Chapter 6
The Night

Hours later, the dream took hold. It was almost painfully vivid: arms bound to a post behind his back, the lingering taste of a cigar on his breath and a line of armed men in fatigues before him. He could've easily broken his bindings, uprooted the whole damned post if need be, but his dream-self knew that it would only make what was to come harder. He felt more annoyed than he did afraid. The man bound beside him felt familiar, familial. He'd muttered something that Logan couldn't quite remember. Then a scream and a rain of bullets. Usually he woke at the moments in dreams where normal people would have died. Instead, he slept straight through until the wounds healed enough for him to come to, laying in the dirt, chained in a cell.

At that point he'd finally woken, sat bolt-upright in bed, panting and sweating. The long sleeved t-shirt and thin black lounge pants that he'd purchase the morning before clung to his damp skin. He counted it as a sort of blessing that the claws hadn't come out and that he hadn't screamed.

He turned automatically to check on Marie. He found her sleeping with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, the blanket inched down around her waist.

He pulled himself out of bed and made his way to the bathroom. He knew his own nightmares well. This one had been new. And, as with every time something new drifted forward, he knew he'd be up all night wondering if it had just been a dream or if it was at least partially a memory.

Logan crept back across the room and around the bed. He tugged the blanket back up around Marie's shoulders because, despite her long sleeves and thin white gloves, she looked cold, before turning to lie back down. On the table laid the pair of folders that Storm had sent. Again he wondered if he should look. It would have been a matter of record somewhere: execution by firing squad. Fingers shaking more than he would ever admit, he reached for the files. He hadn't noticed before how thick his was.

He didn't know how long he'd been sitting there, staring blankly at his folder when the lamp next to the couch flicked on. He turned sharply in the direction of the light in time to see Marie pulling the blanket that she'd been sleeping under around her shoulders and stand from the couch. He hadn't even noticed that she was awake.

"There's not going to be any answers on the outside of the file, Logan," she softly drawled.

"I was James once," he said, tracing the label.

"I know," she said as she climbed onto the foot of the bed.

"You read it?"

"Of course not," she said, sounding offended. "I'd never betray your privacy and past like that. I didn't even know what she'd sent."

Without knowing it she had expressed the very reason that he'd left her file untouched. "Then how?"

"I don't have a pair of adamantium bullets lodged in my brain keeping some of the memories locked up."

A pair of bullets? In his brain? Oh God, did she have dreams of him being shot? Or was this something that the Professor knew and had kept from him? He found that those questions weren't as important as he'd once suspected. "Not just the nightmares and the deja vu then?"

"No. Solid memories. Every touch. From everyone."

His mind flickered back across the people he knew she'd touched: her first boyfriend, Magneto, presumably Bobby, himself, "You know everything?"

"No. Not everything."

"Why didn't you ever tell me?"

"The Professor said it'd come on it's own. He had me write down what I could, though I honestly didn't put it all down. I wouldn't leave you exposed like that. The rest of that file, I guess, is his own research. I didn't think you'd want to hear it from me when it was supposed to come on it's own."

He nodded, somehow unsurprised with how quickly she'd gotten to the very heart of the matter. "I don't want to be told who I am. I want to know."

"But you know who you are, Logan," she sounded almost sad.

"Who I was then," he corrected. "I don't even know what's nightmares and what's memories anymore."

"I wish I could help."

"Me too ki-Marie."

A thoughtful flicker crossed her face. "What if..."

"What if what?"

She shook her head.

"C'mon now. What are you thinking?"

"What if I could tell you?" she asked quietly.

"If they're real or not?"

She nodded and he found himself mulling the idea over. "Storm said you were set on helping me. I... I want to help you too."

He found himself pausing, something crossing his mind that he hadn't yet considered. The thought was spoken aloud before he could stop it. "Do you even want my help?"

"What?"

"I know I'm not the best guy for the job, but I'll help you the best I can if you want to work out how to control it. But if you want..." he couldn't bring himself to suggest another dose of the 'cure', "to do something else about it... or nothing else... I'll understand that too."

"I'm stronger than I used to be," she said softly.

He could only guess at her meaning. "You were stronger than you knew all along. Strength's got nothing to do with it. It's not weak to want to be different than you are."

She shook her head. "I hated who I was. I didn't understand it. But now... I've been powerless long enough. A needle in the arm to fix all my problems? What kind of a person does that make me? I don't want to be afraid of myself again, of what I'm capable of doing to me."

It dawned on him that they'd never really talked about her getting the 'cure' past the conversation in the school's foyer. He'd never actually suspected that she had come to regret it, but that was a conversation for another time. "Now you're back to being afraid of what your powers do to others."

"No."

He simply looked at her with one eyebrow raised.

"Alright... Yes."

"Even what they'll do to me."

"Especially to you."

"I don't get hurt like everyone else does."

"I know it's not the same kind of hurt with you."

"I'll heal, no matter what you throw at me," he insisted, ignoring her implication.

"I hope so," she said. Her voice sounded dismal.

He leaned back so he was half sitting up against the headboard and pulled the covers that were left on the bed up around his waist "Kill the light and c'mere" he said, patting the pillows beside him.

"But..."

"I'm not going to be able to sleep anymore tonight and you're still cold."

AN: I don't know if anyone has noticed that the word cure is always written as 'cure' (or at least I'm meaning for it to always be written that way). It's sort of my way of showing Logan's cynical/sarcastic attitude toward it. Not that I believe he sees it as a bad thing (after all he didn't try to stop Marie when left the mansion and he seemed to see nothign wrong with using it as a weapon against Magneto), but that he finds fault with the failure to deliver the promised permanence. This, of course, would go doubly since it failed Marie.