Sorry, y'all. I didn't post because [reasons]. My life is beyond ridiculous right now. If it helps, I'm giving up sleep to get this one up tonight and I intend to still keep up with the (ahem) regular (semi-regular?) Thursday posting. I have to say it helps that Friday is a day off. Heh. Onward! (to tea and bed) Zzzz...
The feral howl of murderous rage hushed the crowd as a third man fell bloody and unconscious at the Wolverine's feet. His opponent's face was almost unrecognizable, a pulpy crush of tissue and bone. The cage floor was slick with blood. Streaks and smears covered the Wolverine's hands and splattered his face, thick enough to obscure the scent of pussy, finally. But the acrid reek of shame was still hot and sharp in his nose.
Bad.
Bad. It was bad to do this here.
It took a little while for the reason to rise though the violent waves of fury crashing through his blood and clouding his mind.
Too close to the school. Too visible for a man who taught history to children. For fuck's sake. He was no teacher. He was this. This. An animal. His true form revealed with each punch, each spurt of blood and cry of agony. And worse than that realization, was the knowledge that he liked it. It felt… good. Blood and pain and a beautiful, freeing blackness.
The announcer, thick and solid with silver at his temples and a voice like rusty nails tried to stop him.
The Wolverine put him down, too. Brutally. Efficiently.
The crack of a leg and a raspy scream that abruptly stopped as the man crumpled under a powerfully delivered blow. A bloody puppet with strings severed by adamantium and blinding rage.
It didn't help. There was no satisfaction to be found here.
And no peace.
He shouldn't have done it but he couldn't be bothered to care. What did it matter if he burned a bridge when the whole world was flaming down around him?
~ooOoo~
The forest welcomed his slow retreat from the bar. This morning he'd been standing on the battlefield, covered in gore and staring at the marks on Marie's belly. Their fight afterwards had left him feeling as bloody as the eviscerated corpses he had left behind. Tonight she'd goaded him into fucking two different women in less time than it usually took to kill a beer. A part of him had liked that, too, but the urge to claim and conquer and fuck was gone, consumed by the shocking violence he'd just expended in the cage.
As the bloodlust cooled along with the sweat and salt on his skin, he sank to the damp ground in a weary heap, his back against a thick trunk, arms resting on his knees.
Logic and reason returned by slow degrees. He wasn't sure when this thing with Marie had become more about punishing her than giving her… something. When had it changed, from letting Marie reveal herself to stripping away her defenses? Was the animal inside him just so greedy, so voracious, that he couldn't let her set the pace — driven to hunt her to ground, and take what he wanted. That's what she had looked like at the end. Prey.
It seemed to hit him all at once that they'd wound up in a very different place than he ever imagined or intended.
Shit. How the fuck had they gotten here?
When had their playful growling jabs and enthusiastic roughhousing become a full-on battle for dominance? A bloody brawl with snapping teeth and slashing claws that could only end with the arterial spray of a severed jugular. Clearly, both of them were too fucking stubborn to back down and submit.
They also seemed incapable of having a real conversation that wasn't immediately preceded by sex or violence, or both. Logan grimaced, his face sinking into his hands, surprised to find his eyes wet. He was still shell-shocked by the revelation that she'd a had a baby. A daughter. A child made in love with another man.
A dream he was too terrified to even acknowledge had died in his breast at that knowledge, leaving a cold darkness that was slowly consuming him. Wind creaked through the swaying trees like a mother hushing a fretful child in her arms. The world blurred before his eyes and his fingers sunk deep into the rich soil.
The problem with burning down the world was that it left behind only smoke and ashes.
~ooOoo~
By the time Logan made it back to the school, he was shaking with post-adrenaline fatigue. He was emotionally drained, a fragile husk, emptiness and despair shrouded in shiny adamantium.
He didn't speak. Or trash his room. Or light a cigar. He sat in numbed silence rather than quiet contemplation, frozen in place until the shadows creeping across the floor grew long. The sun set. He moved then, a bottle finding its way to his hand. He had no memory of how, but his desperate grip on it eased as the amber spirit inside filled his empty belly. It brought a bit of warmth and briefly muted his body's need for food.
He brooded as the shadows deepened. Thinking about leaving. Thinking about cutting all ties with the Mansion and with Marie. He had all but convinced himself it was for the best. It was time. He should go.
He was not a man much given to sentiment, but he took a beer down to the dock. One last drink by the water. In the last few years, he'd probably spent more time on that old dock than anywhere else. It didn't quite feel like home, but it was comfortable, and sitting there under the stars was as close to peace as he'd come in all the years he could remember.
He wanted the balm of stars and fireflies, but of course it was cold and damp, the stars and moon well shrouded. The clouds hung heavy and low and a thin fog was beginning to roll in off the lake. Everywhere the scent of rain and the sound of dripping moisture. It made him feel wet and chilled, even though he was dry under layers of leather and denim and flannel.
His mind swirled uneasily, but his heavy body was still, absorbing the motion of the dock as it rocked gently beneath him. It was impossible not to think of Marie and all the times they'd talked here. He was too full of regret and unanswered questions to let in much else, but an echo of an old conversation suddenly rose up. Their bet and the bottle she'd brought along with a painful revelation. And his own words came back to haunt him.
How many meaningful connections you gonna piss away?
On its heels came the realization that he was doing it, too. Ready to cut ties and run when things got rocky. By the time he'd switched back from beer to bourbon, he'd made the conscious decision to find her. Not to chase her, but to get some resolution. They needed to stop cutting each other to shreds. Even if it meant never seeing her again, it couldn't end like this.
And if he was honest, he couldn't stand the thought that her last memory of him might be his enjoyment of her pain during a rough sex act. Selfish as it was, he couldn't spend eternity walking this earth knowing that's how she'd remember him.
~ooOoo~
Logan knew it wouldn't be difficult to find her. That had never been the problem. His truck had a GPS tracker. All vehicles belonging to the senior staff were equipped with one. Storm had insisted, and now he was glad he'd lost that particular battle.
It took little effort to locate the truck. A few numbers tapped into the app on his phone and there she was. She'd passed Philadelphia and Baltimore and had stopped just outside of Richmond. Another memory surfaced like an old ghost. She'd mentioned Greensboro to him once. Indiana or North Carolina?, he'd asked.
Now he knew.
From New York to Richmond… if he drew a line from Richmond to New Orleans, Greensboro was on the way.
Shit.
Charlotte. Atlanta. Montgomery. Meridian. Slidell. New Orleans.
Was she running to that Cajun motherfucker? Is that where she went?
It didn't make sense, but nothing with Marie was ever easy and he wondered just how truthful she'd been. A life built on a house of cards, she'd said. Then or now? Who the fuck even knew what that meant, anyway? Maybe she'd never really given the Cajun up or gotten over him.
The truck hadn't moved in hours. For a while, he thought maybe she'd abandoned it. She knew how to hide if she wanted to. She had him in her head — and even if she didn't, one of the first things One-Eye had done was teach her how to hotwire a car. She knew how to get a clean vehicle. If she really wanted to hide, she wouldn't drive his truck the whole way. He couldn't tell if she kept using it to give him the finger or because she just didn't care. He tried not to think about the third option; that maybe some small part of her was hoping he'd follow.
A day of hard driving would put her in New Orleans. It seemed like she wasn't in much of a hurry to get anywhere except away from him. She was probably holed up somewhere, licking her wounds.
He knew a bit about that, too.
~ooOoo~
Once he had decided to go after her, it didn't take long to pack his shit. There wasn't much of it, even now. He passed on his bike, thinking only of functionality. It was too late in the season, too wet and cold to put a thousand miles on the bike in the next few days. He took her Jeep instead, figuring if things went bad when he found her, he could take his truck and head North without leaving her stranded, at least.
By the time he crossed the Potomac, she was on the move again. Down 85 through Durham to Greensboro, just like he thought. He didn't follow too quickly, figuring she might need some time.
Christ knew he did.
The thought of facing her after what had happened sat in his stomach like a bitter stone. She'd might have goaded him into it, but he'd deliberately disregarded all the rules. He'd brought the mountain to Muhammad, forcing it on her instead of letting it be her choice.
And yet there was also a low growling in his mind, whispering that he'd complied with her demands and she still hadn't given him a single answer about her daughter. Not that he'd given her the chance, but his need for answers was second only to his desire to make amends.
There was little chance she'd tell him now, he knew. Not after what he'd done. But when he wasn't torturing himself with guilt, he was trying to put together the pieces. Trying to work out what had happened.
Had her daughter died? Had she abandoned her? Given her up? Been too young and afraid to raise her alone? Too ashamed to bring her to the school? Maybe she'd left her with her mother? She'd confessed to him that she'd returned home to visit. Logan frowned, remembering that conversation. They'd argued about her father. He'd been upset that she hadn't told him her dad had died.
He tried to think back to what else she'd said about that trip.
"But it wasn't the same, even though the things in the house were the same. School pictures lining the hallway. My bronzed baby shoes on the mantle, like always next to the shadowbox with my christening gown and booties knitted by Mama. Even—" her voice trembled, "Even the marks on the wall in the kitchen where Mama measured me every birthday until I ran away…"
Pictures of her as a child. Baby shoes. Booties. A christening gown. That's where her focus had been.
Jesus.
The clues were there if he'd just paid more attention. He'd been trying so damn hard to get her to open up that he hadn't recognized it when she had. He'd been so focused on the physical intimacy that he'd missed the deepening emotional intimacy.
The realization made him angry, too. She'd had so many opportunities to tell him about her daughter. They'd been playing this fucking game for months now, to say nothing of the years before that. He lay in a shitty motel bed in Charlotte, driving himself crazy replaying every conversation they'd had, over and over, trying to look for anything else he might have overlooked. It was like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. Who knew which detail might be significant and which ones were just a product of her unique plural memory?
He drank too much and slept too little.
The driving conditions sucked. Autumn thunderstorms left the interior of the windows on the Jeep wet with condensation and there were accidents and construction projects that had him crawling along, cursing and wiping at the foggy windows impatiently as he inched down the freeway.
He was in Atlanta when it occurred to him that maybe her daughter had died — and that maybe it wasn't because of heart defect or some other congenital problem, but because of Marie's mutation. Maybe she'd been able to carry the baby but not deliver it.
She'd had the Cure, but he had no idea when that had worn off. He didn't automatically think of her as Marie-with-deadly-skin. To him, she was just Marie. But there was no escaping the truth. She was powerful enough to kill him. What hope was there that a newborn could survive even a few brief moments of contact with her skin? If that was the case, it was little wonder why she'd never spoken of it — and it certainly explained her violent aversion to touch.
The knowledge did not sit well, churning in his guts like a knot of squirming worms.
He pulled over and threw up.
~ooOoo~
Logan lost several hours after Montgomery, assuming because he'd been right so far, that she'd go east to Meridian and then down to Slidell. She stayed on 85 and went south instead, avoiding Meridian and passing through Mobile on her way to New Orleans.
What did that mean that she was avoiding her old home?
Was it significant?
It had to be more than a coincidence, surely.
He wondered what she was thinking about as she drove. Normally he liked driving, liked the monotony of the black ribbon of road disappearing under the tires and the time alone to think as the world sped past the windows. This trip was different.
The more time that passed, the worse the waiting became. Logan had been tempted to contact her from the beginning. He knew she had a phone, but somehow, every time he had his phone in hand, he found he couldn't push the button. For now, the distance brought a fragile peace and the more he thought about it, the more he felt like what needed to be said should be done face to face.
No more buffers.
No more third parties.
No more pretending.
~ooOoo~
They both spent the night in Slidell in different motels at opposite ends of town. He was trailing her still, but only by minutes rather than hours or days. It wasn't so much that it felt anticlimactic to catch her now as it was that he was afraid of what would happen once he did.
They'd be in New Orleans tomorrow.
What then?
He couldn't sleep, and when he did, he was rocked with nightmares that left him sweaty and trembling, his throat hoarse from a dying scream. Trapped. Caught. Twisting in the mire and struggling to get free. And always, the insidious echo of cruel laughter. Men who took pleasure in his agony as he thrashed and writhed and tore himself bloody. For revenge. For answers. For freedom.
The shitty motel he'd chosen was a small collection of crumbling bungalows along a murky, backwater inlet. The peeling salmon paint said they'd been redecorated — badly — decades ago. Now they were weathered and mossy with the green tinge that seemed to cover everything here that was still for any length of time.
It had a dock, though. And he passed the night there, feeling foolish and grateful for the soothing company of the stars.
Up next: Light. Buckle up, folks. We're about to turn and burn.