Tiny Fires

This motel room is a creaking, cracking fossil of floral curtains and scratchy bedding and middling cleanliness with furniture that chips and flakes and peels into rough edges that will cut your hands and scrape your shins if you're not careful. On the walls, paper yellowing like an ancient tome holds in confidence the secrets it has seen, threatening to turn to dust if touched even lightly. The carpeting is old and cheap and rough beneath bare feet with dirt and stains hidden in spotty swirls of brown and orange and green. There are furtive whispers in this room, churning and fusing with heated accusations, screams of rage and love murmured over moans. There are a million different people, a million different lives, a million different lies in this room.

When he first opened the door--a dirty key into a lock easily broken--Logan's nose had twitched under the onslaught of the blood and the piss and the jizz of person upon person upon person, world without end, Amen. But it all fades, like everything fades, after a while and, rather than remaining nearly unbearable, becomes simply uncomfortable. He grows accustomed to the stink of the room, layering on top of the unfamiliar scents, more welcome ones. There is Jubilee. Leftover pizza. There's the open beer on the bedside table next to him. There is the night wind blowing in through the open window, ruffling Jubilee's ponytail, cooling the stuffy room and bringing only the safe smells and sounds of the interstate and the New Mexico desert dark.

Logan is stretched out on the bed, rubber-limbed and easy, in just clean jeans. His hat rests on the stained and peeling dresser. Below that, his kicked-off boots and sweaty, dirty clothes are in a heap on the floor. Jubilee had herded him into the shower the moment they arrived, saying that the motel room already smelled like feet, so it didn't need to smell like his armpits, too. She's a pushy kid. Always insistent. Always acting like she knows what's best. He wanted to drag her in with him, wanted to listen to her squeal when the water was too cold. He wanted to watch the grime washing away from her skin and smell the road-smells as they faded from her hair.

Instead, he stepped into the shower by himself, not caring that the water was inexplicably scalding. Jubilee shut the door behind him.

By the time he was done, she was ordering pizza -- two of them, because he likes ground beef and she requires extra cheese and pineapple. She eats two pieces and declares herself stuffed, like she always does. Later on, he'll eat the rest of it (just because it's there) and marvel at how she can turn anything into junk food unfit for normal consumption.

Jubilee is lying on her stomach, her head at the foot of the bed, watching a Law & Order rerun. Logan is lying on his back, his eyes shut, trying to ignore the Law & Order rerun. His hands, though they rest on his chest, twitch to touch her skin. He wants to feel the warmth of her legs beneath them. He wants to listen to her laugh when he brushes the delicate, ticklish spots on her inner thighs. He presses his palms into his chest to still them. To keep them from betraying him.

He's just starting to doze off when he feels something poke into his side. He ignores it and is poked again. And again. He opens one eye, just a little bit. The poking thing is a toe. Jubilee has rolled over onto her side, the offending foot still hovering near him.

"Quit," he growls at her.

"I'm thirsty," she says and toes him again.

"Have a beer."

She gasps, her mouth falling open in mock outrage. "Contributing to the delinquency of a minor! I'm afraid that's twenty-five to life, Wolvie."

He just grunts in reply.

"Get me something out of the vending machine."

"Get it yourself." He shuts the eye again.

She squeals a high-pitched whine that makes him cringe. "But I'm too lazy."

"Looks like you're just gonna have to suffer," Logan says.

"Mean."

She throws the remote at him. It's old and bulky and it hits him hard in the chest. He feels the bed shift as she wiggles off of it. He hears the slap of her flip-flops and the door as it opens and shuts. He turns the television off and sighs. In the blessed quiet, Logan snoozes.

Until the quiet wakes him up.

The quiet wakes him because the quiet means that Jubilee hasn't returned yet. How long has she been gone? He isn't sure. Her scent in the room is fading.

He goes out looking for her.

He finds her in front of the vending machine, a bottle of water in hand. He also finds a tow-headed kid in too-big jeans and a too-tight tee-shirt chatting her up. Logan thinks of six ways to eviscerate the boy from ten paces, so he stops at fifteen–-a distance safe enough to trust himself. The kid is older than Jubilee--nineteen, maybe, and good-looking in that vacant, surf-rat way. By the way she's smiling at him, Jubilee obviously thinks so.

Blending into the shadows, Logan watches them. He wonders what she looks like to this kid. In black terrycloth shorts, a pink stretch tank top and flip-flops, he thinks she must look like any other pretty teenager. In the motel's dirty orange lights, the kid can't see her scars--where the nails drove through, where the battles left her beaten, where madmen plied her with pain and deceit. In the pale light of the normal New Mexico night, the kid can't see her as she really is.

He is just a kid, after all.

But he smells like man. Smells like a young buck, all haunches and antlers and sharp ambition. The scent pushes against Logan like it wants to make him unsteady. Like it wants to challenge the old man. Call the old man out and fight him until he's dead or running. Here's your pink slip, old man. It's time to retire, old man. It's past your time, old man. It's time to give up what was yours.

The blades tremble beneath the skin. They want to pick up the gauntlet that the kid doesn't even know he has thrown. Logan won't be put to the hills just yet. Not by this one. Too weak. Too young. It's coming, though. Not this time. Not next time. But soon. Someday soon, he'll lose. He'll lose and she'll be gone.

"Yeah, so my buddy, Glen, was just like road trip, man! and here we are," the kid is rambling.

Jubilee giggles and flips her ponytail. "Really? That's, like, so cool that you can just take off. I could never get away with that."

"Why not?" The kid is leaning closer to her. Too close. "You don't have a boyfriend or something do you?"

"Jubilation," Logan barks her name.

The kid flinches. He's startled. Jubilee just sighs. Her shoulders slump a little bit, like she's already conceded defeat in an argument she hasn't yet had. The kid looks at Logan standing in the shadows. He takes a step back from Jubilee. And then two more.

"Is that your dad? I didn't mean to get you in trouble." The kid is whispering. He doesn't know Logan can still hear him. Of course he doesn't know.

But Jubilee does.

"Don't worry about it," she whispers back, smiling. "My dad," she emphasizes the word, "is just totally over-protective, in an insane, mass-murderer kind of way."

The kid looks back to Logan, shadowed like a movie villain. Like the masher on the other end of the line. Like the slasher in the attic. Like the thing that goes bump in the night. Logan can smell his fear; it's blood in the water. The challenge is withdrawn and the buck retreats.

Not this one. Not now. Not tonight.

Jubilee watches the withdrawal with quirked eyebrow and a knowingly sardonic smile before sauntering casually over to Logan. He takes her roughly by the elbow and steers her back to the room, walking so quickly that she has to trot to keep up with him. When they get there, he nearly throws her in. She kicks her sandals off and puts the bed between them. He slams the door and is perversely pleased that it makes her jump. He wants it to frighten her. He wants her to feel guilty. He wants her to feel sorry.

She puts her hands on her hips and glares at him defiantly.

It pisses him off. Jubilee pisses him off. She yanks his chain and pushes his buttons. She works him like she's taking him on a long con. She plays him like he's a machine, an instrument, a tool, a toy. Like she knows him in and out and upside-down. Like she has confidence.

Logan is a little bit proud of her for that.

Across the bed, Jubilee's blowing smoke. He's mad at her? That's fucking rich. Well, she can be mad at him, too. She can play his game. She can play any game.

There's more to her than there used to be. She has filled out since they left the mansion in a way that is both gratifying and satisfying. She's not lush. Not curved. She's still angles and planes and edges. But she's not so transparent. Not stretched so thinly, like an overused rubber band, about to painfully snap.

Logan's eyes wander the curve of her breast, the jut of her hip, the flesh of her thighs before returning to her face. She smiles--a slight quiver of the lip that's gone so quickly he can't be sure it was ever there at all. He doesn't have time to wonder about it. Jubilee isn't smoking anymore. She's smoldering.

She knows this game. She knows the rules.

On the bed, on her knees, she's on her way toward him and he feels the pull. He feels it from his bare feet, straight up his knees, into his hips and up his spine. She is his. His. His. His. She belongs to him; he feels the pull to take her. Nearer and nearer, she moves and it pulls, until she's inches away from him and he's inches away from absorbing her.

She runs her fingers over his collarbone, up his neck, down his jaw. She feels his artery. How fast his pulse is. He lets her linger there, feeling his pumping blood. Her hands are hot; they ignite tiny fires on his skin that she fans the flames of with her lips, her teeth, her tongue. She burns; he blisters. Her hands move up and up and up, slowly, so slowly, arms winding around his neck as she pulls his body flush against hers. She smells like sweet-sticky pineapple and slippery-wet desire. The motel smells, the desert night, the usurping young buck--they're all pushed back and under and away. They're going, going, going and they're gone, gone, gone. All that's left is her, just her. Her heady scent surrounds him until he knows of nothing else.

"He thinks you're my father." Her voice is low and rough, her mouth close to his ear. "Do you want me to call you Daddy?"

She takes his lower lip in her teeth. She bites until it bleeds, bleeds for just a moment before healing over. And then she bites again. It's a game, too--her favorite one to play. Make him bleed. Watch him mend. Hurt him hard. Watch him heal.

She knows she can't make the hurt stick.

Logan loses himself in the smell of her and the sound of her and the taste of her and the hurt of her. He lets himself go until he's gone.

He is gone.

But she's still here.

She laughs when he growls and laughs when he picks her up. She stops laughing when he pushes her against the wall hard enough to hurt. As he tears her shorts and ruins her panties, she thinks about how easy he is to turn on, to manipulate. As he bruises her neck with his teeth, she wonders when she became manipulative. She wonders what made her this way. Little girls don't make themselves. Little girls are molded and shaped.

Jubilee has a checklist in her head.

Emma?

Check.

The White Queen knew better than anyone that allegiances are a liability. There's a sucker born every minute and hero-worship is the game for them. Emma branded her with the knowledge that adoration equals disappointment and tattooed Trust No One over every last inch of Jubilee's body.

Logan's hands are rough, enflaming the delicate skin of her breasts.

Kurt?

Check.

Jubilee has nursed a secret distaste for the blue demon since the crucifixion. When she looks at him, she sees only the terror and the pain. She feels the muscles that tear. The tendons that rip. The bones that shatter. The screams that she knows are Angelo's that shred through her. The cold calm that slips over her as she dies. When she looks at Kurt, she remembers only these things. She remembers that dreams make even wise men foolish. And everyone suffers for the dream.

Logan's waist is hard and rippled. When she wraps her legs tightly around it, he growls so deeply that she can feel it in her knees.

Bastion?

Check.

The thought of Bastion makes her feel like her heart is shriveling under her ribs. Bastion changed her so thoroughly that she feels like a different person now, right down to her DNA and her fingerprints. At the Hulkbuster base, she learned that sometimes there is no restraint to cruelty and that infinite suffering is a very real possibility. She learned that she was less trustworthy than an intentional traitor. That she was less worthy than the untried and untrained. That she was nothing more than a nuisance and a burden. That she was never going to be a hero. That she couldn't even save herself, much less the world. That there was only one person who was ever going to rescue her.

Logan.

It is always going to be Logan. No matter how old or strong or powerful she becomes, it will always be him. She will never just be Jubilation Lee. She'll never just be a girl. A woman. Independent. On her own. Light skin. Blue eyes. Short legs. Wearing a suit. Wearing jeans. Too-expensive shoes. Not-expensive-enough perfume. Go to college. Go to classes. Go to parties. Meet guys. Meet girls. Have a job. Work at Starbucks. Work at Saks. Work at Ralph Lauren. Go out for drinks. Go out on dates. Fall in love. Get proposed to. Get engaged. Have a wedding. Have a baby. Grow up together. Grow old together. Die together.

That will never be her. That will never be hers. All she has ever had is this. All she will ever have is this. It is always going to be Logan. Never anything but Logan. She is never going to be able to save herself. She will never be able to let him go. She will never be free.

She wraps her arms around his neck and buries her face in his hair.

She thinks that she doesn't even know if she's alive anymore.

He bruises her thighs and buries himself inside of her.

He doesn't think at all.