Chapter 14: Epilogue: Interviews with Absent Friends

Logan's blood was ready to boil at he threw open the door to Kurt's room; he'd smelt and heard several bodies inside, where they weren't supposed to be. No one was supposed to be in there—not now that the man who usually slept in that room was dead.

"What the hell are you doing?" Logan demanded, claws snapping into readiness.

A small group of young students and recent refugees were like deer in the headlights, staring back at him with a mix of shock, confusion, and imminent certainty of death. They were in the process of lighting a collection of candles at the foot of the bed, many of them also carrying small bunches of flowers, photos, notes, and cards. Logan felt almost nauseous as he sheathed his claws.

"I'm sorry, I thought…"

But the damage was done. Most of the kids dropped their offerings and made a quick exit, while the few who Logan had met previously attempted to sputter apologies of their own before they similarly departed.

Once everyone had left, Logan picked up the 6-pack he'd dropped before entering and walked heavily over to the small, half-completed memorial and lowered his body to the floor. He glanced at several of the written offerings. One read, "Mr. Wagner: your example helped me believe my powers could be a blessing." Another: "Nightcrawler—your faith preserves us." Most of them, though, simply said "Thank You," less for some direct piece of help or advice than as a general, though deeply felt sentiment: the goodbyes of fans to a legend.

Gulping down the first of what he knew would be many more beers than he had with him, Logan tried to decide what he felt, how he should feel. He knew he felt sad and angry, but there were other, less tangible, less familiar emotions lurking at the edge of his consciousness: fear, dread, helplessness. He wished he could cry but decided that he wasn't in the mood. His emotions were too confused or, perhaps, too powerful to be adequately expressed in any physical manifestation of grief. He wanted to pop his claws and cut deeper than his flesh, tearing Kurt fully resurrected out of his own soul. And then what? Lock him away, chain him to the bed, anything to keep him safe. He'd have his own muscles coated in adamantium is he needed to. Anything, anything, to keep Kurt safe now that he knew the real pain of losing him.

"Am I interrupting?" Ororo didn't wait for a response as she entered the room.

"Leave me alone."

"I can't do that."

She walked slowly and deliberately through the small space, touching walls and objects like they were ghostly appendages of an absent body.

"What are you doing, Logan."

"I…" Logan stared thoughtfully at his beer. "I know this is what people always say, and I've told so many people they're being crazy and need to get over it but—I just can't believe he's gone. We've cheated death so many times, 'Ro."

Ororo stopped in front of Kurt's dresser as she examined a framed photograph of Scott, Jean, Peter, Kurt, herself, and Logan, taken she knew not where—maybe Japan?—during their first years as X-Men. Logan watched her turn the picture over and over in her hands.

"Did you know that Kurt and I slept together?"

Logan's first instinct was to lie, but he had no appetite for deceptions that suddenly seemed so meaningless. "Yeah."

"Were you ever jealous?"

"No," Logan regarded her earnestly, pleadingly, but she was still examining the photograph. "I loved him, 'Ro."

"As did I, my friend."

Logan dropped his eyes to his beer. "I keep saying that he was the only one that treated me like I wasn't some kind of animal, but he died… he died knowing that's exactly what I am."

"Was he wrong?"

"No."

"I spoke with Scott about X-Force," she said, stroking the picture with her hands as though trying to coax Kurt out of it. "He said he ordered you to do it. He took full responsibility. I laughed at the thought of someone making you do something, even Scott."

She stopped stroking the picture and clutched it to her breast. "Goddess help me. I feel old, Logan. Every time I feel like I've cried all the tears I have to cry… There he is again."

She turned to face him. "I am taking this picture. You may try and kill me if you like. Isn't that what you do now?"

"'Ro…"

"Tell me I'm wrong, Logan."

"You're not wrong. But you weren't there, were you? You want to judge us from up on your throne? Go ahead. But X-Force was out there trying to prevent all this. Trying to prevent genocide any way we could. If that makes us the bad guys I'll take the heat for that. And you know what? If I had to do it all over again, I'd kill more of them. Because maybe if I'd killed more of them, Kurt would still be alive."

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Ororo, picking up a beer, whose cap he dutifully popped, as she joined him, cross-legged, on the floor. "Because that means this could very well be the last drink we will ever share together."

"To Kurt."

Logan raised his bottle and Ororo dutifully tapped her own against it. They sat that way in silence for several long minutes, drinking, not quite uncomfortable under the lingering influence of Kurt's calming spirit.

"Logan? Ororo?"

It was Rachel at the door. They both looked up.

"What is it, Rachel?" asked Ororo.

"I, um… I don't know if this is the best time," she began, tiptoeing nervously into the room. "But I'm, or I was, taking care of Kitty's stuff while… But then… Well, you know. And now… Anyway, I have something that I thought you—Logan—might want to have."

"What is it Rach?"

"It's, um, it's the DVDs of those media interviews you guys—Logan and Kurt—did a few months ago, before we moved to San Francisco."

"But I thought those recordings had been lost," said Storm.

"They, well… they weren't so much lost as…" Rachel grimaced, angry at her seeming childishness in the midst of such a grave setting. "Kitty and I stole them. We had dared Kurt and Logan to be totally honest with the interviewers, and we thought, after the fact, that they might not want it winding up in the wrong hands. We meant to destroy them, but then…"

"I'll take care of it," said Logan.

Rachel came forward and handed the discs off to Logan. At the same moment, Logan watched Rachel and Ororo exchange a glance that smacked of telepathy.

"I think I will leave you to it," said Ororo, eyes still locked on Rachel's. "Rachel?"

Rachel nodded wordlessly, and the two left together.

Logan waited until they'd gone. Then he got up, locked the door, popped the DVD labelled "Wolverine" into Kurt's DVD player and fired up the TV.

The recordings that Kitty and Rachel had liberated only included one camera and microphone, so that Melody Mitchell was absent and inaudible. As a result, what survived played out like a monologue. Each interview was long, approximately thirty minutes. But Logan only heard the important parts.

Wolverine's Interview:

Nightcrawler? I guess you could say he's… Well, he's my best friend. But no, actually it's not so simple because people have different ideas what that means. What I mean is… I mean, I've been in love plenty of times with women, in love where you feel that… connection… that's—

Now I am getting too complicated. Too sentimental. I guess what it really is when you feel that way about someone is that you want to protect them. You take on a duty to protect them, to keep them safe from whoever, whatever might try to destroy them. Now before you jump all over me—this feeling doesn't have to be romantic, although I have felt that way about women I've been romantically involved with. Nightcrawler—Kurt—he's just… He's my best friend. And I would die to keep him safe.

But I get how that might seem strange. People, even people who know us both pretty well, have wondered what we have in common. The truth is: not a heck of a lot. He's my opposite in plenty of ways: devoutly religious, pacifist at heart—a bit of a martyr, to tell you the truth. I mean, I've taken plenty—plenty—of lumps for teammates, innocent bystanders, hell, even for people I didn't like and didn't deserve my damn help. But Kurt'll throw himself into a scrap, put his life on the line, for something semantic, like, because they don't let kids with red hair use the skating rink between 5 and 6 pm or something. Dumb example, but you get the idea. He's a bleeding heart that way. I'd blame it on his religion but I don't really like religion while I like Kurt a lot. If more religious people were more like Kurt maybe religion wouldn't be so bad.

I guess, to be honest, that we're so different does have a lot to do with it, with me wanting to protect him. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of stuff that bugs the hell out of me about him, and his religion is pretty near the top of the list. I mean, I don't have a problem with religion necessarily—I haven't seen a lot of great examples of it being a real good thing for most people who take it too seriously, but that doesn't mean I'm necessarily against the idea of someone believing in God. The way I see it is, believing in some ultimate intelligence behind everything is maybe less crazy than a lot of the things we've seen as X-Men, so I can't really argue with the idea. But I know Kurt well enough, have watched him and lived side by side with him enough years, to know that for all of his smiles and jokes he's still not totally comfortable in his own skin, still lets other people's perceptions, the wrong kind of people's perceptions, affect how he sees himself.

I mean, all you have to do is watch him keep his tail in check when he's out in public. If it's just us—just X-Men, I mean—that thing's all over the place, like a mood ring or a punctuation mark on a sentence. Like how everybody talks with their body anyway but Kurt's got a different body so, you know. But if he's in public, or even around people he's just met—and I don't even know if this is conscious, I'm still unclear how much direct control he has over the thing—it's all down and still, or even wrapped around his leg, like he's trying not to draw attention to it, like he knows, or is afraid, that people are staring. And he might be right but that's not the point. The point is that when he acts like that it shows in some way, deep down, he's ashamed in front of these people, these people who if they pass judgement on him aren't even fit to be in the same room with him, aren't even fit to lick his boots.

Now I know what you're gonna say. "But isn't that just being considerate? Not to want to upset people?" But you need to really think about what you're saying there. No one asks non-mutants to act less like non-mutants, so why should a mutant have to act less like a mutant? Having a tail, having blue fur and two fingers and pointy ears—that's who Kurt is, and to ask him to be someone else so's not to upset people ain't right. It's not the same as being polite, as having the decency not to swear in front of somebody's grandmother or something. It'd be more like asking that kid with red hair to wear a blonde wig every time she wants to go to that skating rink between 5 and 6 pm. It ain't right. And the thing that kills me is that he'll still even come for a drink with me at a bar using his image inducer to look like someone else no matter how many times I've told him: I'm not having a drink with my friend until he looks like my friend.

To be fair, I can't be one hundred percent sure where his religion fits into all that. But I know for sure Catholicism wasn't something he picked up from his sometimes-evil sorceress foster mother. I know it's something he picked up on his own as a teenager. That's a bad sign in my books. It just smacks of being an excuse to me—like, he needs to believe in intelligent design or whatever to explain himself to himself. But what I'd like better is if he didn't feel like he needed to explain to himself at all. I want him to be happy just being, not looking for some convoluted reason behind it. And the fact that he looks for these reasons suggests to me he's ashamed, and I resent his religion for maybe keeping him from facing that truth a little bit, the truth that he's ashamed deep down of being a mutant.

But the thing about Kurt is that he's naïve as hell in some of the stuff he does and thinks, and Kurt, the things he's gone through in life, he's got no good reason to be naïve. Sure, we X-Men have all gone through some bad stuff as mutants. For me it's stuff I struggle every day to face, the stuff that's been done to me 'cause I'm a mutant. But then again, I ain't never been hunted down with torches and pitchforks like I was Frankenstein's monster, and as messed up as my childhood (what I can remember of it) was, my mother didn't toss me over a waterfall to save herself (that was many years after my fling with her, by the way). But I guess that's what makes me wonder about him. If he can go through all that and still be the way he is… Maybe he really does know something I don't. So maybe it's actually a choice with him, a choice to believe in something positive for us all.

I've gone through all this myself before but it hits me again every time, the thing that makes us alike. Maybe Kurt is dumb 'cause he's willing to sacrifice himself for ideals, for this belief in a positive future. But if he is I'm just as dumb, because I'd give my life for Kurt. In my own way, then, I'd die for those ideals of his, too.

Nightcrawler's Interview:

That's something that people have asked me, or wanted to ask me, many times. If I could, would I want to be 'normal'? Would I want to trade blue fur and glowing yellow eyes for a Caucasian complexion and brown irises, two fingers for five? In fact I like being the way I am. It's sort of an impossible question, really. I have always been this way so to actually want to be something different is really asking if I'd like to be someone different. And I don't want that. While it's a pain going through life needing discreet alterations to all your pants, to ask me if I'd be happier without my tail is not like asking a person whether they would be happier with a nose job. It would be more like asking a musician whether they would be happier without their hearing—you could learn to live without it but you probably wouldn't want to. For all the problems they have caused me, my unique physical characteristics are essential to my being. They make me who I am.

But I'm making it sound too easy. In truth, it's been difficult for me many times in my life to reconcile the fact of my extreme uniqueness. In that, God has helped me, whatever my teammate Wolverine thinks to the contrary. He may think I don't understand his perspective but I do—he thinks my belief in God proves that I'm ashamed of who I am. But that is not the basis of my faith. What I find in God is the promise that all people may find acceptance in life, that all bodies are holy because we are all God's children. In this, my faith helps fortify me against the disapproving stares, verbal insults, and even the physical attacks my appearance has provoked in people. My faith helps to remind me not to see myself through the eyes of my detractors, but through the eyes of God as something unique and special, as we are all unique and special.

Wolverine? He's… At times, I suppose you could say we've been… that we are…

Truthfully, he's my best friend. At times, though, there has been conflict between us. Wolverine—Logan—comes from a… from a military background that frequently puts him at odds with my own beliefs. Yet…

When I first joined the X-Men, he was the only one who never reacted adversely to my appearance, who always accepted me without question. And I think that's very… That says a lot about a person. That sounds silly but it does—I know this, I've experienced it many times, and found it to be true. So I knew because of how he accepted me so easily that there were things beneath his sometimes… abrasive exterior that he wouldn't necessarily want to admit, even though they are things he should be proud of. Like his facility for great compassion, empathy, understanding. He's always telling me I shouldn't have to hide, but I find it ironic that he so frequently fails to, as it were, 'practice what he preaches.'

Maybe I should…

You see, I never knew my father. I recently found out some information about it that—well anyway, perhaps the less said about that the better. Suffice to say that when I was a child growing up I had no father, or father figure, that I looked up to. I'm not so chauvinistic as to think that matters—I had a loving foster mother, brother, and sister, which is really more than any child abandoned on a roadside can usually hope for. But still, I have found myself missing that connection at times that I've seen others enjoy, that connection between man and boy, where the boy learns as much from the man as the man learns from the boy.

Logan is not my father, or some kind of substitute father figure. Even if I weren't too old to harbour such childish needs and illusions he would not fill that role. But there is something… Logan is closer than a brother to me, maybe even closer than a father would be, I don't know. What I do know is that since I joined the X-Men, there have been times when I questioned my faith in God, usually because bad things happened to me or to my friends that made me question God's faith in me. But Logan has never lost faith in me. He has always supported me, even when I've done things that, in retrospect, were probably the wrong thing to do. That's how I knew—how I know—deep down, and with certainty, that he was—is—an idealist, a man of faith, like myself. Only his faith is in himself, and his judgement. And I thank the Lord that he—my friend, my best friend—judges me worthy. While I have sometimes been uncertain of God's protection, I have never been uncertain of Logan's.

At the end of his interview, Kurt's face, in response to another unheard, unseen question, ignited in a stellar exemplar of his famously disarming smile.

"Well," he said. "I'm very flattered but… I, well, at least I… I think I'm seeing someone at the moment. No, no, please… don't be sorry, I'm very… Yes, thank you. It has been a pleasure."

Then he stood up to shake the interviewer's hand so that the last recorded image before the screen went blue was the red "X" logo on the chest of his uniform.

As he stared at the blue screen, Logan's heart twisted. His mind was full of Kurt's smile, his voice… If he just concentrated, if he could just remember his smell…

"He was a remarkable man."

Logan started at a familiar voice that he had not heard in a long time. How long had she been there, and how had he not noticed her?

"Amanda? What the hell are you doing here? How did you get in?"

Amanda Sefton's long blonde hair spilled down the front of her royal blue robe from beneath an expansive hood that hid her eyes in shadow.

"Please, Logan. I am a sorceress."

"Are you really here?"

"Yes… And no. But this is not a dream, much as I wish it were. My mother heard about what happened and… I had to know, to see for myself. But it's true, isn't it? He really is gone."

"I'm so sorry, 'Manda. I should have been there, I should have—"

"Don't, Logan, I know. And I can't stay. I didn't even want to make my presence known except that I know you and Kurt were…" as she trailed off she actually seemed to be fading, dissipating into the air around them.

"'Manda…" Logan struggled to find some kind of meaningful condolence to offer her. He failed. Amanda was more successful.

"Ororo might not forgive you," she said. "But Kurt would have."

And then she was gone, Logan unable to really trust whether she'd ever been there at all. Yet he was sure that her words, real or imagined, were true: Kurt would have forgiven him. And Logan hated himself for it.

Dropping his head into his hands, Logan was still unable to cry. He couldn't. Because his heart was missing.

END