Disclaimer: I own no rights to Marvel, though I wouldn't mind it if they offered some to me?
Sidenote: Originally my story was going to end at this chapter, but I decided to go on with it and I got a little carried away. So, please read and tell me if I should have just stopped, or if you're glad that I kept going. Also, if you don't mind, please tell me what you don't like about the story, or my writing, so I can improve it next time. Please enjoy!
"Look, I don't want to get involved with this," Logan said to me after I finished explaining my plan to him. We were both sitting in his camper talking. He was on his cot and he had pulled over a bucket for me to sit on.
"You won't be involved; Tom and Viv will never know you had anything to do with it,"
"What if you get in trouble?"
"I'll take that risk, but I just want to meet my father and find out what he was actually put into jail for,"
"I thought that guy told you it was for armed robbery?"
"That's what he said, but he was just lying so that I would agree to meet him,"
"I don't like the situation kid, what if somethin' happens to you while I'm not there? I think you'd be better off if I stayed with you,"
"No, because then they would know that you had something to do with it. All you need to do is to drive me to Seattle, come back and fight, then on Sunday come back and get me. I'll only miss two days of school and I'm paying for all of your gas, food and you can have free drinks for a month,"
"The money's not a problem; I can pay for everything on my own. When I'm worried about is you bein' there by yourself. How do I know this guy ain't just blowin' smoke up your-"
I held up my hands, stopping him mid-sentence. "Never mind, I'll just wait until the trial to see him," I said as I stood up as far as I could and moved to go out the door of the camper. "Thanks for talking to me,"
"Hey…hey," he said, grabbing my wrist gently and pulling me back. "Alright, I'll do it, but I'm stayin' until I make sure that you're all right before I leave,"
"Thank you!" I said, flinging myself at him and hugging him. I felt him tense up at my touch, so I moved away, tucked the hair behind my ears and beaming at him. "Sorry," I apologized for throwing myself at him in my state emotion.
"It's alright, just get out of here before I change my mind,"
"Thank you!" I said again before I left.
I ran to the house, snuck back upstairs and into my room. I finally had time to really think about the situation once I was in bed and trying to go to sleep. I was so scared of everything that would happen, or even worse, what wouldn't happen. What if I liked him, what if I hated him? What if I couldn't deal with the real reasons for why he had to leave me at such a young age? Then I realized that I would be spending hours riding with Logan. What if we couldn't think of anything to talk about? We were complete opposites of each other and I had hardly spoken to him when alcohol wasn't involved. I didn't know what was going to happy, and I was scared, nervous, excited and anxious about the trip. I knew it was going to be interesting, if nothing else. That whole week was the longest week of my life.
"Do they know that you're not runnin' away, or anything?" Logan asked me as I climbed into his truck and buckled myself in.
"Yeah, they think that I'm going on a field trip with my school, which is why I wanted to park my truck here while I'm gone,"
Logan had followed me as I drove my truck to school that night after he had finished fighting. I was going to leave me truck and ride with him. Tom and Viv had gone to sleep before I snuck out and they wouldn't wake up until after I was supposed to be at school.
It was going to take fourteen hours to get to Seattle and fourteen to get back. It was nearly three in the morning when we left and Logan was expecting us to get there by five o'clock that afternoon. They were an hour behind us, so it wasn't going to be too bad. He was going to call and tell Tom that his truck had broken down a few hours away and wouldn't be able to make it for the night. Tom would no doubt be pissed that his fighter wasn't going to be there on a Friday night, but I was sure that he would get over it. I was going to spend the next night in a hotel in Seattle, see my father on Saturday, stay that night in town as well, and then Logan was going to come and pick me up. If everything went as well as planned, I would be back home a little after eleven in the morning on Monday, spend the day as though I had gone to school, and Tom and Viv would be none the wiser.
"What kind of field trip?" he asked.
"I don't know; why does it matter?"
"If you're gonna' lie it's gotta' be believable, so where did you tell them that you were going?"
"I told them that we were going to watch a show up in Edmonton,"
"What kind of a show,"
"Well, if you must know, I said 'Oklahoma,'"
"And they believed you?"
"Hey, believe it or not, I actually like musicals, so I would appreciate it if you didn't make fun of my make believe field trip,"
"You've got more problems than I thought,"
"Oh shut up, just because I'm cultured and you're not does not mean that I have problems,"
"Cultured?" he said condescendingly.
"Yes, just because I'm sixteen and live in a bar with my foster parents does not mean that I don't have a right to appreciate a musical,"
"Watchin' people make idiots of themselves doesn't count as being 'cultured'; it just means that you need to find better things to do with your time,"
"Like wrestling shirtless in a cage with sweaty men!" I said sarcastically. "Please forgive me; I apologize for ever thinking that you don't have better hobbies than me,"
"Are you gonna' talk the whole time?" he asked, looking at me with a smirk.
"No, I'm going to sleep, but I'm going to snore so that I annoy you even when I'm not awake,"
He laughed. "Then shut up and go to sleep,"
"I'm not sleepy right now,"
"When are you gonna' get sleep, then?"
"I don't know, talking helps me to fall asleep," I said. "Do you have a heater; it's freezing in here,"
He turned the heater on. "Put your hands on the vents, it'll warm up in a little bit," he said, pointing to the vents.
"So, where did you come from?"
"I thought we talked about this before?"
"No, where did you live before you moved into our parking lot?"
"A place over in British Columbia,"
"What place?"
"It's called Wolverine's Range,"
"Is that where you got your name from?"
"No,"
"Where did you get it, then?"
"I don't know,"
"You have it engraved on dog tags but you don't know where you got it?"
"Look, I don't remember, alright?" he said a little aggressively.
"Alright," I said, looking out at the falling snow through the side window.
That was the one thing that I had mixed feelings about moving from Canada for; the weather. I loved winter, snow and cold weather, but at times, it got a little ridiculous.
We both say quietly for a couple of minutes as he drove and I continued to stare out my window.
"I'm sorry,"
"For what?" I asked, confused.
"For gettin' mad,"
I smiled and let out a little laugh. "It's fine," I said. "I'm not fragile, or anything, people tend to yell and scream at me, it doesn't bother me,"
"Just because it doesn't bother you doesn't mean people should do it,"
"You know, to be a man who makes a living out of fighting other guys, you sure have a lot of morals,"
"You don't?"
"I know that having morals makes a difference, not everyone agrees with yours so obviously there's not a set standard for how people believe and if there's not a set for people to go by then what are you supposed to believe in?"
"You go with what you think is right,"
"But what is right? What if what's right for me is wrong for someone else, is it still right?"
"That's why you trust your instincts, they don't lie,"
"Hey…Chloe, wake up,"
"What?" I asked, pulling the side of my face from the cold, sweating window of Logan's truck.
"We're at a gas station, do you wanna' go use the toilet and get something to eat?"
I looked around sleepily. "Where are we?"
"About four hours away from Laughlin City,"
I stretched my arms over my head and yawned. It was a little after seven that morning and I had been sleeping for about three hours worth of our trip thus far.
"Yeah, let's go," I said, reaching for my seat belt and trying to unbuckle myself, but it was stuck. I was still sleepy and tried to focus on the buckle. "I think I'm stuck," I finally admitted, letting go in frustration.
"It's kind'a screwed up, you have to push it right," he said, reaching over and jiggling the seat belt until it 'popped', unbuckling it for me.
"Thanks," I said, grabbing my hat, pulling it on and hopping out of the car.
I followed Logan into the gas station and went straight to where the drinks were. I needed some caffeine if I was going to stay awake for the rest of the ride. I grabbed two Coco-Colas, assuming that we would probably stop again before we got to Seattle, as we still had at least ten hours of driving left. I then went to where Logan was at, looking at the food. I grabbed a bag of chips, gummy bears, a box of Twinkies and some beef jerky.
"Nice breakfast," he said sarcastically.
"It's a gas station, what are you supposed to get for breakfast?"
He didn't say anything, he just turned and walked over to the section where they had boxes of chicken fingers and potato wedges for sale; he grabbed two and started to the cash register. I followed him, tripping on the edge of one of the aisles. He looked back at me and laughed.
"Leave me alone, I'm still sleepy," I defended, but smiled at him.
"Hurry up and put your stuff up here," he said.
"I am hurrying," I said, walking to stand beside him and placing my odd items beside his. He reached for his wallet. "Oh, I'm paying for this," I said, digging into my pocket for the money that I had stuffed into it in a hurry earlier that morning.
"I've got it, don't worry about it," he said, pulling out his wallet and handing the young woman behind the counter twenty-five dollars. He looked at me as I teetered sleepily back and forth, covering my yawn with my hand. "Are you gonna' make it back to the truck?"
"Yeah, I'm wide awake," I said with a laugh. "Uh, where's your restroom at?" I asked the woman at the register.
"It's right back there," she said, pointing to a door.
"Okay, thanks. I'm going to run in there real quick before we leave,"
"Alright, I'll be out there waitin'," he said, grabbing the bags with our food and heading towards the door.
I rushed through using the bathroom, noting how rough I looked in the mirror. My hair looked like a mess underneath my hat, all of my clothes were wrinkled and my right cheek was still slightly pink from leaning against the window.
"Oh well," I thought. "I don't have anyone to impress,"
I went back out to the truck, not happy to have to be scrunched up in the small seat for any longer, but knowing that it was my idea, so I wasn't going to complain. I climbed back in, buckled myself up once more and he pulled over to the side of the gas station.
"Here," he said, handing me one of the bags.
After six more hours of driving, we had eaten our chicken and potato wedges, chips, pork rinds, Twinkies, gummy bears and almost all of the beef jerky, which I had stuck the rest in the glove compartment for later. Somewhere along hour four, he was amused by the fact that if you squish red gummy bears between your teeth it made your gums look like they were bleeding.
With nearly four hours left to go he pulled over for more gas and a bathroom break for me. We spotted a hamburger place next to it and ran over for lunch.
"Are you gonna' get in trouble for missin' school?" he asked as we were eating.
"No, I called in yesterday pretending to be Viv and told them that I was going to miss today because I had to go to a funeral and that I wouldn't be there Monday because I had an appointment with the dentist,"
"You really don't have enough supervision,"
"Probably not," I said with a laugh.
"If you don't have to live with your dad do you get to stay where you're at?"
"I don't know. If I'm not with him I'm not sure how it'll work out, because I won't technically need to be with a foster family and if that's the case then they probably won't keep paying for me to live with Viv and Tom," I said.
"Can't they adopt you?"
"No, they won't. The only reason they even took me in was that when you keep a foster child the government pays you so much to take care of them. About eight years ago, they had some financial problems and a spare bedroom, so I seemed like a good solution," He looked at me for a moment and I swear he felt sorry for me, they way his eyes were so full of concern put me off slightly. I didn't need him to pity me, I needed him to be touch and strong, not caring about how I felt, because if he started to feel sorry for me, the 'He-man' of my bar, then I would start to feel the same way, which was not how I wanted to start feeling sixteen years into my life. I looked away from him, forcing a small laugh. "I thought everyone knew that,"
"But you want to stay with them?"
"Yeah…I mean, it may seem…odd, but they're like my family, I guess, they're the only ones I've known who haven't just kicked me to the side when I've been hard to deal with, which is, as you know, most of the time,"
He gave me a small, weak smile and nodded his head. "Will you have to go back to that foster place if they don't want you to live with them anymore?"
"Probably, but I've been thinking about it and I thought I might try to get in touch with my aunt to see if I couldn't live with her. Now that I'm older and go to school and can get a job, I probably wouldn't be such a problem for her,"
"You want to live with her even after she gave you away?"
"I wouldn't be by myself, so I wouldn't care,"
"Alright, are you ready to go?" he asked.
"Yeah,"
After another four more hours of driving, we were finally in Seattle. I had planned everything out so carefully, or so I thought. However, I had forgotten that while driving into the city, we would have to go through my old neighborhood, and so when I spotted my old house I couldn't stop myself from crying. Logan stopped the truck, pulling it over to the side of the road, unknowingly right in front of the house.
"Are you alright?" he asked.
"Yeah, sorry," I said, wiping the tears from my face. "That's where I used to live,"
He looked up at the house and swore. "I'm sorry kid, that's where your mother-"
"Yeah," I said, suddenly not wanting to hear him say it.
It all seemed too real, like I hadn't been living with it for all of those years, but as if I had just been told what had happened and suddenly I was full of so many emotions that I didn't know what to do with myself. I was sad because I had never gotten to have my mother for as long as I should have, I was mad at my stepfather for being the reason why she was gone, and I hated my father for leaving us. It was his fault that she had been remarried; it was his fault that she had met that stupid man.
I sat there and cried, not able to stop. He didn't try to comfort me; I didn't want him to. I wanted to be allowed to hate, to be mad and to miss her. I wanted to be allowed to cry and feel without anyone making fun of me, without having to hide what was hurting me. I didn't want anyone to hug me and to tell me that it was all going to be okay, because it wasn't. I didn't have a family; I didn't have anyone who loved me, who didn't have an ulterior motive for doing things for me. The only hope that I had was in a man whom I hadn't seen in thirteen years, he was my only hope for having someone genuinely love me and want to take care of me, and I couldn't have hated him more than I did at that moment.
"Alright, listen to me; I'll be here to pick you up on Sunday around this time, do not go anywhere except to see your father, that was the deal," Logan said to me after I had checked into my hotel and was getting my bags out of his truck.
"Okay, I'll be here waiting on you, so don't forget me," I said with a smile.
"I'm not going to," he assured me.
"Look, I really appreciate this, I know you've got to be dead tired, so thank you a lot,"
"I'll be fine, just talk to your father and get everything you need to know, we ain't gonna' be makin' this trip every weekend,"
I smiled at him and let out a sigh. "I'll see you on Sunday, then," I said, slinging my bag over my shoulder. "Bye,"
"Bye," he said as I closed the passenger's side door, and then he drove off.
I watched as his truck went down the road and saw that he was my only life, my only hope in my crazy life. He cared about me and as drastic a step as it may have seemed, I decided that when I saw him again on Sunday, I would ask him if I could live with him after the trial. We would be great together, he could go fighting and I could take the bets on him. We could have made a great living together and it wouldn't be too bad to have someone to talk to all the time. I would also get to travel a lot, which I had always wanted to do. He seemed to actually care about me, at least more than anyone else had, and it wouldn't hurt to at least ask, the most he could do was say 'no'. I tried not to get my hopes up, but the thought of living with him got me excited and as I went to sleep that night, I began to plan my life with him, and it looked great as far as I could see.
The next day I was terrified, more so that I ever had been. The future of how my next two years would be spent would unofficially be decided upon me meeting my father.
I caught a cab down to the prison where he was supposed to be at, but when I told one of the guards that I was there to see Christopher Wells, they said that he wasn't there.
"What do you mean he's not here? I was supposed to see him today; I had a meeting set up with one of his representatives,"
"I'm sorry, he's not here," he said.
"Do you know the address to any of the other prisons around here?" I asked.
"No, he was released, he's not in prison any longer,"
"What, when was he released, what was his release date?"
"Uh…" he said, flipping back through some papers on a clip board. "Wednesday,"
I resisted the urge to kick the wall, even though that what I wanted to do. "Alright, thank you," I said, walking away.
I went out the door and sat down on the steps. I was sitting there for, literally, not even two minutes when it started to pour down rain. The great thing about the rain is that when you cry, no one can tell.
Sunday night I was starting to get a little nervous, it was past nine o'clock and Logan was nearly five hours late from when he had told me he would pick me up.
"Where is he?" I wondered; looking out the window into the rain flooded parking lot.
After it turned one a.m. I decided to call home and tell Tom and Viv where I was. "Hello?" Viv said into the phone.
"Hey, uh, I'm having a bit of a problem,"
"What's wrong?"
"Well, I know that I told you that I was going to Edmonton, but I lied, I'm in Seattle,"
"How did you get to Seattle?"
"I paid someone to bring me, but they were supposed to come and pick me up at give, they're seven hours late,"
"What do you want me to do; you got yourself into this mess,"
"Yeah, I'm aware of that, but I need a way home, otherwise I'm going to be stuck here,"
"I'll call some airports and see if I can't get you a flight in tonight,"
"Alright, thank you," I said.
I left her my room number and waited for her to call me back, which she did at fifteen to two, telling me that I had to hurry and get to the airport, there was a flight leaving in twenty-five minutes. It was nearly six in the morning when I got home. They let me sleep for the rest of the day, and Tom took me to pick up my truck later that night. They didn't say anything about it and just left me to my own thoughts. By that night, I was furious that Logan had forgotten me when he told me that he wouldn't and I was looking forward to letting him have it, but as the time dwindled down and the clock struck eight, he was no where to be seen and I was starting to worry about him. I was about to go looking for his truck when Sid started the fights, saying that our fighter was gone and that they needed a new one.
"Tom, where's Wolverine?" I asked.
"He left," he said, sounding slightly angry.
"Why?" I asked, very confused. Had Tom found out that he was the one who had taken me to Washington?
"He got into a fight with one of the customers,"
"So? That's what he's paid to do,"
"No, it was different,"
"How?"
He looked at me hard, walked over to me and dropped his voice. "He's one of those freaks,"
"What?"
"He's a mutant,"
Have you ever had one of those moments where everything seems to go in slow motion, but your heart speeds up and your mind starts reeling at a mile a minute? Where everything you thought begins to unravel and make up what was actually real? Where things that you couldn't explain, but had overlooked, suddenly made complete sense? That's exactly what was happening to me at that moment.
"I have to go," I said.
"Where?"
"Up to the house, I'm not feeling good," I said, running to the stairs and up through the kitchen and into my room. I locked my door and fell onto my bed.
How could I have been so stupid? I finally realized the reason to why I had felt a connection with him, it wasn't because we were both alone, because neither of us had a family and were searching for something. He hadn't taken up with me because he had wanted something from me, like I had originally thought. I guess Rick Blaine said it best in 'Casablanca' "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine" Except his she was my he. No, the reason why he had taken care of me was because he knew that I had a hard road ahead, because he knew what it was like to be a mutant and to be scared and hiding it from the world. He wanted to protect me because he knew that I was a mutant, too.