Title: Harbinger

Author: thefanficmistress

Author's Note: This will be the last snippet in this series.

Snippet #3

A screech tore through the heavens as a flaming piece of debris soared through the air. The sky was filled with smoke and ash. His come unit crackled to life.

"Logan, keep moving. Get to the boy!" The voice boomed. Fires burned and buildings crumbled as far as the eye could see. The world around him seemed to slow down. He screwed his eyes shut. His dry sandpaper tongue ran along his blistered lips. Explosions rang out far too close to his position and rock and dirt rain down all around him. It was sweltering but no matter where he looked he couldn't find the sun.

"Logan go!" A man next to him wailed. His body was almost torn in two. He sputtered and gulped for air. His Muscles seized involuntarily as if his body was possessed.

"Just go…" He spat with what effort he had left. Logan grabbed for the chain around his bloody neck, yanking it off as his eyes closed and body went limp. He clutched the tags tight and then stuffed them into his breast pocket.

"Damnit Logan! Move your ass!" The com barked and he was thrown out of his reverie. He got to his feet, looked around his shabby cover of broken brick and broke out on foot. Bullets soared through the air peppering the ground at his feet, growing closer and closer. Hot pain shot through his shoulder and he fell down on one knee. Teeth gritted. His mind swirled and his lost his grip on the present. He found himself reliving a moment from the past.

"What…what's going on? How long have I been out?" He muttered. His head lulling and sleep crept up on him once again.

"You've been asleep for awhile Logan, in a healing Coma of sorts. It's quit amazing your regenerative abilities. It took us awhile to put you back together and even longer for your body to fully heal. As for how long you've been out, it's been…years old friend." Beast said in a quiet tone. Logan let the information sink in. Years? That couldn't be right and he shook his head with a frown. Had that blast from Scott done that much damage and if so…why hadn't they let him die?

An explosion with horrific intensity erupted so close it deafened him. His mind snapped back to the present. His ears ringing with white noise. He seemed oddly detached from the chaotic scene without the sounds. No blasts, no screaming, no yelling, just quiet and scorching heat. Like a silent film everything around him seemed like a horrible screen play. Mutants against humans, fighting for there lives. Death by gun fire he had seen before, Death by mutant abilities he could understand but him mind reeled when he saw Death by a force he could not explain. Entire groups of people seeming to just implode onto themselves, Bones crushing, bodies distorted and shoved into their center until they were just gone and all that was left was the blood that drained from them. Merciless death on a grand scale, a scene so big his mind couldn't process the implications. His mind slipped again. Slipped to the past…

"He's all powerful but he still has the mind of a child, A child who wants to have his father back." Beast said rising from his chair. The room they were in seemed on the slow road to ruble and the screams of war outside made him shiver.

"Scott and the professor are still determined to destroy the boy. The sheer implications of a child this young with limitless power… The world in the hands of a seven year old. Logan, it's simply inevitable what we must do."

The memory melted away and was interrupted by a familiar shrieking voice.

"Get up!" Rouge screamed as she soared above, moving with such speed the dirt swirled around in her wake. She drew the gun fire and he willed himself to his feet and trotted off. He could feel the familiar burn of his body rejecting the bullet lodged in his shoulder, forcibly pushing out the intruding object and attempting to heal. He could feel that familiar burn all over his body. He was riddled with bullets and shrapnel. It wasn't much further he kept telling himself. Just a little further. He entered the government building. More like a fortress built of metal and steel to keep in mutants, dangerous mutants. They had tried to house the boy here, not realizing the sheer scope of his abilities. It was ice cold and his breath bloomed out like fluffy white clouds. His skin prickled. Everything seemed suspended or stuck in mid air. As if the air around them had turned to gelatin. Everything suspended including the soldiers. There eyes staring at him, mouths open with shock. That told him enough. Everyone in the building was dead. He shuffled forward and with each step the tags in his pocket clanked growing louder and louder like a beating heart under the floor boards driving him insane. Stopping he reached into his pocket and pulled them out. Eyeing them with exhaustion, he ran his thumb over the engraved name.

"Lebeau" He mouthed then strung the chain around his neck and let the tags fall to rest again his own and for the first time the guilt of what he had done, what he was too blind to see, began to eat him alive. From the inside out his guilt and shame was a hungry creature that started in the pit of his stomach and then branched out to devour every nerve, every muscle, and every cell. Logan froze, and then collapsed; face pressed against the cold steel of the buildings walls. He couldn't catch his breath, his heart palpitated, and his forehead beaded with sweat. He could hear boot falls but he didn't care. There was nothing that could be done now, nothing to change what he'd already destroyed.

"Get up and right what you did wrong Logan." The man said looking down at him with disgust. His breath rolled out cold and Logan didn't have to look up to know who it was.

"Arent' you gonna say I told ya so?"

"I don't have to." Scott said taking a moment to look at all the death and carnage around him. Logan gritted his teeth. It was the faces that disturbed him more then the lingering stench of death. The surprise, the shock and horror. To imagine his boy had done something that would freeze a face like that.

"I wonder, I wonder if the boy hadn't gotten my temper, my feral side…I wonder if he wasn't so much like me if he could have controlled his abilities. Maybe if his father had been someone else he would have been able to control this…and we wouldn't be here right now." Logan whispered and Scott crouched in front of the feral man and the implications of what he meant weren't lost on Scott, not at all. Scott grit his teeth willing the old demon Logan had opened to recede.

"We don't have time for this. You need to move now!" He wrenched Logan from the ground to his feet and then shoved him towards the room the boy was held up in. Logan stumbled forward to the doorjamb. The entrance to the room was littered with bodies. Both mutant and human alike and Logan assessed that once someone stepped into the room they're somehow killed instantaneously. All there faces looked shocked and horrified and they were frozen like that for eternity. Gingerly stepping over the bodies he stepped into the room and the boy whirled around, glowing hands raised, eyes solid black, and his tiny frame engulfed in a light so bright it burned Logan's corneas. He could still see the innocent boy wrapped in all that raw power, He could still see the boy he had risked everything for. The boy that was a combination of his feral essence and the raw strength of the women he loved. He could recognize himself in all that anger and rage that poured from the boy and the shaggy red hair that fell clumsily into the boys eyes reminded him so much of Jean. Jean…what would she tell him to do right now? Without further hesitation Logan made short work of the distance between them. He fell to his knees and wrapped his arms around the boy. The boy stumbled back to support his weight. His eyes wide with surprise and in that moment there was a lull. The explosions stopped the screeching and tearing and chaos quieted. The only sounds were boots hitting the metal floor, sliding to a stop in the door ways. Ruby red glowed behind a bent and dirty visor, a tired face staring at Logan and the back of the boy's head. He nodded at Scott and then subtly looked behind him. Storm stood regal and tall. White hair splayed around her ebony shoulders. Her pupils sunk eerily into the vast milky white of her eyes until they were completely gone. Logan nodded at her and then closed his eyes with his arms wrapped tightly around the boy.

Today they'd die together.

So there it is. The beginning, middle, and end of a story. I could either leave it like this (as a sequential collection of snippets) or fill in the blanks and turn this into a multi chapter story arc. Just keep in mind that you already know the ending…

*The beating heart under the floor boards reference is from 'The Tell Tale Heart' by Edgar Allen Poe*

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