Cold Comfort I

Logan

"There's Max, thought she'd wasn't supposed to be here," said Sam, abruptly interrupting Logan mid-sentence. He was listening with his head cocked to footsteps that Logan hadn't heard yet.

"She isn't," said Logan.

Logan wasn't expecting Max for another hour. He frowned and threw a look at the clock. Max was never late, never early, just always there right on time, even for casual things like dinner. She didn't casually drop by around 7 or 8 for dinner. She specified when she'd be there and followed through precisely. For such a good quality, it was actually really annoying. And, for once, when he was banking on it, apparently somewhat unreliable.

Then, Logan heard the door open, after something fumbling with the key.

"Hey, we're in the back," Logan called out to her, as a warning that they weren't alone. "I have a stray for dinner."

"Sounds like she does too," Sam remarked.

Again with the air of judgment that Logan had given him bad intel. For a rogue solider, he was pretty fucking uptight. They weren't planning the invasion of Russia here and being interrupted by Jehovah's witnesses. It was an expected visitor that was a little early plus a guest. Considering that Sam had literally dropped in unannounced, injured and barely conscious only two hours ago it seemed a bit rich for him to be complaining about unexpected people.

"We? You and who? I didn't know you had other friends," Max called back, disinterestedly, presumably dumping her coat and bag before coming to check it out.

Logan looked as Sam appraisingly. Well, he wouldn't exactly call the man a friend. A partner, maybe. Even that seemed too intimate.

"Your friend," Logan replied.

Despite genuinely offering his help and support to Sam before he skipped town, Logan hadn't actually anticipated that Sam would take him up on the offer and definitely not so soon. Then again, it wasn't like Sam had a whole bunch of choices with the state he'd been in.

He didn't look too bad now. Transgenic healing ability already kicking in? Or Sam was right back to his default pseudo- invincible and untouchable resting state? Probably a little of both.

"You have other friends?" came the other voice from the other person. It was Rob. Now that was the definition of an unwanted stray.

Only Rob appeared. He nodded at Logan, barely glanced at Sam, and was texting on his phone. "Hey, guys."

"Where's Max?" asked Sam. He was glaring at Rob.

"Getting changed," said Rob. "She, um, is slightly covered in blood from a lab accident, but it's all fine now so don't worry."

"Covered in blood?" echoed Sam.

"The Hunger Games?" asked Logan at the same time.

The Hunger Games was an ongoing series of stupid challenges that went on in the lab that ranged from stupid word games, right up to dares, and stunts. The day he had visited for the interview was haiku day and his tour guide never hesitated to keep playing.

It was hard to take accidents seriously or sympathetically when they were caused by supposedly very intelligent adults pretending the floor was made of lava. Or whatever they might have been playing today.

"No," said Rob. "It was work, for a change. She cut herself on a machine. It has a really sharp knife, like sharp enough to cut bone, and she was careless and not paying attention. And, you know, hands bleed at lot so it all looks very dramatic."

Rob said the middle bit loud enough so that Max could hear before dropping back to regular volume. He then showed Logan a picture on his phone of the injury. It was a deep nasty cut, three inches long running from her index finger across her palm sewed up with over a dozen spidery black stitches. It looked like it nearly took her finger off.

Logan winced and hissed. Fuck. That looked painful.

Max appeared now. She looked fine aside from the soft cast on her right hand. She was now dressed (or more accurately not dressed) in some of her dance stuff that found its way here– a crop top, leggings, no shoes or socks and an unzipped hoodie. Nothing that Logan hadn't seen her wear countless time already but Sam, who to date had only seen modest professional Max, had to stop himself from gaping.

Logan didn't gape. Not to say that he didn't appreciate it, but he just kind of took it for granted. You could get used to anything eventually, including a gorgeous, semi-clothed girl casually contorting herself into stretches that were somewhere between provocative and painful because while doing this she was also talking Eyes Only business and crunching through college assignments. That was just a standard Tuesday evening.

Logan suspected that Max was probably a terrible real girlfriend. She seemed too guarded and distant for the vulnerability, connection and honesty of a strong real relationship. She was, however, the perfect fake girlfriend. Max was a low-maintenance cool girl personified. No playing stupid games or making demands or prying into his stuff.

Logan hadn't realized he needed a fake girlfriend but now he couldn't picture his life not having one. Date night was the perfect cover his Eyes Only work that kept him busy. She backed-up his lies, brunched with the friends, charmed his Uncle, and was an all-round awesome part-time roommate. And Logan wasn't anywhere near ready to try out the dating scene yet so she kept him safe from confronting that.

"Rob is a filthy liar," said Max. "Don't listen to him. I swear to you he just came at me with that knife. He saw that I finished off that buffer and just flipped. He's a bad person."

"She's joking," said Logan, quickly, worried that Sam might just take Rob's head off. He was tensed and ready to pounce. Was he actually growling? Max gave Sam a look too. What was going on with them? Seemed a little intense for ex-colleagues.

Max eyed the picture of her hand critically. "Though you are good with a needle and thread, I give you that. Gotta say, didn't really believe you at first. It just sounded better than hospital."

"Are you okay?" Logan asked her.

"Super," she said. "Rob is just being overprotective, accompanying me back here."

Rob gave Logan a look. The look said she's your responsibility now, don't let her get away with that bullshit. "And, as it turns out, I'm meeting Dean for dinner not far from here so it all works out quite nicely. You folks have fun now."

Logan had to admit that Rob was a good friend. A better friend than Logan was to Max. Fake boyfriend did not translate into decent friend. It had been Rob that worried about where Max was at the conference while Logan had barely spared her a thought. Rob had always been leery about Max and Logan's fake relationship, seemingly sensing its innate falseness, and assuming that Logan was exploiting Max. And Logan kinda was, but she was using him right back, so they were equals in the arrangement. It would be Rob, not Logan, that was able to look after Max, but Rob had his own boyfriend to get to so looked like Logan was on boyfriend duty.

Logan walked Rob to the door, like the good host he was, but mostly it was so that he could get Rob out before Rob changed his mind. Good friend or not, Logan wasn't exactly a fan of the guy and didn't want him hanging around. Three was crowd, four was a disaster. And Sam and Rob were practically the worst two people he could think of for a group hangout.

"She's still in shock I think," said Rob, quietly, pausing in the doorway. "Knife so sharp you wouldn't feel it, but she barely even reacted to getting the stitches. No tears, no swearing, no flinching. I mean this is Max, yeah, who isn't exactly sobbing damsel in distress type by any stretch of the imagination but it's weird that she didn't complain at all. The very definition of suffering in silence. So don't assume she's alright because she won't admit to not being not alright."

Max was tough. It was a dancer thing. She wasn't the first dancer that Logan had dated so he knew all about how they popped pain pills and accepted a ridiculous level of pain as normal and got on with it and kept dancing. It wasn't exactly shocking to hear that Max fit the stereotype.

"Sure, thanks, Rob," said Logan.

If Max's injury was being managed adequately like Rob claimed and Max said she was fine, well, that was good enough for Logan to leave it alone. She was as independent as he was. She didn't need or and wouldn't expect or appreciate coddling.

"So what's going on here?" Max was asking Sam when Logan re-joined them in the office.

"Trouble with a mutual acquaintance of ours and another mutual acquaintance right here in your back yard. Know anything about that?"

"I don't know what any of that means. De-coded it for me."

"One of the others was careless and got caught," Sam said, bluntly. "Were you involved?"

Max shook her head. "No. Is that it?"

"You're telling me you're been minding your own business here? Not a word to Lydecker?"

Max threw a glance at Logan.

Logan quickly caught Max up to the speed: "Turns out our Mr. Lydecker from the conference is actually Colonel Lydecker of Manticore, hunter of the escapees and all-round bad guy."

Max shrugged. "Huh. Small world."

"Don't dodge the question. What did you tell him?"

Suspicious Sam assuming the worst of Max.

Sam had been sure to share these suspicions with Logan and had even persuaded Logan a little bit, enough so that Logan kept their first little encounter secret from Max, enough that didn't bother telling her about the genetics conference.

This backfired, of course, and Logan ran into her there. He had assumed that he could keep it on the DL thinking that Max wouldn't be attending it. She hadn't mentioned it to him. It wasn't her research area. And she was on Jam Pony duty. It seemed like a safe bet that she wouldn't be there. And he saw no need to be responsible for getting her involved in potential Manticore research.

What had Sam said after all? Cautionary pre-emptive measures.

"Nothing, Mr. Lydecker doesn't report his business to me. I met him once at a conference. That's it. Logan hung out and schemed with him for the whole hostage thing so you'd want to be asking him not me."

Logan nodded. This was true and exactly what Logan had already told Sam before Max arrived.

Zack had been distinctly unimpressed to hear that Logan and Lydecker buddied up during a hostage situation not too long ago. And even less impressed to be reminded that: "the enemy of your enemy is your friend."

Once the whole situation was resolved, Logan hadn't really thought much more about Lydecker. There was another case that urgently needed his attention. This, Logan realized now, was careless. He should have put together transgenic kids with gifted teenagers when the guy telling him about the latter was a military dude at a genetics conference. The same guy who was too interested in Max (who fit the bill as a runaway transgenic) and insisted that she meet a colleague of his and then completely dismissed her presumably once he confirmed she was just a normal girl.

"What did you make of him?" Sam asked Max.

"He didn't seem like your boogeyman," Max said neutrally enough, as though she hadn't been a little rattled by Lydecker's questioning. Superficially, it was all very polite and professional but there was an underlying intensity and deliberation to it that was unnerving, like failing an exam, and that hadn't even been directed at Logan.

"Meaning?" Sam pressed, refusing to let her away with this non-answer.

"Meaning, he's no Santa Claus, for sure, but he seemed okay to me. We shook hands, drank coffee, small talked. Same as I did with another half dozen delegates there. A non-story."

"You only saw his nice side," said Logan. "He was fairly tough on Jude during the hostage situation. And that's probably his kid-glove-in-polite-company toughness and not whatever he was really like at Manticore to those guys."

"Whatever." Max shrugged. "Why do you care so much?"

Logan threw a look at Sam.

'Cause that Sam convinced me you're gonna end up working for the devil and it's never too early to derail that career objective.

Logan didn't say this. He shrugged too and said: "Doubting Thomas over here has to absolve his suspicion that one of us hooked up with Lydecker to capture Brin."

"There was something weird about Lydecker being in town, about the capture, about everything," Sam admitted.

"So what, Sherlock?"

"Give me a few minutes," said Logan, although the question wasn't directed at him. "But I'd reckon she wasn't caught by Lydecker. That there's some other party at play. I'm looking into records of military convoys leaving the city, any unusual air traffic, see if I can't find anything."

Logan returned his attention to the laptop only half-listening to Sam and Max's continued conversation.

"You launching a rescue op? Let them or him or whoever score a two for one sale on runaways?" Max sounded skeptical.

"Maybe."

Sam, for all his talk about being reasonable and safe, for his solider upbringing, was still a 21-year-old kid with that invincible, caviler attitude of his age group. This, teamed with his self-appointed responsibilities, added up to potentially impulsive poor decisions to save his sibling.

And Max, now that she had escaped her strict Christian-turned-weird-cult upbringing, was enjoying defiance and dumb decisions just for the sake of it. She'd willfully ignore Rob's advice to take it easy and jump on this Eyes Only op just because she could and shouldn't. Max didn't sound especially inclined, not yet, but Logan could foresee it happening.

Unless Logan intervened, which he should, because he was a responsible grown-up. And also because he was being tactical and a half-assed rescue op could cost him two useful Eyes Only contacts. These two things balanced each other out so he was still in neutral karma.

"Or, hear me out," said Logan, not looking up from his laptop as he spoke. "How about the two of you hang out here, watch some dumb movie, eat some popcorn, mind each other's respective injuries and sleep on it?"

Logan made sure to make his comment in a casual disinterested sort of way because this was how to handle Max. Trying to tell her what to do was doomed to failure. Even reverse psychology trickery to tell her wasn't effective. He didn't know about Sam, but figured he was someone used to calling the shots and not listening to them.

Both of them spent a lot of time looking out for or after other people. Max with charity and Sam with his siblings. It was just the way they operated as people. So it wasn't exactly a leap to get them to look out for each other. They were friends of a sort even if Sam thought they might be enemies too. Sam and Max eyed each other and then, as one, seemed to agree.

While Logan got started on research in his office, they settled down in front of the flat screen to watch an old Pixar movie with a bowl of popcorn, hot chocolate and a blanket. For such a basic domestic scene, it was ridiculously surreal.

Logan could see them as siblings. Or, weirdly, as a couple, but really those two things were quite different relationships so maybe he was a little sleep deprived himself. Or maybe he was projecting. Although Max was his fake girlfriend and not a real one, it was far too easy to feel territorial.

"Right," said Logan, handing Sam a file with map, base layout and history and other details. "She's not captured by Lydecker but an old army buddy of his gone rogue. Major Jake Sanders. Works out of Fort Xavier, an abandoned base thirteen miles outside of town. Runs the place like his own private fiefdom. Secure installation. Lots of guys with guns."

"Why?" Sam looked incredulous at Logan's story, as if Logan had come out with an alien abduction conspiracy theory and not a perfectly reasonable alternative to Lydecker. There were a lot of bad guys in the world. Lydecker was only one of 'em.

"Looks like he has a deal with the Chinese military. They've been trying to procure biosynth technology on the black market for the last few months. Word is the order has been filled," said Logan, shrugging. He raised his hands in a surrender gesture. "That's all I'm saying. Here's all info you need with an emphasis on the danger. Do with it as you like."

I think I've written Logan a bit differently than he should be acting, but I couldn't fit the motivations and actions of that specific version of the character into this story. He comes across more ruthless and cold here, at least when it comes to achieving the great the good, and maybe not so much because he is like that as person. The same way he owns a gun, Logan is willing and able to make concessions to his moral principles in order to do some good in the city.

By the way, Logan still thinks Zack is called Sam. Sam is so paranoid that he wouldn't bother to clarify and give his real name, thinking the less Logan knows the better, so whenever I'm in Logan's head, Zack will always be Sam (until I slip up that is).