I WILL REMEMBER YOUR SINS NO MORE


Disclaimer: Fox, Cameron and Eglee made them. I just like to play with them.
Summary: Logan contemplates Max, Uncle Jonas, and darkness. First season fic, set in IAIAAC
Spoilers/Timeframe: Spoilers for I and I am a Camera
Rating: PG


"I will remember your sins no more."

Logan didn't know why those were the words that came to his mind as he looked up from the photographs in his lap and stared blindly through the window. The words were from somewhere in the Bible, he knew, but he didn't read the Bible. They had come from something someone had told him long ago, when he was a headstrong, upwardly mobile college student who didn't have time for such things. His mother, he remembered, the memories of her now brought to the surface during the days spent with his extended family for his uncle's memorial.

"I will remember your sins no more."

He remembered laughing at the idea of an omnipotent deity suddenly developing selective amnesia, and his mother explaining that it wasn't quite like that. God didn't forget your sins when He forgave them, she'd tried to explain. He just didn't hold them against you anymore.

Logan hadn't understood the difference. Forget, remember, sins like scarlet, washed as snow, east from west--it was all the same to him, all part of another made-to-order religion created by people who needed to believe there was something more to life than the darkness, and embraced by people who needed something else to look forward to than a slow, painful and inevitable death. People like his mother. Logan couldn't agree with a god who would snuff out a beautiful woman in her forties, and leave someone like his uncle Jonas, who should have died of liver failure long ago, to reach his golden years in prosperity.

Prosperity. It had been won by Jonas Cale embracing the darkness, and he hadn't even tried to stop his fall. He had stepped up to the edge of the abyss and looked in, then taken a running leap into it, diving in cleanly without even a splash. Cale Industries was an empire built on evil. Logan hadn't had any choice but to make the Eyes Only broadcast that would bring it down, even if Max thought that he was cutting off his nose to spite his face.

Logan ran his fingertips over a rough spot on the rim of his wheel, where a bullet had glanced off his chair. It was surprising that only one bullet had actually hit the chair, considering the firepower on that mechanical assassin that his own uncle had sent after him.

It wasn't the first time in his life he'd had an assassin shooting at him. Getting shot by Bruno, however, had been different. Not because Bruno had actually got him and the hoverdrone hadn't, but because it wasn't, as the man had offered in a shallow apology, personal. Bruno hadn't even seen Logan's face when he'd shot him, while the hoverdrone had been programmed for a specific target, taught to seek him out from a photograph that Bennett had taken years ago when Logan had been on a vacation with Jonas' son.

His face still itched, though he knew it was psychosomatic. He rubbed his hand over his cheek, where he imagined he could feel the red lasers that had played over his face, confirming his identity before the guns started shooting. Betrayed by a kiss. Jonas... Judas? Whatever. It was his mother's religion again. At least it acknowledged the ugly heart of humanity.

He looked down again at the pictures of a child with blood on her face.

"The darkness, it's always there..."

If Max thought she was the only one who had seen the darkness up close and personal, she was mistaken. Logan knew intimately what Max had managed to escape and evade until now. He had fallen full tilt into darkness and clawed his way back out. He pictured himself on the edge now, half-in and half-out of the pit, clinging desperately to fragments of truth and love and hope, while the inhabitants of the pit had wrapped themselves around his lower half and were still pulling, beckoning, coaxing him to let go.

One corner of his mouth curved slightly at the irony and strange appropriateness of the metaphor as he slid his hands from his knees up along the inside of his thighs, feeling like it was somebody else's body he was touching, because he didn't feel a damned thing.

It had been a long time since he'd felt anything. His hand moved higher to rub across his lower abdomen where the scars were: neat rows of cuts that hadn't hurt, had never gone too deep, and had welled up with unsatisfying beads of someone else's blood.

His mother would have been horrified.

His mother, he thought, would have had something good to say about darkness. She always had something good to say about everything. The darker it was at night, she had pointed out on a young Logan's first trip out of the city, the more stars you could see in the sky. It had been a fascinating discovery for a boy who'd grown up in a city with its own private rain cloud. The problem, she said, was that most people, when surrounded by darkness, don't really bother to look up. Logan contemplated it, agreed with it. Most people, including himself, just tried their damnedest to look in, and what they saw there only frightened them even more.

"The darkness, it's always there, right on my tail..."

Had Max been thinking to warn him as well as confide in him? Perhaps what she'd really been trying to say was, "You don't really know who I am, Logan. Are you sure you want to get involved with me?"

Irony again. It was he who should be asking her that question, and she who should be wary. He'd struggled to keep his voice steady as he'd responded.

"Yes. But you've got moves..."

Yes, he thought, picking up the first ugly photograph of Max's past and slipping it into the shredder. The darkness is there, but you've managed to always stay one step ahead of it. It hasn't got you yet. The strips of the second photo followed the first into the bin.

For the first time, Logan understood what his mother had been trying to explain to him all those years ago. Because he couldn't suddenly make himself forget what Max and the other X-5 children had done that day in the woods.

But he would remember their sins no more.

Author's Note:

I couldn't find any reason why Logan wouldn't think that Jonas had deliberately sent the hoverdrone to kill him. I have taken liberties with the character of Logan's mother since we're not told much about her on the show. Do you like her like this? If you like the story, or dislike it, or have any thoughts and suggestions, please leave a review, or email me at jude_mustard@yahoo.com :)