect and she was not going to slice him open and tear his liver out and eat it raw, while he watched her as he bled to death screaming in agony, but she did tell Sabretooth she was going to rip his heart out and then she did it, so I wasn't going to take anything for granted.

"I think he's had enough, kid. I think you've had enough, too." I said.

"Yeah, you gotta point, Logan. I can afford to be merciful."

She was merciful.

She put the knife away, pulled one of her guns, jammed it against his head, and drilled Fat Boy right between the eyes.

Now I know you've been to the movies, but have you ever seen what a .45 caliber bullet with a full metal jacket does to a man's head at point-blank range in real life?

You know how much blood and bone and brains you're gonna get all over yourself if you're holding the gun that fires it?

Or if you're standing next to the lunatic holding the gun?

Trust me, bub, you don't want to.

I can tell you this, though, Napalm didn't even flinch.

She put her gun away and gave the bartender a piece of paper.

"Send the bill here. If you have any more trouble with these lowlife motherfuckers, call the Harlequin. C'mon, Logan, we're done, here."

And she leaves.

I was so fucking surprised, I just stood there for a minute or two in the middle of it, looking around.

"Jesus, Mister, did you know she was gonna do that?" the bartender asks me.

"Bub, I had no fuckin' idea."

"She came in here this morning, and I said Old Fat Joe and his gang were making it hard for me to do business in this place, and that the local cops didn't give a shit as they are bought and paid for. Sure I told her what a bunch of dope-pushing murdering low-life sons of bitches him and his outfit were, and how they been making it so decent people can hardly live in this town, and I can't say as how I'm not glad to see him dead, but, Jesus, Mister, I ain't never even heard of anything like that. Don't get me wrong now, that man lying there with his brains on the floor was one of the worst excuses for a human being the Good Lord ever allowed to suck up air on his Green Earth, but…but if I didn't know better I'd think the Devil himself sent up a little red demon to carry Old Fat Joe and some of them sons of bitches right down to Hell."

I looked around.

"I'm not so sure of that, myself." I said.

And I don't know who cleans up the kid's messes in New York, either the cops do or maybe the Justice League does, or New York's so full of bodies and bullshit nobody notices, but I had to call up some people who I'm not supposed to know and who aren't supposed to exist at midnight to do some damage control.

When I finally got out of there, I found Liv waiting for me behind the wheel, with the engine running.

She was too beat up and too drunk to drive, but that didn't stop her.

Not Napalm.

She was just getting warmed up.

After having annihilated some of the most fearsome members of one of the biggest outlaw biker gangs in Ontario, it was time for her to annihilate us.

The whole goddamn car smells like blood and death, and on top of it, she's flying down these dark winding roads, downhill, with no lights at all, with one eye swollen shut, playing Led Zeppelin on the radio at a deafening volume, bleeding all over the seats.

Big surprise, she's still drinking.

There's blood all over her and some of it has to be hers, but she's so keyed up and getting so drunk so fast, I don't think she even realises that she's hurt at all.

And me, I don't wanna try and take the wheel because if she shoots me in the head and I'm out of it for a few minutes while my brain regenerates, we might get killed.

That's the kind of mood she's in.

If I say three words to her, she'll start putting bullets in my fucking head.

She's killed at least five men, tonight, and she's not done yet, she won't be done until she's lying dead in a ditch somewhere and I'm in for about 12 hours of pain and suffering while my body knits itself back together.

I don't want to have to lie at the bottom of a canyon in agony, looking at her broken and mangled and dead beside me the whole time.

So I'm sitting there, saying my prayers, and trying to figure out what to do next when she starts to take a turn way too fast.

I lunged over and cracked her one in the shoulder, hard, right where she got shot, which put her in enough agony that I could manage to shove her into the passenger set, get in the driver's seat and shift gears and get on the brakes and the clutch and pray to God and crank the wheel.

It took less time to say it than it did to do it.

We laid some tire, and sideswiped the guardrail, with paint scraping and sparks flying, but they knew what they were doing in Detroit when they made that big bitch Super Wildcat, and we made it.

If she'd been alone, and there was nobody in the car to save her ass, she would have got an all-expense paid trip down the embankment and it was pretty dark, but I'm fairly sure there were jagged rocks below.

The kid was looking at me funny and holding onto her arm, like she was already drunk and confused and now she was in horrible pain and she couldn't figure out what was happening.

I took the opportunity to pull the car over to the side of the road, and put both my hands on her arms and shake her a little and get right in her face, to try and snap her out of it.

"What the fuck are you doing? Are you out of your fucking mind? Okay, the bartender said something about running those scumbags off, maybe putting the ringleader on ice, but off the top of my head I can think of about twenty ways to do it that would have been a lot better idea than that! Do you know how incredibly fucked up you are if I, me, Wolverine has to tell you to knock off the ultraviolence? And what the fuck was that all about, the way you were driving? Would you like to die? This ain't the fuckin' city, you don't ram a pole and get out and say, aw shit! If we go over the hill, I'm in a lotta pain, but you are fuckin' done! Dead! Busted into little bloody bits hanging from rocks? You get me?"

She sure as shit didn't get me.

She got that hopeless look of crazy, mindless, evil look on her face, and grinned me a great big Joker smile.

And laughed.

I looked in her eyes and they were like two cat's eye marbles, there was nobody home.

You don't ever want to see anything like that.

It's a helluva lot worse than anything else I just described to you, seeing something like that.

"If you were anybody else, this would be the part where I put a gun to your head and told you that you'd better let me drive. But you know, and I know, chief, that would only make you mad. But you had better let me drive, anyway. Because even you gotta sleep sometime. And when you think this is all in the past, I will get that fancy special machete made outa the same adamantium you got your bones wrapped in from my trunk, and I will chop your motherfuckin' head right off and throw it so far you'll die chasing after it."

Jeannie was right.

So, not only is she threatening to kill me, she's put some thought into the best way to do it.

Well, I don't like to get violent with a woman, but that was it, no more Mr. Nice Guy.

If I wanted us both to get to sunrise alive, I was gonna have to get tough.

I jammed my fist under her chin, hard, and unsheathed a claw on either side of her face. I know they were close enough to her skin to cut her just a little, but I wanted her to know I was serious.

Deadly goddamn serious.

Did I mention she still didn't flinch?

"Not if I see you, first, baby! Now you sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up and let me drive, or the next move you make will be your last! Two can play at that game. I can pop that middle claw and push this car over that hill and tell everybody how you went out in a blaze of stupidity, and they'll believe it."

She was pretty sure I wasn't really going to kill her, but just in case, she kept still.

Now, I got torn up pretty good, but by the time we got back to the campsite I was healed up like nothing ever happened.

She was a different story.

It didn't bother her I threatened to kill her, as soon as I retracted my claws and moved my hand, she just crawled off into the back seat where she had a blanket and more booze and she mumbled something that sounded pretty insulting, and just then, I didn't give a fuck what happened to the crazy little Devil.

Even in the dark I could see she'd taken some serious damage, you don't fight that may guys and not take some serious damage, but I was too mad to care.

I figured that if she could live through getting shot all by herself, she'd make it through a simple beating and a few superficial nicks here and there, and I got my shit together and took the two-fifty that was rightfully mine and jammed my knapsack onto my back and started walking.

I think I was about two miles down the road before I started to think about what would happen in the morning when she woke up feeling like Thor himself was inside her head beating her skull with his hammer, in the back seat of her car all covered in dried blood with the blanket all stiff with it, her whole body hurting and her face all swollen up and looking like ten pounds of raw hamburger and found that whatever demon that got inside her had gone, and she was all alone, again.

Then I realised that after she pulled these stunts at home, she had to stagger back to someplace to lick her wounds, probably back to Wayne Manor for a stern lecture, but it was home, where there were people who would help her get cleaned up and put her back together and put her to bed and keep an eye on her so she didn't throw up while she was unconscious and choke to death, as drunk as she was.

A place where people showed her a little kindness, a little tenderness.

Family.

Friends.

I was her friend, hell I was more than that, and I knew it.

I swore by my blood and on my honour that I'd always be her friend and never betray her, and those ain't the kind of oaths a man like me takes lightly.

If I only stuck around when things were good and got in the wind the minute they went bad, what kind of way was that to keep my oath?

If she swore by her blood that she would always be loyal and true and always my friend, that meant she wasn't gonna kill me in cold blood while I slept, didn't it?

What about a little kindness and a little tenderness?

Sure, Logan, it's easy to show the kid a little kindness and a little tenderness when you're in bed with her, but how about now? Now that she's drunk and savage and furious and bleeding and she's just about ready to saw off your head?

Now's when she needs it most.

Just like you did, once upon a time not so long ago.

And when I started thinking about her bleeding to death during the night, or lying the wrong way and choking on her own puke, and somebody finding her the next morning dead in the car, under a dirty blanket stiff with dried blood, one eye swollen shut and one staring blankly up at them, the dog howling mournfully beside the car, I turned around and walked right back.

The car door was half-open when I got there and the tough little broad was trying to get out and stand up, but she couldn't, and she was hanging onto Baldur, who kept licking her face and whining.

He gave me an accusing look as I came close to the car.

"Hey, she's never threatened to kill you." I told the dog.

I opened the door all the way and hauled her out.

"Okay, She-Hulk. Time to hit the showers." I said.

"Logan, you know I wouldn't do nothin' to really hurtcha. I got an oath to keep." She says.

"So do I. And I never woulda popped that third claw, either. Quit trying to stand. I gotcha." I replied

When I got her to the showers and I saw her in the light, I realised she was hurt pretty goddamn bad.

One eye was swollen shut, her nose was all over her face and had dried blood all over it, her lip was puffy and split and she had two or three slashes on her arm that I could see.

That was just the obvious damage.

It wasn't shit compared to what she did to ten of fifteen grown men in her fury, but that's' a lot of punishment for a little girl to take, and I couldn't just let her lie there and bleed.

I cleaned her up, and put her back together, and in the light in the showers I could see bruises starting to form on her body, especially around her kidneys and her ribs.

I helped her put some clean clothes on and walked her back to the car, which I had to clean up, and then I broke camp, and drove us to a roadside motel and got a room.

We checked in around dawn.

She needed a bed, and she was going to need one for a couple of days.

When I put her in the bed and covered her up, she went right to sleep, and I went right back out to the car and got her bottle from the back seat and finished it, and then I called the Bat and told him everything that happened, and he didn't seem surprised and thanked me for taking good care of her and getting her out of trouble.

But I got really upset, and I was yelling and screaming and at the end of it I asked him something like didn't he know that she was going to get herself killed, and what was he going to do about it, because I couldn't think of anything.

"Yes. But the only thing that's going to stop her is fear. She knows I would never kill her, so she doesn't fear me enough to listen to me. And she's figured out that you would never kill her, so she doesn't fear you enough to listen to you. But, the Comedian, he's a wild animal, just like she is. Except he's an older, meaner, bigger wild animal who already did what she's doing when he was a young pup like her. She listens to him. She always has."

Now I know Eddie Blake, and I knew him when he was a young pup, we were fighting the Nazis together with the Invaders, and I saw just what he was made of when he and I and poor dead Bucky Barnes got cut off behind enemy lines and had to make our way through Hell to get back to base camp.

And I had just done a tour with Eddie, and I had the Operation Wrath of God patch on my fatigues to prove it.

On and off the battlefield, I have been Eddie Blake's friend and he has been mine since 1943 or so, and I know him well, and I know Napalm pretty well, so I also know just why it was she listened to him.

Bruce probably does, too, but he doesn't want to think about it,

"I love her, Logan. A lot of people love her. Love hasn't worked. So I'm going to have to try fear."

I wanted to tell him that his thinking was all wrong; Liv wasn't scared to die; she laughed at fear and death. I was about to tell him that maybe since he was her father, he just couldn't show her the kind of love she needed.

Like the man at the hotel in BC said, sometimes all a woman needs from a man is for him to shut up and be a man.

Still, it was his idea and somebody had to break it to him.

"You really think that's what it's gonna be between them? Fear?" I asked.

The Batman sighed, heavily.

"Don't tell me this, Logan. Please don't tell me that Satan himself made my little girl in Hell just for that old Devil Eddie Blake and that she's just as full of sulphur and molten hellfire as he is, and that's why she listens to him."

"Bruce, as long as she listens to him, and he treats her with, well, a little kindness, a little tenderness, what do you care?" I asked.

That didn't seem to make him feel much better.

So, I promised him again I'd have her home, safe and sound, and he said that while we were in Toronto, we could stay at his penthouse along the lakefront.

The next morning, despite my best efforts, Liv's face looked like ten pounds of raw hamburger, and she had bruises all over her body, and the one's I'd noticed the night before were real goddamn bad.

I know she must have had a cracked rib or two, and I was surprised she could get out of bed under her own steam , and that she could manage to twist those swollen lips into a smile.

"You look like hell, Logan." She told me.

"So do you, Napalm. But Fat Boy's dead, and so are a few of his goons, and those people in that little town are free of 'em, so, I guess the good guys won."

"You got that right. Sometimes street justice is the best justice. But you already know that. Anyway, I'm done now. They've passed. My Troubles, I mean. I'll have to stay in bed for a day or two, and I imagine Ill be pissin' blood for a week, but, insofar as Troubles go, I should be good until right around Christmas. I was having the Troubles every month for awhile there, but I'm a little better now. I was kinda hoping I'd get back to New York before it happened again, but, well, I'm sorry."

I didn't know what the fuck to say to her.

"Liv, you have to find out what makes you do shit like that and stop it. Or you are going to die, woman."

"I know. But right now, I think I just need some sleep."

I made sure she got to the can and back, and that she had some food and I put her back to bed and got in beside her.

I needed some sleep, too. I was out like a light for a good long time.

In two days, though, Liv was up and around, and she was back to her normal self .

We hit the road with her behind the wheel. Me in the passenger seat and Baldur in the back with his head out the window, just like in better times.

In the next town she got some paint and some fill and fixed the car, and she healed pretty fast for a regular human.

By the next week everything was the way it had been before, just like nothing ever happened, and Liv acted like nothing ever happened.

Me, I didn't say shit to her about it; I didn't want to bring it on again.

What the hell else could I do?

I'll admit it, I just wasn't the man for the job.

I swore on my blood to be her friend and that's an oath I'll be proud to keep, but I can't be her knight in shining armor.

That little dream I had of retiring to a little cabin in the mountains with the Wildcat died right about then.

For one thing, I knew she would never make it on that quiet, normal life deal, and for another, I knew I wouldn't either.

And she needed more than a little kindness and a little tenderness, she needed love, real love. And it had to come from the dark heart of a man who saw her for everything she really was, good and bad, and still loved her, just the same.

And my heart may be black, but it's not a Heart of Darkness.

I: Liv

Boy, do I know how to fuck up a good thing.

Because I can only think of one man I ever met that I don't scare the unholy fuck out of.

Not to say Logan is scared of me that I'm going to seriously hurt him. Nobody can seriously hurt him.

What I did manage to do was freak him out, seriously. I mean, he knew I was kind of a tough broad, but someplace in his mind I think he was still seeing me as just this spunky little Twinkie he was putting the cream to.

When I was boxing those fucks for money, I was just screwing around. When I just about sawed Victor Creed in half, well, I lost my temper. Logan and I both knew I couldn't kill the bastard , I just wanted to make sure my friend Logan had a happy birthday and that Sabretooth never forgot the Harlequin.

When I took on those lowlives in the bar, I was serious, I was doing my fucking job.

That said, had I not been in the midst of the Troubles, I would have used a slightly less completely fucking psycho approach.

But back to Wolverine, all of the sudden, our relations were strained.

Okay, maybe I do have a machete that supposedly could cut through adamantium, but it's never been tested and I would never have really cut off his head and I know he would never have really popped that third claw.

When you're not innocent or clean and you never have been, and decent people have spit on you since the day you were born, you got nothing but your honor to give and nothing but your blood to swear it by, so you can bet that neither of us were really going to break the oath we took.

Still, those kinds of situations tend to put a chill on anybody's good faith in each other, so when I say our relations were strained, I mean we were no longer having them. And I'm not just talking about the kind of relations that used to take place on a regular basis in and around our tent and our campsites.

We were barely fucking speaking.

I'm talking I think Logan would have been in the wind if he hadn't promised Bruce that he would see me safely home and there wasn't blood between us.

I can't say I blame him, after the shit I pulled.

I'm used to it. A lotta men, they meet Liv, they think she's a little wild, but they like her, but when they meet the Harlequin, well, they're pissing their pants and screaming for Mommy.

Now Logan, he's not some uptown Manhattan faux-hippie fake freak jock in high school who used to make fun of real freaks pussy, so I figured that I could find a way to make amends, at least so we could continue as friends after this adventure. Because, even putting aside the masterful way in which he was consistently slipping me the old beef torpedo, I like the hairy little bastard, and I trust him.

He's my friend.

And it's blood between us.

Well I was driving, and it was my blood and sweat that got us the money for this little trip and you know me by now, I have no shame, no finesse, and no subtlety, so fuck yeah, I brought it up.

"Hey, Logan, if you want me to leave you and your dough off in the next town, I understand. I'm used to it. I'm a freak and I've been an outcast all my life; I'm used to people getting a load of the real me and running screaming into the night. I'm all better now, I can make it on my own. I'll see you in Toronto, and if not, I'll see you around."

"When I make a promise, I keep it."

Terse and and square-jawed, like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western.

"Goddamnit, ya threatened to kill me, too! I was one claw away from gettin' shish-kebabed, and I ain't holding a grudge. So I'm tough. So I'm a killer. So are you, and it never bothered me."

Logan just puffed his cigar and gave me a funny look.

We were a mile or five down the road before he said anything

"You're a loose cannon, kid. That's what bothers me. People say I am, but when it comes down to it, I've got my shit together. You don't. I'm not worried about myself. I know you'll keep your oath. I'm worried about you. I don't want to see you die, and you pull another stunt like that and I may not be able to get to you before all I have to take home to your stepfather is a pine box. Liv, I want you to understand, I'm not sayin' I think you shoulda treated those lowlives with kid gloves. I can't say I'm personally opposed to you killin' some of 'em, maybe, and I'm glad Charlie ain't here to hear me say it, all of 'em, but we both know killin' all of 'em, that might be the easiest way, but it ain't right. No, what bothers me is the way you did it. It would just about take a miracle to kill me, and I wouldn't have played it that way, simply because I'm not that big of a fan of being in, or even dishing out, that much pain. It was dumb. Especially for somebody who's 100% mortal. And somebody who obviously knows better. I know shit like that wouldn't fly in New York."

"I usually plan things out better than that. I think if you weren't there, I'd be dead."

"Me too. Listen, Napalm, when you get back, Bruce is planning to apprentice you to Eddie. And as somebody who's known him longer than you have, I can tell you that he's a real bad, mean, son-of-a-bitch, a real wild animal. But Eddie, he's not a product of some experiment and he ahsn't got any superpowers. He's just a man. But he's the only man I know who could get a load of you at your worst, crack a smile, and let it roll off him like water off a duck's back. Do yourself a favor. Stick with him. Learn from him. Listen to him. Other than that, you're headed to an early grave, and then straight to Hell."

"Logan, I always listen to Eddie."

"Bullshit. If you always listened to Eddie, you wouldn't have done any of the stupid shit you did this year. You gotta mind the man even if he's not right there, tellin' you what to do. And the same with me. An' Bruce. An' Clark. When you listen to alla the shit whizzing around in your great big jumped up Boeing 747 roaring jet engine mind, try to filter out the bullshit and pay attention to what people who are older and wiser than you have told you a million goddamn times. You might live to see thirty, if you do." Logan snapped.

Then, he turned away from me.

Most of the time there's nothing I can do to take that creeping mortal fear out a person when they've seen that I'd be capable of killing them with the same amount of compunction I'd have about killing a mosquito.

But, in Logan's case, there was something I could do to make him feel better.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road and I got out.

Logan got curious, and he got out, too.

I took out the special machete that Bruce had given me.

"I know you take me at my word, Logan, but I just wanna show you I take a blood oath seriously. Everybody told ya I was dangerous, an' everybody was right. But the one thing they don't seem to know is that just because I might be capable of killing anybody, including my friends, that doesn't mean I'd ever do it. I don't kill for sport, or because I'm angry, I only kill when I have to, when my life is threatened, or when it's what justice calls for. First lesson Bruce taught me, and there isn't enough booze or anger or madness in the world to make me forget it. Now, if for any reason I could go mad enough to break my oath to you, this is the only thing in the world I could do it with."

I took the machete, went to the edge of the treeline, found a sharp slope and tossed the thing as hard as I could.

"Fuck it. Bruce can buy me another one. Adamantium's expensive, but he's made of money. Let's get back in the car." I said.

I held out my hand like I wanted to shake on it, and Logan got this big smile on his face, and he took my hand and hauled me to him and laid a big old soul kiss on me.

"I liked that better than a handshake." I told him.

"I shake hands with men. No use wastin' a woman like you."

Then the crazy bastard went down over the hill to get the machete back.

"What the hell are you doing?" I asked.

"Gettin' your weapon back. I got six of these and you got one. That evens out the odds if we do ever get really mad at each other." he said.

Man has a good point, there.

We got back on the road, and just like I'd told them in the building where Bruce has his penthouse, later on that day, we arrived in Toronto.

I couldn't wait to see the look on Logan's face when he got a load of that joint.