"Ricochet"
AUTHOR: Mystic25
Summary: Logan didn't fire his gun at the end of "Female Trouble" But where exactly does that leave everything?
RATING: PG14
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my name and the Coke I'm drinking, and Cameron will probably cheat me out of that too.
A/N: Don't worry about Choices. I'm glad to say it's finished, as soon as my beta gets it back to me I'll post it (no pressure Sammie, haha, put down the rocks…)
A/N #2: This is what happens after watching Female Trouble and having a Lincoln Park song (Numb/Encore) stuck in my head. I never really liked the way things ended with Logan and Max.
DEDICATION: To Tab, if ever you read this know I love ya girl.
XXXXXXX
"Are you comfortable?"
"Not really."
"Good."
"Good?"
"This isn't about your comfort. You're supposed to be on edge after everything that you've been through."
"And I suppose you want me to tell you everything?"
"That's what I'm here for."
"Well?"
"Well what?"
"You were sighing, you need words to talk."
"This isn't easy."
"It never is."
"I really don't want to talk about it."
"You're here so you might as well."
There was a few seconds of silence in which a thousand phrases could have been spoken but were muddled into silence by a closed mouth.
"Logan?"
"I've been having these dreams."
"Dreams?"
"They're not really dreams, they're more like visions."
"Visions of what?"
"It's one vision really."
"And what is this one vision about?"
"It's always about the same thing."
XXXXXX
"It's okay," the warmth from her body is enough to make Logan turn towards it. Only when he sees it the realization struck him that she was still on the other side of the room. Through the thin glass window the Ambulance sirens wailed in the daylight to take the elderly Mrs. Moreno to the hospital. Spectators are already starting to converge on the sidewalk; curiosity is a human weakness that can't be avoided.
But Logan wasn't curious about Mrs. Moreno. He had already seen what happened to her, taken in every gory detail with the eyes of a caretaker, not a spectator.
"If everything's so damn okay then what the hell are you doing?"
His chair wheeled around because the words were so forceful. In front of him was beauty personified. Raven hair, brown eyes that went to eternity. It was these eyes that he found locked on his, completely on fire, angry, enraged, and above all scared.
"There are a lot of things I have to contemplate Max," Logan found his voice past the simple comfort he had offered her earlier. "Things you'll never know about."
Her eyes shifted to another stage of seething rage and he could tell that she was about to explode and fall back on her well-perfected Manticorian hostiles.
"You're damn right it's things I'll never know about. Mainly because you never open your mouth to tell me what your deal is."
Logan had to laugh then. She could always be counted on to leave a streetwise attitude amidst a tense situation. "My deal Max is having to live my life dependant on a set of wheels to get around because apparently my body lacks knowledge to recognize a good thing when it sees it."
"No Logan your deal is you would rather feel sorry for yourself then be grateful you escaped with only two malfunctioning legs from an attack that was supposed to kill you."
"That attack didn't kill me, but it might as well have for all the good it's done for my life." His eyes had a muted anger behind them that was slowly rising to the surface. Standing on her two perfectly useful legs she could have no idea how he felt.
"The last time I checked you were still living your life. Your legs aren't the only part of you. So don't give me any of your bleeding heart story about how the poor man's life is ended because he has to sit down to piss now."
"Don't try to put an street mass optimist spin on things Max. My legs are never going to work, and as a genetic protégé you could never understand what it feels like to be incomplete."
"I may be a genetic protégé Logan but I sure as hell know what it's like to feel incomplete." She was beyond enraged and was now into a totally new emotional range that melded concern and anger into one unit. The gun was still resting on the computer desk where he left it to check on Mrs. Moreno. Her eyes darted to it, but then quickly turned away as if she could erase its very presence by ignoring it.
"You're not the only one with issues," she started speaking again, her voice tuned down, evoking a new strategy of trying to keep his attention drawn away from the weapon and focused on her. He hadn't done it, but she wasn't a stupid person. When someone attempts suicide once, they don't just stop attempting it. "What makes you think you're so damn special?"
His dry laugh was back. He lowered his head for a moment, seeing the black metal of the Vector inches from his face. The single Pelican round was still in the clip. All he had to do was reach for it. His hand moved and his index finger reached out to touch the edge of the trigger, his hand stilled a second later. "I don't think I'm special," he withdrew his hand, turning to her eyes. "Why do you think I was going to do it?"
"I don't want to think why you were going to do it," Max's voice was ever-present and strong because she was fighting the turmoil in an internal battle. "Because it would paint a certain sound hearted man as nothing but a coward."
The word coward struck him, almost invoking a challenge in him. "Cowards don't want to face up to their own demise Max." His hand was back again in the trigger, only this time he positioned his hand on the gun so that he was grasping it on the flat of the table.
"That line only works if you're a military martyr Logan, not because you can't own up to your own life."
He turned his eyes up to her then, deadly angry. "What life? What kind of life is there for a crippled cyborjournalist whose work nobody can even credit him doing?" His hand raised the Vector off the table. The barrel was pointed into the open air. It swept through its invisible presence in a half circle.
"Since when has Eyes Only ever needed credit to give his work merit?" Max's words were to Logan, but her eyes were on the gun. She knew there was one bullet left in the chamber, one shot that she wasn't about to let him use. "Is that what you really want? Just a bunch of phony headlines claiming you as a Messiah for the masses from people who've never even seen you work?"
The gun moved downward in an angry swipe. "What I want is to be left alone." His anger was still there but there was weariness in it. His eyes lowered from her face, not wanting to look her in the eye right then.
"I can't do that."
Her voice snapped his eyes up to hers again, despite himself. "You can't or you won't?"
It was a question that he only wanted one answer too, and whether or not she would give him what he wanted he didn't know.
But she did give him an answer. "I can't leave you here to off yourself Logan." She remained in the same place but her body moved forward, in a stance ready to sprint at him, to tackle the offensive object away from him. "You think shooting yourself in the head is gonna solve anything? What if you miss and only wind up brain damaged?"
"C'mon Max," Logan insisted in raw disbelief. "You of all people should know that a bullet wound to the head is almost one hundred percent fatal. There'd be nothing alive in my brain to sustain any damage."
"This isn't some damn game Logan!" Max raised her voice even higher, not caring anymore if she made him angry. Her only goal now was to take the gun away from him before something happened. "This is No Holds Barr. Once you do this you can't take it back."
"That's the idea." Logan's words were soft again, defeated, but a newer, deadlier purpose had arisen inside him. The gun was higher now, aimed at the level of his head, the barrel still pointed towards the air.
"So this is how the All Mighty Eyes Only closes the chapter on his life? Dying by his own hand because of a moronic fear of not being able to walk." She was still lividly angry but her eyes had grown downcast, scared, teeming with moisture at their ends. "That'll show'em Logan. Some idiot with a grenade launcher paralyzed you so you decided to finish the job for him."
"We can't all have perfect bodies like yours," each word Logan spoke was dripping with malice. "You'll never have to suffer the burden of being half a person."
"After you pull that trigger Logan I will have to suffer the burden of being only half a person." A tear that had been pooling at the corner of her eyes escaped and fell slowly down the planes of her cheek.
"Spare me your sentimental piety Max, I know you're only saying it just to talk me down off this ledge." The gun barrel slowly began to turn around and was now pointed, aiming at the flesh of his head. "I devoted my entire life trying to talk people down from ledges and I for one know it's a load of crap."
"Logan-" Max was at a loss for words. In the most critical hour she was running out of things to say. "Do you think this makes you more of a man?" She knew the words were harshly inappropriate but it was all she could think of. She wanted a response from him and she knew that he would give it with that kind of remark.
He turned sad, affirming eyes to her; the barrel of the gun was now aimed square at his left temple. "I wish I had an answer for that."
Time seemed to slow down, his finger pushed back the trigger, the spring mechanism pumped, the single bullet readied itself to propel out of the barrel. In those few seconds, somewhere in the world a humming bird beat its wings four times, a pebble made contact with the ocean, a newborn took its first gasping breath of air.
The gun fired.
Time returned to normal. Logan blinked, once twice. Then a strength in his voice came that he didn't know he had. "Max-" The gun had dropped to the floor by his chair, and beside it a dark marring stain of crimson blood that didn't come from him.
In the short few seconds she had managed to turn the barrel around, but his finger had still pulled the trigger.
"Oh god." She was lying on the pinewood floors beside his empty gun. There was a gaping jagged hole in her chest, right above her heart. With each beat more blood leaked out of her oozing out of her like a fountain.
"Max." In his haste to get down to her he forgot to set the brakes on his chair and it propelled backwards throwing him off of it and onto the floor in an unceramonial heap.
He was a few inches from her body, and he could smell the blood leaking slowly out of her. He stared in shock at the huge wound on her chest. Finally his body acted and he placed his hands over the wound. The blood leaked through his fingers anyway.
Her eyes opened slowly as if they were laden with lead. Sweat had covered her body in a fine sheen. "Logan-"
"It's okay," Logan spoke in a rush of words, trying vainly to hold the blood in her body. He watched her eyes drift higher to meet his, intensity still in them, but it was slowly ebbing away.
"Do you wish you could take it back?" Her throat was dry, and her voice was choked as blood began filling her larynx.
He removed one hand from her chest slowly and caressed her face, leaving a trail of her own blood down her cheek. His touch held nothing but a vibrant form of life that he wished to only emit to her, to save her.
Her body was growing cold but she felt the warmth from his touch, and smelt her own sticky blood on his hands. She tried to smile at him, to give him a gesture that would envelop every reason she didn't want him to pull the trigger. But in the end she only choked on a pool of blood that sputtered out of her mouth and dribbled down her chin. Her eyes held unimaginable pain before they finally clouded over and dropped back in her head.
An uncontrollable shutter went through Logan's body, almost as if he was in the throes of a seizure. Her eyes had closed on their own and her entire body went limp under his hands.
She was still warm beneath his touch, and her hair gave off the faint smell of strawberries he always remembered loving about her. He still had time; he could call an ambulance, send the one back that had picked up Mrs. Moreno. But he couldn't leave, not out of fear, but because he suddenly had found the reason not to take his life. And she was lying on his floor.
He took his hands off her chest and leaned his forehead against hers. There were still tear tracks on her face. He kissed them away, seeing his own tears hit the side of her face as he finally answered her last question: "Yes."
XXXXXXX
"And what happened next?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"She died."
"Why are you saying she?'"
Logan's eyes turned up to look into the gaze that was demanding attention from him. Her eyes were inches from his own, staring into his expression. "You died." His correction was softly spoken as he watched her."You died right on my floor." He turned away from her, staring at the floor that was visible in the partial light of the moon illuminating a strew of clothes on it's surface. He caught an emotion in his throat and held it, almost choking on its presence. "You died when it should have been me."
Max's cat's eyes stared at the back of his neck, where he would have had a barcode if he had been from Manticore. "I wouldn't have let it been you." Her words weren't forceful, but deathly honest.
He turned around to face her, his eyes observing the nakedness of her body concealed only under a thin sheet. Her chest was rising under the movement of her breathing. There was a rhythm to it that he could get lost in but he didn't give into it and turned upwards to meet past her body, and to her gateway of her eyes.
She was recoiled, but still strong, staring at him, giving him a no nonsense response to a no nonsense statement. His sweater hung hap hazardly on his wheelchair whose silhouette was right behind her. A beacon of reality cutting into his dream.
"Why?" He had made love to her for hours, but he still couldn't read what was behind her looks, the force that fueled her passions.
Her eyes clouded, but just for a second, softening instead to a quiet sad looking strength. "For all kinds of reasons." The echo of his earlier words hung in the air, this time coming from her mouth instead of his. "But maybe really just for one." A tear hung suspended in her eye for a moment before it dropped down her face.
She could feel him move towards her, wiping away the tear track with his forehead pressed to hers.
"It's okay," they were living out earlier events in a complete different setting.
She let herself be comforted by him for a moment, took the kiss he offered to her forehead. But then she pulled back to him with a gaze that swept through his entire being. "If you ever do anything stupid like that again I'll kick your ass. It's called ricochet."
Her words stung him with more force then she might have realized. But maybe she did realize otherwise why would she say them? She was being honest, something she always knew how to do.
And he had to respect that, even if his legs didn't work. Even if the thought of it drove him over the edge. Because he finally had someone who gave a damn, and would sacrifice everything to prove it too him, even herself.
XXXXXXX
Ricochet (def.)-to spring away from an impact
R/R please.
Mystic