Disclaimer haiku: I don't understand/ And am glad of it; oh, and/ I don't own. Don't sue.
Notes: I won't go into details, but Genie was discovered in 1970, in California, and presented a truly horrific case of child abuse, lost scientific opportunities, and general disservice to the girl. I strongly suggest looking up more information because I can't do Genie's story justice here.
When I saw "X23" the other week, I immediately thought not of Mary Sues, but of Genie. And this fic, while not quite turning out the way I'd planned, began there. The "chapters" are really separate stories, but they all fit under the same umbrella theme.
The quote in the summary is from the suicide note left by Genie's father. He was right about that, at least.
The world would never understand.
Despite his assertions otherwise, Logan understood only partly. He knew the portions of the story that he had lived through himself: the adamantium bonding, which burned and burned and afterwards felt maddeningly foreign in a body that had never suffered an invasion before; the endless days of heavy combat training, grueling even to someone who had a healing factor and superhuman endurance; the atmosphere born of shadow agencies, black governments, under-the- table military operations, where the paranoia and uncaring were so thick you gagged on them with every breath; and the wild exhilaration of breakout, slicing and stabbing and running and fighting without concern for the bullets being fired at you in your final bid for escape.
He understood that much. But the rest of X23's life was a mystery.
SHIELD and HYDRA's Mengele of a scientist, that Dr. Risman, could show him footage and quote him data until the sky fell in, but that told him nothing about the girl herself. How her mind worked, what she wanted most, what she feared most, what she saw when she looked at the rest of the world. A life with no childhood. He thought he could come close to understanding; his childhood was a long stretch of blank nothing, part of a mind that had been so wiped and erased and messed with that some of the memories were simply not there anymore.
He'd still had a childhood, though. And he'd known love, and safety, and human contact. X23 had had none of these things.
And yet the girl had managed to grow a sense of independence, of identity, and had at last demonstrated the sheer guts to live and change her fate and be more than a killing machine. To be human. To feel. Machines didn't cry from rage and frustration and undefinable longing.
Professor Xavier and Beast had become fixated on the developmental impossibility of X23. Isolated from birth, no emotional attachments, little human contact outside of fighting and killing, abused, neglected, systematically brainwashed... Beast especially had grilled him on the final confrontation: she spoke? what did she say? complete sentences? proper grammar?
He'd finally gotten annoyed and yelled, "It was a flamin' battle, Hank! I wasn't takin' notes!"
But the abruptness hadn't deterred Beast and Xavier from sitting down and discussing the matter ad nauseum. Logan had been pulled into their talk frequently enough to make it impossible to escape, and he'd been forced to endure the conversation even as it soared well outside of his area of expertise.
"Chomsky's ideas remain unproven theories," Xavier would say, and Beast would counter with, "His work and Lanneberg's is highly suggestive of a critical period for language acquisition," to which Xavier would make a statement of agreement or disagreement, they would ask Logan for some arcane detail he hadn't bothered to notice in the first place, and then the entire cycle would begin anew. They finally stalled out on a question of whether or not Genie, whoever that was, provided sufficient evidence for Chomsky's theory ("Curtiss' results would indicate-" "No, there are too many other variables..."). Thoroughly bogged down in a deep morass of intellectualism, they stopped noticing the outside world. Logan picked that moment to get out.
It was science that had created X23. Bad science, conducted by a greedy, overambitious researcher and funded by some of the worst in the business - Logan was no fan of SHIELD but HYDRA was pure evil - but it was science nonetheless. And the well-intentioned chatter of Xavier and Beast was still science. It changed nothing; X23 was still out there, lost and alone. It changed nothing.
Scientists couldn't understand. They were so far into the cerebral cortex, so far into the higher- order, rational world of abstract concepts and rarefied thinking that the old brain, the brain humans inherited from reptiles, no longer registered. Logan wasn't driven by rational ideas. At the end of the day you had primal instincts to kill or run. Confronted with those choices you had hate, anger, and fear, but not love, forgiveness, and justice. The anger and hate sprang from the fear and then turned on it, devouring it whole and leaving no other choice but an explosion of fury at the slightest provocation.
Risman had called it "instability". Logan knew it as a red veil obscuring the world and dividing it into selections of prey. Whatever it was, X23 had it. It shone in her eyes and glinted on her claws.
He understood that, too.
He walked through the hallways of the Institute, watching the kids playing and living in relative safety, sheltered from the harsh laws of nature by friends and family and the tight bonds of social interaction, of shared culture and expression and all those other human things, and felt more keenly the animal drive that separated him out. He would never fit in, not really. He loved all the kids, some more than others, but it was a thin emotion, a shallow thing that he could toss away behind him on the road if he wanted to, and sometimes he did.
If X23 had stayed, it would've been like that for her. Always the outsider among outsiders, a lone wolf temporarily lurking around a pack, living too far inside the reptile brain to really connect with the higher-order children.
And he hated that. He hated it for her, that she could never get back what was rightfully hers, what HYDRA had stolen from her. Stolen irrevocably when they'd put her through the Weapon X process - a euphemistic way of describing a form of agonizing torture made survivable only by a healing factor. He'd wanted to die. One of the few times in his life he'd so wished. And he'd been a fully grown adult with, presumably, years of combat experience behind him. To imagine that visited on a child... a child treated worse than a lab rat...
The anger flashed over again, spilling red everywhere, and he left the house at a deliberate walk that became a run, out into the night, not following X23's faint, lingering scent in case someone from SHIELD was watching. Just running out the anger until every tree within arm's length had three new, sap-bleeding gashes striping its trunk. Some of the trees had two gashes already laid across them - X23's signature, when she had passed through here in, maybe, a similar rage.
X23. The kid didn't even have a name.
The kid. No, not "the" kid. His kid. His DNA. But not a clone. She wasn't a clone. Clones were identical, and she was clearly different - starting with gender - but too much the same. She was a child, conceived in a petrie dish, born in a cold steel laboratory. His daughter by proxy.
He didn't know if he had any children, any real children. Weapon X had seen to that, sending that chunk of time into the same oblivion as his earliest years. But he knew X23 was his flesh and blood. Literally. Family. And the emotion connected to that ran far deeper than his relatively superficial affection for the Institute kids. Family was everything. Even the reptile brain knew that; protect the family, protect your genes, save yourself in the form of your offspring.
He wanted to find her; knew he couldn't. She was like him, after all, and he hadn't wanted to share his first post-breakout days with anyone. Everything had been too raw.
"You shoulda stayed, kid," he said aloud anyway. His voice was swallowed up by the trees and the night and the anger ebbed away, slow and steady like the flow of blood from a fatal wound.
Sometime later, days maybe, he found Beast and asked him what the outcome of the great debate had been.
"We decided that the plasticity of the brain was the real issue," Beast said without batting an eye. "Assuming she wasn't taught to speak - and read, while we're at it, and I highly doubt both - by HYDRA, the healing factor X23 inherited from your DNA probably kept her brain 'young' enough to enable her to pick up language well after the critical period theorized by Chomsky. The really good news is, given her brain's extreme plasticity, she should be able to rapidly develop in other areas as well, now that she's out of those barbaric conditions. Twinkie?"
Logan grimaced at the proffered junk food and walked off with a curt, "No thanks."
His family. His flesh and blood. The same problems and the same unexpected side benefits. The knowledge was temptingly lulling, but he didn't fall for it. It changed nothing.
X23 was still out there, running solo with no shelter in sight. No one except Logan could begin to know what she had gone through, was going through, would go through when she sloughed off the worst of the killer and eased into the uncomfortable, ill-fitting skin of humanity.
And the world... the world would never understand.