Logan/Laura here folks! #DaddyLogan
"Never made it as a wise man
I couldn't cut it as
A poor man stealing
Tired of living like a blind man
I'm sick of sight without
A sense of feeling
And this is how you remind me
This is how you remind me
Of what I really am
This is how you remind me
Of what I really am."
(How You Remind Me- Nickelback)
He'd lost her. He'd been able to smell Maia's blood for over two dozen kilometers, but her wound had stopped bleeding and after a few miles her scent had faded into the cacophony of scents in the bustling Mexican city. It was absurd that he was pissed over the fact that she'd stopped bleeding. He should have been glad that she wasn't hurt badly enough to bleed to death, but he couldn't help but wish she'd been a little more thin skinned.
They'd stopped in a parking lot to regroup.
"I can't find her." Jean said, slamming her hands on the steering wheel.
Scott put a hand on her shoulder from his spot in the back seat, "Jean, calm down."
The car was shaking. Logan hadn't even noticed.
Jean took a few deep breaths, but her face was paler than usual and her hands were shaking. Logan got out of the car and walked around to the driver's side. "Move over, Red."
Jean looked up at him, eyes wide, favoring Maia more than he'd ever seen before. "I-I…how did I lose her? We shouldn't have left her alone."
Logan gestured for her to get out again, "That's my fucking line. Come on, get out, you're gonna crash the car and kill the bastard in the back seat if you try to drive like this."
"I've got her." Scott said as he got out of the car and squeezed himself between Logan and Jean, pulling her hands off the wheel and guiding her out of the front of the car and into the back seat.
Logan got in the driver's seat and looked at Rogue, who'd remained silent during the episode, "Anything?"
Rogue shrugged, "I've got passcodes and directions once we're inside, but she really had no idea where they took her." She rubbed her face roughly, groaning, "It's a big place, no windows, probably mostly underground. She wasn't outside the building very often." Rogue paused for a second, "She fought for years for…Laura… to be let outside. They agreed, but a guard always had a gun on Gabriella. She didn't care. She just wanted to see Laura get to play." Rogue finally looked him in the eyes, "At least Laura was with someone who loved her."
Logan scowled, "I'll let you tell that to her mother."
She grimaced in response. After a few minutes though, it was Rogue who had a suggestion on where they should go next. "Gabriella has this one memory of being outside at night, and she could see lights in the distance from the East, nothing from the West. So maybe…"
Logan put the car in gear with one hand, rolling down the window next to him with the other. "Then let's go West. Eyes peeled everyone."
It took fifteen days. Fifteen long days of them all taking turns and either driving, navigating, running into convenience stores to get food and use the bathroom, or taking quick naps in the back of the car before they finally got something.
"There!" Rouge suddenly shouted, pointing to a rock formation a few miles out from them. Jean and Scott jerked awake in the backseat at the sound of her voice, "Gabriella could see those rocks from the yard."
Logan reached out one hand and grabbed her head, pulling her over the console to press a rough kiss her temple, grumbling, "Good work, Stripes."
She positively beamed at him. Things had been overwhelmingly tense, even more so when Rogue had admitted that Gabriella was starting to fade from her mind. He'd been an ass about that, yelling at her before Jean started screaming at him. Scott had been the voice of reason that got them all to shut up. Didn't that chap his ass.
And a day later, they had something.
So even if it fed the crush he was well aware she had on him, the girl deserved something of him not being an asshole.
They left the car, Scott bitching a little about how there wasn't enough gas to get it back to the city as they walked away from it. Jean promised him that Logan would be perfectly capable of siphoning some gas from whatever cars they found when they ended up at the…compound, and damned if Logan didn't appreciate that Jean's acknowledgement of one of his less copacetic skills shut Scott up. Finally. They were all lucky he was focused on finding Maia and Laura, because four days in a car with only restroom breaks to keep him apart from Scott had almost pushed him over the fucking edge. He'd officially decided that Jean was a saint.
He almost kissed her when she stopped with a wild grin on her face, "There's people nearby. Quite a few, definitely working on genetics research."
"Maia?" Logan growled.
Jean shook her head, dismay on her face, "No, but she could just be asleep."
His next question was stilted on his tongue, "Laura?"
A small smile came to Jean's face, "I think so. She's counting ceiling tiles…in Spanish…I think she's trying to go to sleep." She gave a tiny laugh, "She's got a mind a lot like Maia's…and yours. Wild."
He scoffed, hoping to cover the little burst of relief at knowing Laura was okay, "Maia's not wild."
"Least you don't deny you are." Scott hissed under his breath, pulling out a pair of binoculars that had to have been what was constantly shoved up his ass.
Jean glared half heartedly at them both for that. "She's more wild than you'd like to think, Logan. My sister can be down right predatory when she wants to be. Must be a Canadian thing."
Her Canadian comment was enough to ease a bit of the tension in him. Maia and Laura didn't need him to be an animal right now, going into a building they were too far to even see without having a plan first could get them all killed. Rouge had spent some time in the last four days writing down every passcode she could pull from Gabriella's memories, and had even managed to figure out the pattern to one code that changed every week. She'd used that to distract herself from his angst, and now it was paying off.
Jean sat for several hours with a pad of paper in front of her, mapping out what she could see from her mental surveillance of the people inside. Her head popped up with a hiss, "Shit. Laura's awake."
"What's wrong?" Logan rushed, in her space far more than he should have been.
Jean cut her eyes at him, looking confused, "She's all over the place. She's okay, but…pissed." She pinched her eyes closed, "They have her tied down. She's alone. I'll keep an eye out for anything else."
"We need to get in there." Logan growled.
Scott gestured to the papers laid out across the ridge of rocks, "We all good with this plan?"
Logan scowled at him, remembering how well it had gone after the last time Scott had said the same damn thing. Maia had gone missing. "You really need to stop saying that shit."
Scott mumbled an apology.
They made their way in slowly, fortunate that in the over two weeks since Gabriella had died no one had bothered to change the pattern of the passcodes. Of course only Rogue could make the dead useful after they croaked, as far as Logan was aware, so no one would have assumed that Gabriella's knowledge was in danger of being revealed.
Jean led them through, at least until Logan caught the sweet vanilla scent that belonged to his daughter, and picked up the pace. When it came down to it, there was a single guard in between him and the door the scent was emanating from. Poor bastard didn't even have time to get his gun up, and would have been fillet if Jean hadn't used her mind to toss him at the ceiling like a dog toy.
They weren't so lucky with the doors. The first was adamantium, but opened with a code Rogue keyed in. The second, not adamantium, however, didn't open with the long code Rogue painstakingly keyed into the keypad. Instead, it triggered an alarm. Once the blaring started, Logan didn't waste a second shredding the door with his claws.
There she was. For the first time in nearly ten years, Logan was in the same room with his daughter. She wasn't just a bump on Maia's stomach in an old video tape, the newborn in half baked memories of holding her tiny bloody body in snow, or the ferocious figure on Gabriella's phone. She was absolutely glaring at him from her position strapped to a metal table, and she growled through a strip of leather between her teeth.
Jean brushed past Logan, and he barely grabbed her back before she got herself sliced by Laura's two claws. "Laura!" Jean cried.
Logan chuckled, "She is her Momma's daughter after all." He stepped closer to her, putting his own claws in her line of sight, "Easy, Kit, we're here to get you out."
"Gabriella sent us." Rogue added.
Laura relaxed slightly, but kept her claws out and sharp eyes locked on his every move. She sat up quickly once he'd cut her free, ripping the leather from between her own teeth. And then she launched herself at him. Or over him rather, skimming between Rogue and Scott to attack what could only be the rank bastard that had violated Maia. The science experiment threw her off and into Scott, who's head hit the wall with a crack. Laura on the other hand, recovered quick enough to join Logan when he buried his claws into the creature's body.
"We've got to go! They've rigged this place to explode!" Jean yelled, tossing guards away with her mind and trying to rouse Scott.
The body of the creature with his face and scent hit the floor as Logan pulled his claws out and grabbed Laura up. Very much like her mother, Laura bit and hissed and scratched at him, kicking a surprisingly clawed foot into his gut before he could get to Jean and Rogue to help with Scott and the guards, "Damnit, Laura, cut that shit out!" She went still at his voice, and let him carry her in one arm so he could slice up anyone who got in the way as he searched for Maia.
She wasn't there.
Logan adjusted his grip on Laura as he headed to the others, out of the building, "Where's your mom?" She didn't say anything, so he finally looked at her. Laura was glaring at him. "Huh?" She just shook her head, jaw tightly closed. He looked her over, "Shit, you've got blood on you."
Her expression said she didn't care. Jean cared. The other three had gotten out of the building and Scott had come around. They were far enough away from the blast radius that Laura's brown hair barely fluttered when the building exploded. As soon as Logan put her on her feet, she stalked off into the dessert, towards the town. Jean looked up at Logan, "She's looking for Maia."
Logan sighed heavily, "You three get to the car, I'll get her and some gas." Jean waved encouragingly.
Laura kept walking, completely ignoring him for miles. He couldn't take the silence. That was not something he was used to. "We've got to get gas for the car. The others can't take the elements like we can." Rogue could, but he wasn't going to get into that with his apparently mute child.
There was no scent of Maia anywhere though. Her determination waned after about an hour of walking, and she let him lead her to the nearest gas station. She ran over to the mechanical horse outside the station. She stared up at Logan and gave him a silent demand to start the ride. Logan reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet, putting coins in.
The horse started moving, and Logan nodded his head at her, "I'll be in the bathroom, stay."
The bathroom mirror was dirty and Logan wiped at it with his hand. He looked tired. He needed Maia. Seventeen fucking days. He turned on the water and ran his hand through it before splashing and cleaning his face. He peed, washed his hands, and went back out to the front to get Laura and a gas can.
He heard a growl as he exited the bathroom and looked up. "You've got to be fucking kidding me," he cursed to himself and ran over to where Laura was sitting on top of the store clerk. Her claws were out and her eyes were livid.
"Hey!" He yelled, grabbing her arm and lifted her off the young man. "None of that." He pulled her towards the door, grabbed a gas can on the way out, and ignored the man shouting that they need to pay for the can of Pringles clutched in Laura's hand that Logan had been too preoccupied to notice. He shoved Charles' card into the gas pump and filled the can all one handed. He kept his other hand firmly around Laura. To her credit she didn't struggle, she just hung there like an angry little cat, glaring up at him.
"Just wait until your mother gets ahold of you." Logan couldn't help himself. The silence was cloying and he missed Maia's constant chatter more than anything. Damned kid was too much like him, and she wasn't even ten years old yet. Hadn't even been around his sorry ass and she was already fucked up.
"Mama." She corrected, her voice was too loud for the space even with just the one word, like she was unused to being given the chance to speak at all.
Logan sighed, "Yeah, we'll find your Mama." He finally let her walk, and no, he wasn't the least big smug when she sat between Rogue and Jean and scowled his same scowl as they drove back into town. Jean had grabbed new files on their way out, and she seemed confident about a list of coordinates she'd found. Their new plan was to get back to the X-Jet and use it to go directly to the desolate locations.
He hoped the last leg was a short leg of their trip, or the little girl radiating vicious intent was going to explode. He did note, distantly, the calm that had come over him when they'd been reunited. She was a fighter, just like him. There was no way the two of them wouldn't find Maia. There was too much love for Maia and determined anger between the two of them for them to fail. He just had to keep Laura safe too, or Maia would never forgive him. He looked back at her dark eyes. Hell, he'd never forgive himself.