CHAPTER FIVE


Logan is speeding down the highway.

I know you've done good things.

His right hand fumbles for the near-empty bottle of whisky next to him. He takes a quick swig, followed by another and another. And then the bottle is empty.

"Fuck!"

He wishes he'd just kept walking away.

I'm a fucking masochist, Logan thinks, furious with himself.

But then that woman had grabbed him and he'd been so shocked by her sheer audacity to actually reach out to him that his claws had almost pierced through. A very human woman of five foot nothing that weighed less than half of him.

Elena.

He wishes he'd bought more whisky.

The moment he heard her name, he knew she was trouble. Her and her kid. Both trouble. He thinks of the blond man from the day before, Pierce, and he has to restrain himself from crushing the steering wheel beneath his hands. He has enough on his hands already just dealing with Charles alone. And Caliban too.

Now there is this woman and her child along with a man who is hell bent on finding them. Logan knows, just knows, that Pierce is ex military of some sort with a specific set of skills. He doesn't care. He, himself, is a military man. Pick a war within the last two hundred years and there he is, being shot at by bow and arrow, by cannons, guns, machine guns, artillery, weapons of mass destruction and even nuclear bombs.

He and Charles need to leave soon. He knows time is fickle and is something neither of them have enough of left. He knows this in spades. The Sunseeker is the only option they have left to live out the rest of their days on the open seas.

It would be a fitting place for them to both die, he thinks.

And when the moment finally happens, when Charles Xavier finally takes his last breath, Logan will simply take the one adamantium bullet he has and shoot himself with it.

You're waiting for me to die.

There is a burning sensation behind his eyes, something Logan blinks back as Charles's words echo. His friend is only partly right on that account because the brutal truth of it is that he is waiting to die. He wants his turn for oblivion but he owes Charles a debt of gratitude which chains him to his friend, shackles him.

So he waits.

All for fuckin' nothing, Logan thinks.

I know you've done good things.

He all but snarls as the woman - Elena's - voice comes back to him.

Logan really doesn't want to think of any good thing right now. Not one good thing. Because the grief is too near, always has been and always will.

But it is too late to back down now. He told the woman he'd be there tomorrow and so he would. There is too much money at stake and he needs it to buy the boat. Fifty thousand dollars is difficult to come by especially these days. He needs the money, they need the money.

He tells himself this is why he's taken on the woman and the girl.

The girl who had barely blinked looking at him throughout his entire confrontation with her mother.

Logan knows there is something odd about that child but didn't think the oddness was due to strangeness, per se, but more of a familiarity. Like finding a book you'd lost and then suddenly stumbling upon it after some time. A kind of out-of-place déjà vu that shouldn't be there.

And as for the mother saying the girl is a mutant, he isn't entirely convinced. The desperation reeking off her mother triggered his heightened olfactory senses to suspect there were lies in her words.

Or, at the very least, the woman is definitely hiding something.

It is with these thoughts in mind that he returns to the abandoned smelting factory over the Tex-Mex border where he continues to brood over his life. He parks the limo outside and slips into his makeshift room ignoring Caliban's nagging upon arrival. He nearly trips over a few empty bottles before sitting down on the edge of his bed.

He feels weary and aching and old.

The sight of his dog tags nearby sets his teeth on edge.

He blinks away the memory of a smiling auburn haired teenage girl with a stripe of white in her hair, wearing those very same dog tags around her slender neck and telling him she doesn't want him to go.

Logan kicks the empty bottle closest to his bed. It shatters somewhere in the darkened room.

Marie, too, had been in trouble when he first met her nearly thirty years ago. He had not wanted to help her either.

Where is Marie now?

Dead.

Her Ice-Man husband, Bobby, had been all but ten feet away from her, his features contorted in agony, hands stretched out in her direction as if to warn her. Too late, of course. Because Bobby died too. Both of them dead at the age of forty three because of Charles's terrible, heart breaking accident.

Logan bends down to unlace his boots, kicks them off and lays down.

In the thick of the first wave of devastation, he had been struggling to move. To save his friends, comrades and students. The children. Anybody. And when the dust had settled it had just been the two of them left still breathing, he and Charles. The instinct to survive had kicked in full gear seconds after so he ran and can hardly bear to look back.

"All for fuckin' nothing," he mutters out loud this time.

All the fighting, the wars, the dying and living, all the saving, saving mutant kind, the world - all of it.

In the end it had not been a villain who had destroyed his world.

It had been Charles.

The irony, the sheer irony of it was almost enough to convince him to load the adamantiuim bullet and be done with it all.

He still has time though. Not a lot, but perhaps enough, which is why he didn't give in to suicide immediately. It took a few months but he finally realized what was - is - happening to him.

Logan looks down at his hands; broken fingers and bruised knuckles. There is puss seeping from the chronic scarring where his claws come out.

It seems that he, too, has not escaped Charles's devastation without injury. It was shortly after their escape that he realized he was no longer healing at the rapid rate he normally did. Wounds would not close, flesh would not knit back together. The lines around his face deepened and he began to feel slower, weaker, his bones aching and throbbing too. Then a chronic cough had started; blood tinged with the stain and smell of adamantium silver and he just knows.

The smell and taste of poison is something he is all too familiar with except this time he knows he will not survive it.

For that, he doesn't care.

He welcomes it, in fact.

When Logan does finally sleep it feels like blinks and fragments of time. He tosses and turns against the sound of the train outside, against the pain wracking his bones.

And when he wakes up in the morning there is something pressed against his nose, something soft but tainted with the coppery smell of blood. His blood. Something else too, that faint trace of familiarity accompanied by a feminine scent.

Eyes snapping open he stares at the white handkerchief with lace edging tangled in his fingers. It is such a bizarre sight at first that he doesn't know why he has it. The frilly lace edge brings up a nostalgic memory of him as a boy in his childhood Victorian home, staring at the bottom of his mother's lace ballgown as he toddles behind her. If he were to let himself, he might be able to conjure up the memory of her perfume, the feel of her hand brushing back his hair.

He can't even remember the last time he thought of his mother.

Logan stares at Elena's handkerchief and instead of tearing it to shreds as he knows he should, he finds himself folding it into his back pocket, tucked away like a secret.


"I like those," says Charles as he fiddles around with his plants. Logan knows he is referring to the reading glasses he is wearing.

"They make you look younger." His friend continues on, bald head bent, focused on the greenery. Logan almost laughs. He checks the time on his cell phone. He should have left ten minutes ago but he wanted a few quiet moments with Charles.

"Charles listen," Logan begins patiently. "I gotta go away for a couple of days, okay? I've got a long ride for some good money but when I get back we're gonna get out of here. We're gonna drive down and get ourselves a boat and live out on the ocean."

"Will you be safe there?" Charles has that look again, that aged confused look with an almost childish expression.

Logan tries to smile lightly with some confidence but fails when his eyes run over the old man who is now frail and aged, his arms thin and body bordering on skeletal. When Charles does remember, he eats. When he doesn't, he lays listless and mumbling. Logan gave him the pills earlier and so far he seems okay though sometimes not-all-there.

"Yeah." Logan feels like there is gaping hole in his chest just looking at his friend and then nods. "We'll be safe."

He hears Caliban approach behind, smells the food on the tray. He wants to say a bit more to Charles, to feel a connection again before he takes off but decides against it. They'll have plenty of time once they get on The Sunseeker.

"I'll be back in a few days," Logan says to Caliban on his way out.

Once he's outside he takes a deep breath. It is just after dawn and the drive up will be the same as always, hot and tedious. At least watching the sun rise in the morning has a calming effect on him and for a little while he can find reprieve in feeling numb.

He thinks of the fifty thousand dollars waiting for him at the end of this job. He will put up with the woman and her daughter for two, possibly three, days to get the rest of the cash. Mutant or not, human or whatever, he doesn't care anymore. This will be his last job and when he gets back to Charles, he'll start packing up their lives again and be on their away. He'll even do Caliban the favor of trying to get him set up somewhere safely before he and Charles disappear off the face of the earth.

Logan thinks on these things on the drive up, meticulously going over details he never thought he'd ever have to.


It is earlier than noon when he arrives in the parking lot of the Liberty Motel. He is a few steps away from the door when he smells the acrid scent of fear.

Fear and blood.

He strides forward, the door to the woman's room has been broken into. He pushes it open.

Empty.

He inhales sharply at another scent. Tears. His eyes take in the room, tossed furniture, the bed a mess. There are dents in the wall. Signs of a struggle are obvious. Papers are strewn all over the floor. When Logan bends to pick up one of the scraps of papers he freezes momentarily.

A male scent that he identifies immediately - Pierce.

That the woman and her child are gone are one thing. But the evidence of the room's remnants is another telling thing.

He knows that he and Charles need to disappear now. Whoever that woman and her child really are, Logan knows that Pierce has found them and will likely be looking for him now.

Them.

"Shit."

He steps out of the room and races back to the limo then speeds all the way back down over the border.