The sun was beginning to rise over the Sandia Mountains, sprinkling light between the branches of the ponderosa pines and casting long shadows over the forest floor. Pale purple and yellow wildflowers stretched up silently towards the sky. A few birds were waking up and testing their morning calls, but for the most part, the nearby wildlife was still.

Anna stood beneath the refuge of a maple tree and gazed out at the clearing in front of her. She ran a gloved hand over her jacket collar, waiting. A family of white-tailed deer wandered cautiously into the sunlight twenty meters ahead of her. The buck leading the group gazed around and flicked his ears curiously. A moment later, he suddenly took off into the underbrush, his family disappearing with him. Anna straightened up and tried to get a better look.

Across the field, a few blades of cheatgrass stirred—practically unnoticeable to the untrained eye—not from the wind but from a shadow, which vanished as soon as it appeared, popping up a few meters closer in the thicket.

The communication device Anna had clipped onto her belt buzzed silently. Without looking down, she grabbed it and felt each of the vibrations, counting them out and calculating the signature. Her shoulders relaxed.

She pressed her thumb over the fingerprint sensor and keyed a response. Ahead of her, the shadow paused, and the device in her hands pulsed in acknowledgment. Then the shadow was gone again, evaporating completely from view. She searched the treeline for any trace of him, knowing he was likely already deep in the woods, and smiled.

She fastened the device back onto her belt and began making her way through the field, parting weeds and sunflowers as she went. Soon she had reached the other edge of the clearing, where the silhouette of a man was slumped against the base of a Siberian elm. His left elbow rested on a modest pack he'd set on the ground. His right hand awkwardly cradled a small flask, which he kept raising to his lips. At the sound of Anna approaching, he pocketed the flask and got to his feet—a painstaking endeavor that required grasping the tree for support—and hobbled out into the sunlight.

Anna stopped in her tracks.

Gray trousers, a white wifebeater, and a brown corduroy button-up covered most of the man's skin. What wasn't shielded by clothing was sealed in a thick, gray-green, scab-like growth that stretched all the way over his arms, around his neck and face. His knuckles were completely sloughed over; his fingers looked almost unusable. Some of the growth on his hands and face had risen into white-crusted lesions like little volcanoes. He had carved the scabs away from his eyes harshly and unevenly—Anna didn't want to know how—revealing dull, clouded-over pupils that gazed at a spot just behind her. What was left of his hair was gray and scraggly.

"Logan," Anna said.

The left corner of his mouth lifted up into a slight smirk. Anna was surprised he could even move it. "That bad, huh?"

"No, I—" She took a step closer, her brain fumbling to find the right words. A foul purulent scent wafted towards her; she almost grimaced. She tried to examine him without staring, even though he had no way of knowing. His eyes looked straight ahead placidly. At length, she said, "It's good to see you."

"I can make the hike," he stated, as if reading her mind. His voice was hoarse and strained.

"Are you sure? I could—"

"No," he said automatically. "My legs need the walk. And besides," he added, turning back around and leaning down to reach for his pack, "I'm not hauling your sorry ass up that hill."

Anna walked over to grab his bag from his hands and slung it over her shoulders. She guessed from its shape that it contained a rolled-up sleeping mat, some clothes, and other necessities she couldn't make out. It was heavier than it looked.

She noticed a white cane on the ground and stooped down to pick it up too. She adjusted her gloves, then grabbed Logan's wrist and placed the cane in his hand. Almost immediately, he lost his grip, and the cane tumbled back to the floor.

She looked at him skeptically. "Do you actually use that thing?"

"When I have to," he replied, reaching out for it again.

Anna sighed. She grabbed the cane, checked once more that her gloves were pulled up over her elbows, and placed Logan's hand around her arm. He didn't protest.

She began leading him away from the clearing and back into the forest. Even through the fabric of her gloves and coat, she could feel the coarse texture of the necrosis on his skin, the build-up of years of scabbing. She tried not to think about it—or smell it—as she steered him around various rocks and trees.

"So," he said, limping along next to her. His breath rasped with each movement, but he seemed used to it. "Where do you call home these days?"

"Oh, everywhere and nowhere." Anna raised her free arm to part a few low-hanging branches. "Depends where I'm needed."

He wheezed out what sounded like a chuckle. "Still fighting the good fight?"

Anna bristled but said nothing. At a wider portion of the path, Logan stopped to let go of her arm and grab something from his pocket.

Anna eyed the flask as he struggled to keep it in his hands. "You know, I have water if you need it."

He smiled grimly, took a long swig, and shoved the flask away. Liquid dribbled down his scaled chin, which he swiped at with his sleeve. "Sorry," he said.

She shrugged. "It's your life."

"No, I mean—" He gazed in her direction. "I know you're helping people. Like Kurt." He shifted onto what seemed to be his better leg and reached for her arm again. "It's good."

Genuine sincerity shone through the glaze of his eyes. She secured his hold on her arm.

"The world Charles believed in is still here," she told him.

Logan grunted. "For some of us."

The two of them slipped into silence. She looked at him and then moved forward, resuming their trail into the woods, bracing her heels as the terrain gradually shifted uphill. She began wedging the cane into the dirt ahead of them to support their weight at each step. After a little while, a small creek popped up beside them, trickling over pebbles and mud.

"I know that sound," Logan said in relief. His mouth almost moved into another smile.

The creek filtered in and out of hearing as they continued weaving their way between the trees. The soil under their feet turned from rock-littered dry red earth into a damp brown clay spotted with tiny plant buds. Then the fullness of the creek was right beside them, loud enough to drown out their thoughts. Logan inhaled deeply, breathing in the wet scent.

"One last climb here," Anna reminded him, raising her voice to be heard over the running water.

He nodded, latched onto her arm as tight as he could, and let her usher him over fallen logs and miscellaneous debris as they trekked further uphill. It could've only been a few minutes, but it felt like an hour before they reached even ground.

Anna let go of Logan, tossed his cane and pack aside, and glanced over. He'd stripped off his top layer, revealing sweaty spots across his chest where the perspiration had found a way through the necrosis. His arms and shoulders reeked from the same gray-green scabs that encompassed the rest of his body. He placed his hands on his knees to support his heaving sides as he struggled to catch his breath.

"What crazy sonofabitch thought of living up here, anyway?" he joked, panting. He fumbled in his pocket for his flask.

They stood at the opening of another clearing, this one much larger than the first, facing a wide meadow. To their left, in the distance, a run-down shack stood uneasily between the tall strands of mullein and sunflowers. Out to their right sat a simple Gambel oak with two wood posts beneath it—unseen and swallowed up amidst the weeds, but Anna knew they were there. Across the chasm of cheatgrass, she could see the treeline fifty meters away.

Before she could say anything, Logan was shuffling on his own towards the oak tree, spacing out his steps as best he could to match a standard pace. Within twenty paces he'd reached whatever he was looking for and dropped into the weeds. Anna checked their surroundings once more before trailing after him.

When she got there, he was kneeling with his head bowed and his hands in the dirt. The wooden posts next to him—one ponderosa, the other Gambel—stood straight between overgrown thistles. Tears sprung to Anna's eyes.

The two of them sat there quietly, Logan in the dirt and Anna standing beside him. She looked across the field at the shack in the distance, letting its memories pass through her. How many mornings had they spent like this, gathering firewood or preparing to hike into town? She could still hear Charles's voice somewhere in the back of her mind, repeating the words she and Logan had heard so often at his bedside in the back room of that little cabin.

What am I without him?

What am I without him?

I couldn't save him.

I couldn't—

"I should've listened to you," Logan said, his voice low. His cloudy eyes gazed at nothing, but she still imagined he was staring at the graves in front of them. "I should've let him go."

She remembered finding him on a log at the firepit one night all those years ago, rearranging the tinder with one hand and grasping his flask in the other. Deep blue and purple pustules, the first signs of necrosis, crept across the gaps in his knuckles and over his left eye, sealing it half-shut. The medicine Charles had managed to cook up was slowing the spread, but more small indigo dots were already popping up over his arms and neck from where bullets and metal had grazed him. She tried to ignore them.

"Logan, he wants to go," she said. "I've seen it."

His splotched hands brought the flask up to his mouth for another swig. His face barely moved an inch. "Yeah, well, we all do," he muttered, "at one point or another. Doesn't mean we should."

She crossed her arms and stared at him pointedly. "You haven't stayed inside his head." As if feeling the weight of her gaze, he turned his face away. "Think about it. What's left for him after he finishes CHANL?"

Logan swiveled back towards her. "What's left for him?" he repeated incredulously. "Everything!" The stick he was using to stoke the fire fell onto the grass as he threw up his hands. A little liquid sloshed out of his flask. "All of it—the rebuilding, the reteaching, the whole mission."

His good eye lit up in the glow of the flames. "He's not done saving us," he said. "He never will be."

"And have you considered his first mission?" Anna asked. She eyed the Gambel oak in the distance, its low branches sweeping over a small grave.

"There'll be others."

She shook her head. "Not like Erik."

He raised his flask back up to his lips and said nothing.

"If you won't even think about it, at least take the time to really hear him. Please." She tried to meet his eyes, but he remained focused on the fire. "I don't know how long I can keep doing this."

"Then I'll do it," he said. "Or what would you prefer? Giving him over to his thoughts and letting him rot away?" The fingers on his free hand picked the scabs on his other. He looked back up at her and sneered. "Is that what you really want? Another corpse for me to bury?"

She swallowed hard. "I'm trying to do the right thing."

He let out a scoff. "And you think you know what that is?"

"I said I'm trying." She glared at him, hoping it would push back the saltwater in her eyes. "One of us has to."

She stalked away from him and back into the shack, throwing open each set of doors she passed. She crossed through the kitchen and dining room and hallway until she reached a small bedroom in the back corner. She burst in to see Charles calmly hunched over a notebook on his secretary desk, scribbling something to himself in the dim light of his bedside lamp. His brow furrowed in concentration as he wrote. It took him a moment to reach a stopping point and look up at her.

"Anna," he said. A smile spread over his face, crinkling his brown eyes.

"You," she told him as she walked across the room, "are supposed to be in bed." She meant it playfully, but it came out angry and impatient.

He dropped his pencil and didn't protest as she lifted him up under his armpits from the chair and dragged him the short distance over to the bed. She held up his legs as she gathered the sheets and blankets from under him, then set him down and worked on tucking him in. She moved quickly, and her annoyance radiated off her in waves.

Charles gently touched her arm, almost where her glove ended and her skin began. She instinctively flinched away.

"He'll come around," he said quietly. "Whatever it is. He'll come around."

Anna couldn't look at him. Her eyes were too wet. Is that Logan's programming or yours? she almost asked, but bit her tongue. She focused on fluffing up the pillows and bringing them under his head.

"He cares," Charles added, "in his own way."

Anna stopped, closed her eyes, and sighed. You don't understand what he's doing to you, she wanted to say. But hadn't she been doing it too? Logan was right—she didn't know what was best. At the very least, she knew she couldn't say goodbye. Not yet.

She took another deep, conscious breath, pressed her gloved hand to her chest, and tried to steady her mind. She concentrated on pushing Logan's stubbornness out of her head. Then, slowly, her eyes opened, and she looked at Charles and leaned in close—close enough to hear him but not close enough to touch.

She let herself see his first few thoughts—his ever-present worry for Logan, and her, gliding by like a river; his continual plans for CHANL, which he would accomplish over the next few days; his ruminations about Erik, which somehow weaved between everything like a ribbon connecting all his seams. Erik's look of triumph when the two of them first used Cerebro, when he beat Charles in another chess game; Erik's angry steps when he and his mutants descended on the school, pacing the hallways and turning over the rooms for any trace of Charles; Erik's body lying lifeless as Logan bent over him, checking for a pulse—

No, she thought, and focused harder. She threaded new ideas between the memories of Erik, silently speaking them into Charles's mind until they were indistinguishable from his own. Everything is okay. We must go on. Everything is okay.

She hadn't tried making him sleepy, but he seemed to be getting drowsy anyway. His eyelids drooped and his breathing slowed. "Everything… Okay," he whispered. "Must… Go on."

She leaned back, making sure he really was falling asleep. He continued murmuring to himself. She looked at his desk, stretched out to grab his notebook, and settled back into her seat beside the bed. She eyed Charles once more, then lowered her gaze to what he had written. She froze.

A sketch of a Gambel oak filled the page, branching out into the margins. Its narrow trunk and limbs unfurled towards the paper's top border. A few lobed leaves clung to its arms, but most of the foliage was gone, drifting off into the wind or sprinkling itself over the ground. At the base of the tree was the slab of pine Anna recognized, and a different slab beside it that she didn't.

She stood up, closed the notebook, and dropped it on his desk, then quickly left the room and closed the door behind her.

"It wasn't just you," she said, in the present. "I couldn't let him go either." It hadn't been more than two weeks after CHANL's completion when Charles had managed to touch her long enough to stop his own beating heart. By the time she'd regained consciousness, it'd been too late.

"I'll never understand it," Logan continued, as if she hadn't said anything. "How he thought we could all be good. Even…" He half-chuckled raspily, then coughed. "Even Erik."

Anna smiled sadly. "There's always good in people, if you know where to look."

"Christ, you sound just like him." Logan breathed out another laugh despite himself and winced from the effort. He turned his head, revealing eyes brimming with tears. His smile fell as his lip began to quiver. "I want to see them," he said.

Anna nodded and knelt on the dirt beside him, grabbing one of his trembling arms and wrapping it around her. She carefully removed her glove, then reached up and laid a hand on his lesioned cheek.

Instantly, the necrosis under her fingers dissolved, revealing a patch of healthy flesh that grew wider and wider to encapsulate his whole face. It reached his left eye first, then his right, disintegrating the gray-green scabs around his eyebrows. At the same time, the cloud over his eyes began receding, and the pale dullness of his irises transformed into a brilliant hazel. The trail of healthy skin continued over his head, down his neck and back and arms. He almost felt like the wind had been knocked out of him as his joints relaxed into place, easing pains he'd endured for years. His arms stopped shaking just in time to brace Anna as her hand fell and she went limp.

He squeezed his eyes shut against the blinding sunlight and knelt there for a moment, breathing in and out, marveling at the steady rush of air to his lungs. Gradually, he reopened his eyes until they'd adjusted. He held up his free arm and stared at it, at the twisting outline of muscles and veins he hadn't seen in forever, trying to examine them from every angle. Then he remembered he was still holding Anna. He could barely feel her weight.

Out of habit, he turned to check her pulse and examined her. She was just as he remembered, with the addition of a few smile lines and some gray strands peeking through the red in her hair. Her popped-collar trench coat wasn't the one he was used to, but it suited her. He listened to her breathing, amazed that he could hear it, and watched her chest rise and fall. Gingerly, he guided her head to the crook in his shoulder.

He gazed out at the field, observing how much the weeds had taken over since he'd left. Mullein and cheatgrass smothered the landscape, choking out most of the sunflowers. Only a few patches of untouched yellow dotted the meadow. The small cabin to their left was missing various slats of wood, and its roof sagged.

He looked down and ran his free hand over Charles's gravemarker. The oak plank was jagged and dotted with orange moss. Almost immediately, a splinter pricked his skin—and then, just as quickly, the feeling was gone, the sliver of wood wedged out of his hands. He paused and inspected his unblemished palms, just to be sure. Then he stared at his knuckles.

What am I without them? he had asked himself, over and over, when the necrosis had first set in. It was another thought so similar to Charles's that, after enough days and weeks beside his teacher's bed, speaking his own tormented beliefs into Charles's mind, he hadn't known where he ended and where Charles began. He glanced at Erik's grave, remembering.

What am I without them?

What am I without him?

I couldn't save them.

I couldn't save him.

The tears welling in his eyes finally spilled down his cheeks. At first, like everything else, they were a relief—a return to a life unhindered by scabbing and decay. Then his whole body was shaking as he gave himself over.

Beside him, Anna stirred.

"No, no," he cried. "Not yet." He trembled and heaved, suddenly struggling to keep them both upright.

"Logan?" Anna murmured.

He was already starting to lose sight in his left eye; small black dots lined the perimeter of his vision. Little blue and purple spots were popping up across his skin. In a swift movement, he unsheathed his claws and drove his right hand into the earth, trying to steady himself, and screamed out in pain. He continued sobbing as Anna slowly sat up, replaced her glove, and embraced him.

"Never enough," he choked out. "It's never… Enough."

The skin on his back began hardening into layers of scabs beneath Anna's gloves. She pulled back, resting an arm across his shoulder. He shuddered and groaned as his entire body proceeded its shift back into decay—his eyes, his lungs, his joints, his limbs. Anna watched the transformation in silent horror.

"Logan," she finally said, her voice quiet but determined. "I want you to come back with me to New Orleans."

He turned towards her, his half-cloudy eyes almost pleading, the snot on his face disappearing under the rapidly spreading necrosis. "For what?" he asked, exasperated.

"We have a safe house there. And a doctor who could help you."

He closed his eyes and shook his head. "I gave up… Hope… A long time ago," he said. "If Charles…"

"Charles didn't have the right tools," Anna told him. "Or enough test subjects. There are more mutants out there who didn't get the vax." She shifted so she was resting on her knees. "Dr. McCoy says they might be the key."

Tears ran down his face and into his scabs. "Fool's… Errand," he rasped. "Just leave me."

"No."

"I deserve this. I—"

"No." Anna grabbed his upper arm and looked right into his eyes. Most of the brightness had left them. "No one deserves this."

"Charles…"

"Charles thought about you every single day. You of all people should know that. This isn't what he wanted."

His body shook with more sobs. "I don't know… Anymore… What Charles wanted."

But even as he said it, he knew it wasn't true. He tore his right claws out of the dirt, braced himself, and resheathed them. They pierced through the scales covering his knuckles, sending gray-green bits flying. He screamed out again and reached for Anna, who wrapped her arms around him.

"Please, Logan," she begged. That unmistakable rotten scent radiated off him again, but she didn't budge.

The rest of the necrosis settled into place on Logan's skin. He grew quiet, then began rocking back and forth on his heels. His limbs were still shaking.

Anna's arms briefly slipped from around his back as she slid her feet out from under her. Feeling the movement, he panicked.

"Don't go," he whispered.

"I'm here," she assured him. She tightened her grip on his shoulders, hoping he could feel it. "I'm here."

As she held his wracking body, she looked across the field at the crumbling shack, then at the nearby Gambel, and finally at the two makeshift markers below its twisting branches. A light breeze carried a sunflower head, small and delicate, onto Charles's gravemarker, decorating the dark oak wood with a bright circle of yellow.

She didn't know how long it would be until Logan got up. She took a deep breath, secured her hold on him, and settled in for a long day—or week, or month. Whatever it would take.

Author's Note:

This is my first X-Men fanfic, and the first fanfic I've written in over 10 years — so, along with being new to this franchise, I'm a little rusty. If you're confused about what's happening in this story, could you let me know? I built a whole background story and lore around it, and I err on the side of underexplaining so as to avoid the whole "Here's exactly what happened!" character monologue or narration that, frankly, I find takes away from the joy of the readers discovering it on their own. However, I don't want to leave anyone stranded, either, and I'm always looking to improve my writing.

Anyway, hopping back off my creative writing critique soapbox to say: I hope you enjoyed this story! I'm fairly certain it's just a standalone, but I might explore other characters' stories in this timeline. We'll see when inspiration strikes... Maybe I'll be back in 10 more years ;)