Alright guys, this is Maia's account of the last ten years, and it's not pretty so hang in there!

"No one ever listens, this wallpaper glistens
One day they'll see what goes down in the kitchen. Places, places, get in your places
Throw on your dress and put on your doll faces.
Everyone thinks that we're perfect
Please don't let them look through the curtains. Picture, picture, smile for the picture
Pose with your brother, won't you be a good sister?
Everyone thinks that we're perfect
Please don't let them look through the curtains. D-O-L-L-H-O-U-S-E
I see things that nobody else sees." (Dollhouse- Melanie Martinez)

Before L Maia had never considered herself having children. Ever since she'd realized she was a mutant, the idea of passing that ever present fear of discovery on to a child was terrifying, but she wouldn't give her baby up for the world. L felt the same way too. She'd fallen asleep on his chest when she was about seven months along, one hand splayed over his heart, the other on top of his as it rested on her stomach. He was dreaming. She hadn't mentioned to him that she'd started to be able to read his mind when he was asleep, but he was only the second person whose dreams she'd been able to see. The first had been her mother. She took a breath and focused on where his mind was:

L was standing in an empty bedroom looking at different colored patches of paint on the wall, a handmade wooden crib sitting in one corner, waiting on the rest of the room to come together…a nursery. He was staring at the three paint splotches, his eyebrows furrowed. This was the life he imagined outside of their cage. She loved it. What she wouldn't give to have met him somewhere else. So much would be different. Maia walked up behind him on instinct, and wrapped her arms around him. He felt her. Her unintended intrusion into his dream jolted him awake, and she covered up her fright by smiling up at him, "I like the yellow. I don't think our little girl is going to be a pink lover." The baby shifted, and Maia grimaced, grateful for the distraction, "Shit, she hit my bladder again." She tapped his arm, "Help me up please sir, I need to pee. Preferably not on the both of us."

He helped her up, and they stood nose to nose in silence for a minute. She slid her hands up to his neck and pulled herself up for a kiss. She smiled broadly as she pulled back, "Thank you, my Wild Man." She'd drifted into the restroom and contemplated her apparent dream walking.

Maia didn't think about it long though, as her daughter stretched again and brought her attention back to the future. Or rather the past. When she got back into bed with L she started talking, "You know, I was thinking about what things would be like if we hadn't met here, if we'd met out there in the real world. I think you'd be some sort of blue collar guy, like the ones in Valleyview." She touched the side of his face and looked into his eyes, "I would have pursued you I think, and you'd be absolutely horrified because of how young I am. I'm stubborn though, and I know you think I smell amazing. You might have been able to convince me to wait until I was eighteen for sex, but I think we'd be right here not too long later. You, me, and a baby, picking paint colors for a nursery after you made a crib by hand. I might have become a teacher, kids wouldn't ever get anything over on me." His mind read both amusement and agreement as he kicked one of her legs over his and eased himself inside of her to show his little mutant exactly what he thought about their complimentary imaginings.

Two months passed in a blur.

Maia had given her life for her daughter's, she couldn't regret that. She'd let the darkness take her, confident that L would save their daughter and she'd have a good life. That was all she could ask for. It didn't work out that way. She'd come awake in a morgue freezer, her chest burning and her belly itching like hell. Instinct had her roll on her side and cough up blood. An animalistic strength burned through her and she shoved the door to the chest open, freeing herself. The strength fled as soon as she fell from the open freezer, and she laid on the floor, panting. She pulled the gown up slowly, and nearly fainted at the sight of herself.

Black thread zigzagged across her skin, which was angry and red but almost completely healed. The cause of the itching being the healing skin pulling on the thread. Someone had stitched her back up after L had saved their daughter. Her daughter. Her daughter had done this to her, had passed L's healing ability to her mother. When Maia got her hands on them both, she was going to hug them so tight and kiss every inch of their faces. She didn't know where they were. Maia struggled to her feet, swaying dangerously, but managed to make it to the morgue door without falling on her face. She didn't make it far though. Dr. Rice found her, "Oh my. Our own Lazarus."

"Go to hell." She spat, "Where are they?"

He'd stared at her like she was a piece of meat, but had hardly missed a beat, "Dead. I'd show you their bodies, but even I'm not that cruel. Stryker's men tracked them down and killed them. The baby did something before it died though, didn't it? You should be dead too."

"They're not dead." Maia gasped, her brain not comprehending what he was telling her, "You're lying."

"You're such a doll." He had the nerve to laugh at her, "They're dead, Maia, and your sister is Stryker's bitch now because she insisted that we keep you with that animal."

"He wasn't an animal." She hissed, her stomach clenching.

He shook his head, "Yes, he was, and you're naive to think otherwise. You were just something warm for him to entertain himself with." Maia lunged, growling at him, the animal in her rising up again, but he was ready for her clumsy attack. She never had learned to have the strength and grace that L had innately, and she was still dizzy. A syringe sunk into her neck and she was out almost instantly. Hell started when she woke up.

He'd dressed her in a frilly white gown and strapped her to a metal table. Torture was a mild word for what they did to her to see the extent of what her daughter had left her with, compounded with the grief that overwhelmed her mind, Maia wished she was dead. Eventually the healing faded enough that they stopped slicing her up all the time, but Maia clung to the animal, her last connection to L and their girl. Maia lost all sense of time, staying in that stark medical room for what felt like years, clinging to the idea that L was coming for her, that they weren't dead and he would come back for her. They had to be alive.

Things were worse when Stryker came to visit. He just satisfied himself with beating her and telling her what an animal she was, describing in brutal detail what had been done to L and the baby. When he left, however, Dr. Rice always felt the need to spend time cooing at her, treating her like a child. He even dragged his teenaged son by and made them get a 'family' picture taken. The man with a gun pointed at her head wasn't in the final product. At least that particular visit from Zander hadn't led to him being left alone with her while she was strapped into a chair or on a table. He like to see just how far he could push her boundaries before his dad returned. Zander'd gotten his hand in her panties once before Dr. Rice had come back in and he'd made the excuse that she'd needed an itch on her thigh scratched. His father bought it and had gushed about how sweet their bonding was.

She couldn't decide if Dr. Rice thought she really was his child or if she was a family pet. Animal or child, she wasn't Maia anymore, and she wasn't part of his family in any way. They kept her blindfolded and moved her a time or two, and she didn't think things could get worse.

She was wrong of course. She was always so wrong. She was being tortured by a man who had a tendency to try to get his hands on her bare skin and to taunt her about letting 'Weapon X', an animal, fuck her. She'd wanted to kill him for a long time. His luck ran out when her blindfold slipped. At first she was blinded by the bright medical lights. She'd gotten used to darkness and the dim lighting of her tiny cage, but it didn't take too long to recover. Then she was caught up by the same surge of malevolent mental energy and caught his eyes with hers. He realized the mistake, but she opened her mouth before he could do anything about it, her voice hoarse with disuse. "Don't say a word." He gasped a bit, but couldn't form words. "I want you to make yourself feel the pain we've felt."

By the time anyone realized what was going on, he had sliced lines into his skin, gutted himself, and was digging into his own skull with a scalpel as he bled to death in agony. Her satisfaction at his pain was short lived. Dr. Rice was disappointed.

"Dear girl, I was hoping it wouldn't come to this." He whispered to her as he fit speculum in her eyes, forcing them open. "If you hadn't been naughty and killed my associate, I wouldn't have to be doing this. But you know as well as I do that the eyes are the window to the soul." He dripped something into each eye, and they burned. She screamed. Her vision faded until she was left with shadows. Blinded, her mutation was useless. She'd been hobbled.

Then Stryker died, drowned, Dr. Rice told her, and he moved her again, to a place where no one would think to look for her. She began to come to term with the truth, L and their daughter were dead, and she was destined to live in torment until she finally joined them.

"You're a doll." He'd always told her, but she hadn't realized he'd let the phrase go to his head until he took her to the house he'd created for her. Maia had spent the first few hours scratching at walls and fumbling through more rooms than she'd had access to in forever. There was no way out, at least not one she could find blind. No way to kill herself. No way to kill anyone else. Or so she'd thought at first, but then her 'Nanny' had brought her a meal and she'd had an idea that only ended up making things worse for herself. She chose self-starvation, but not eating was a poor choice. They wouldn't let her die like that. It gave Dr. Rice another way to control her, to make her a doll for his little house. Gnawing hunger became her constant companion.

Nanny would come every morning and dress her, hands lingering too long on her skin, and began the torture that was feeding time. Dr. Rice would usually come in then to check on her, chattering happily about whatever torture he had planned for some other poor mutant, she rarely listened and never comprehended. He'd succeeded in turning her into a doll, and dolls didn't talk. She hadn't said anything in a while, and he suddenly seemed bothered by that, "I hate seeing you so unhappy." He whispered one day as he brushed her hair, "I'll reduce the sedative. I want to see you smile." Her brain sluggishly realized that was why she had been so dizzy all the time, why she felt like her limbs were made of lead, and why her attempts to escape had been so short lived.

He'd probably drugged her the entire time to some degree or another, but the reduction of the sedative was enough for Maia to understand what he had planned for her next. That couldn't happen. She wouldn't let it happen again. She wasn't going to let him take that from her. She had to keep trying to end it one way or the other. The next morning she'd rebelled by dressing herself, which had made Nanny mad, "Little bitch, it's your ass on the line if you're not in one of those fucking dresses in five minutes."

The woman had pushed her though, and Maia's new plans of rebellion didn't settle well with her. Nanny had tried to force her out of her hoodie and sweat pants but Maia had bitten the hell out of her, nearly coming away with a chunk of flesh. That earned her a time out with a large drug dose from Dr. Rice, it wasn't enough to kill her, but it was enough that her own brain saw fit to torture her with the familiar sound of L's footsteps. She'd failed. Rice pat her on the head, finishing whatever he was saying before leaving her torture chamber. Next time she'd do more damage. Maybe then he'd give her enough to end the torture before he got what he wanted, assuming he hadn't already. They had a habit of knocking her out with gas and experimenting. At least the benefit of being Dr. Rice's doll was that she didn't have to be awake every time they did sick stuff to her. Her own head did a good enough job torturing her as it was. How often had she dreamed about hearing L's footsteps, of hearing their baby cooing.

Then she heard L's voice, low and sexily gruff, "We're here to help."

She turned, head swimming at the movement even though she could tell the sedative was wearing off. The person with L's voice kept talking. It needed to stop. She couldn't take it, couldn't take hearing his voice. Dr. Rice had freed her hands. He should have rethought that before trying this game. She wouldn't let L's memory be tarnished by anything this facsimile said or did.

Maia growled, struggling to her feet after undoing the demented rocking chair's waist belt. They wouldn't use his voice to torture her before they did what they were going to do. She would kill this person, even if she had to do it with her bare hands, murder without her mutation. There were noises of surprise as she lunged, revealing others were in the room, but she didn't stop. She had to do this, for L, and for their daughter: Laura.

We'll be back with the continuation of that last scene via Logan next chapter! Anything you guys want to see there? And who else is glad that baby Laura has finally been named? Anyway, Maia/Logan reunion next chapter! Reviews are my life blood!

-Jenn

p.s. Just to clarify, Dr. Rice in this chapter referred to Dean Rice who was killed in canon when Logan escaped Alkali Lake, but I gave him a reprieve here. Zander Rice is the Dr. Rice from the movie Logan, but he's a teenager/young adult in the 1980s and 90s.