"Hi, honey, I'm home." Wolverine bounces through the door, smelling of cordite and old blood.
"Good day at the office, dear? Bad guys all beaten to pâté? " Kurt responds, without looking up from a mound of files, data crystals, iPad and good old fashioned reams of paper which fill almost every flat surface of the room to overflowing.
"What the fuck is all this shit?"
"DON'T touch anything!" Kurt waves his hands protectively over the mess. "Please, I think I have it all sorted."
"But what is it?"
"It's Krakoa. Or rather it's a plan for all the municipal substructure you need to run Krakoa as an ongoing refuge for all of mutant kind."
"The what?"
"The drains, the agriculture, the wifi, the catering services, housekeeping, waste disposal. Beer imports." That's got Logan's attention. Kurt's eyes are shining with accomplishment. "Doug and Tessa and I have been working on this for days and days and I finally think we're getting there."
"But why is this your problem? And why is it taking over our place?"
"My place, I'm the one with the executive pad and a waterfall in the bathroom, if you don't mind. Because I am Important."
This earns him a dismissive snort, but the suite is indeed more impressive than Logan's rooms.
Kurt sighs and stretches his back, the cracking of vertebrae is loud enough to be heard from across the room. "As to why it's here, because someone has to do it? Because the rest of the council is too full of brilliant ideas, or too busy or too important to deal with the minutiae and the detail of making it all work."
"So it all falls on you?"
"And Cypher and Sage, but yes, the buck stops here."
Logan's peeling off his uniform, heading towards a shower under a warm waterfall. Some things about island life are cool.
"So what's for dinner?"
"Dinner?"
"You know, that meal at the end of the day..." he stops undressing and pauses in the doorway. Kurt gets busy with a data crystal all of a sudden. "When did you last eat?"
"Oh, I had breakfast..."
"Uh huh, and when did you last get any down time?"
"Um, what's the day today?"
"Tuesday."
"I had the afternoon off on Friday. Well, not last Friday, because Exodus tried to kill Sinister, so we all got a bit busy, but the Friday before that."
Logan's eyes narrow and he crosses the room, he puts a hand under Kurt's chin and tilts his face up. "That's a bruise? Why do you have a bruise on your cheek?"
"Oh, it's nothing, nearly gone, I told you, there was a little spat and there were psychic bolts flying all over the place, I just fell off my chair but it's alright now and Exodus apologised and I think he really meant it this time and Charles has fitted me with excellent new, shiny, psionic shields and my head doesn't ache much at all..." the sentence only stops because he runs out of air.
Logan is growling.
"It's fine, really."
"Really?"
"No," Kurt deflates. "No, it's all crap." Logan moves the hand to the nape of his neck, the muscles are rigid with tension.
"Go on then." After a hot shower, Kurt is lying on the vast bed while Logan works on the knots in his muscles.
"Oh, there, right there!" He's more relaxed than he's been in a fortnight. "So, I thought it was going to be okay, with Jean, Ororo and Kate to back me up. But they're busy and they're away, off doing stuff and I'm left with the rest of them. And they're all taller than me, bigger than me. Older than me by a millennia or two. They're psychopaths, maniacs, megalomaniacs. And that's just Mother..." Logan flinches in sympathy. "and Charles won't let me kill her." He groans. "And the sewage designs. And import tariffs."
"They can't expect you to do everything, hon' not on your own. You need staff. A secretary, admin, stuff like that."
Kurt rolls over beneath him. "Staff?" He sounds incredulous.
"And someone to clean this place and cook for you." Logan pokes a prominent rib. "You need a housekeeper."
"A servant!" Kurt has now progressed to sounding horrified. "Mutants don't come here to be cooks or housekeepers or secretaries, they come here to be free!"
"Sure. Free. And then what? They sit around all day eating lotus flowers and being all Zen like? They come here to be safe, but they need to do things, have a purpose, a job." Kurt, for once, is speechless. "They're not all gonna' be out in spandex, saving the world, Elf. Or working their tail off on the Quiet Council. So let them make you dinner. It's gotta be someones superpower, baking a good pie."
Kurt is looking at him as though he's speaking in tongues. Logan kisses the back if his neck. "Sleep now."
"Oh, god, I've got to be up at five."
"No, no you don't." Strong arms close round him.
Logan doesn't know much about computers, but the Krakoa system is very user friendly. And besides, Sage helps him.
'I'm sorry, I'm out of office today because - my partner is reaming me through the mattress and if you want to argue, take it up with him, if you think you're hard enough.'
K. Wagner. Nightcrawler.