9

He came to chained to a wall. Well, that was a nice medieval touch.

There were no actual chains, though. Just heavy adamantium shackles bolted directly into a steel and concrete wall, and high enough up that his feet were barely touching the floor. It was the ache in his shoulders that brought him back to consciousness.

He lifted his head up and looked around, his mouth feeling like it was full of bad tasting cotton, but there wasn’t anything to see. He was in an unlit, featureless metal room, maybe nine by nine, tops, and he couldn’t quite make out a door, although there must have been one … unless he was teleported in? Well, maybe.

He was definitely alone in here; in fact, it smelled like he was the only person who had ever been in here. Was that even possible?

Just as he was about to start cursing to see if there was anyone listening, Dorn’s voice came over a loudspeaker, and made the metal walls tremble with the bass in his voice. “Logan, I’m glad you’re awake. Just in time for the slide show.”

He scoffed as best as he could with almost no saliva. “That’s how you’re gonna torture me? With slides from your vacation to the Wisconsin Dells?” Well actually, that was brilliant and inventively cruel.

“You’re very funny,” he replied, clearly not meaning it. “No, you misunderstand me. Not all your records were destroyed, Logan - several still exist, in our possession. You know, you may have been unwilling participant in Stryker’s fun experiments with liquid metals, but you joined us voluntarily, at least to start with.”

“Bullshit.” Hadn’t Stryker said he volunteered for the adamantium? So he lied about that too. Or Dorn was lying …

“You did. A man of your talents - and your mutations - didn’t find it easy to exist in the world. We gave you a purpose.”

“Bullshit.” He repeated, trying the cuffs. They were very solid, and he was pretty sure he could only get through the wall if he had the use of his claws - which he didn’t, because the shackles made certain his hands were pointing straight up.

A small dot of bluish light appeared on the wall across from him, like a negative of a laser sight. He looked around, but didn’t see where it was coming from. “When you were outside in the world, how did you make your money, Logan? By fighting. You lost all your memories, but that was instinctive; you were born to fight.”

Suddenly the light grew into an image projected on the wall. It was black and white, and shot from an upper angle, suggesting a security camera had shot the footage. It showed a stark white room with a bank of wall monitors … a control room of some sort? Maybe an older one, as some of the technology looked dated. There was no sound (again, security camera footage), but it was clear from the way many of the monitors started to fade to static something was starting to go wrong.

The door - metal by the look of it, perhaps aluminum - suddenly burst open as a man was propelled through it violently, sprawling back out of frame. A man came through the broken doorway a moment later, walking this time …

… oh fuck, it was him, wasn’t it? He was wearing dark clothes, but nothing to disguise his face, and the gloves on his hands seemed pointless. He watched himself turn to the control panel, and pop his claws a millisecond before plunging them into the console and ripping downward. Sparks vomited upward, but all he did was close his eyes against them. A shadow appeared near the doorway, but he never saw them, and he assumed it was someone working with him, as he didn’t even acknowledge them in any respect.

Shortly after the shadow departed, and he had finished carving up the control panel, someone - a bad guy, presumably - lunged through the doorway towards him, and he watched his other self not even look, but simply throw back an elbow, which the would be assailant seemed to run into full force, his head snapping back so violently it was a wonder it stayed attached to his shoulders. But it fell to the floor with the rest of the body, theoretically still a part of the same entity.

His other self then looked up, into the security camera, and he had the most disconcerting feeling of looking into his own eyes; his own hard, angry eyes, as the few flash burned areas on his face healed over, the skin looking like a living thing oozing over his wounds. Sometimes it did look more creepy than he realized.

He watched himself approach the camera, popping the claws on one hand, and slashed the camera, ending the footage. Logan felt inexplicably shaken because he looked in his own eyes and saw … what? Not nothing - something was there - but he wasn’t sure he liked it.

“Film can be faked,” he snapped, more for himself than Dorn. “That was fucking meaningless.”

“Perhaps, but we’ve only just begun,” he said, his voice silky with false amiability. “Please understand that your current accommodations are only temporary, as much for your protection as ours. I don’t blame you for your anger or distrust, but I’m sure, once you see the facts for yourself, you’ll be more willing to listen. Stryker was a megalomaniac, and Control was a psychopath; the follow up idea of divesting the Organization of all mutants was idiotic at best. We were always at best when we were working together, and I think we can do that again.”

“Fuck you.”

“You can lead your own team again. We can give you back some of what has been taken from you.”

“Oh, how fucking generous,” he growled, his head feeling like it was throbbing from the rush of blood to his ears. He didn’t want to hear this; he didn’t want to see this. But he was the embodiment of a captive audience. And maybe it was karma - he did want to know about his past, yes? So now he was getting it, whether it was true or not.

“You were important to us, Logan. We can be important to you again, if you let us,” Dorn said, like some sleaze ball ex trying to get back into his old girlfriend’s pants.

More film came to life on the wall, this time in color - and in the middle of what appeared to be a bloody battle.

And Logan couldn’t shut it out.

10

The phone was ringing by the time Marcus got in the door.

It had been a stupid mistake to even try and go out; he couldn’t even get a good buzz on. He kept looking at his watch, and wondering where Logan was now. If he was captured, tortured, or simply ripping through fascists like bags of chips. He hoped the latter, but he wished he was there helping him. He’d been worried a lot more about Logan’s “plan” since he found the note he left him in his medicine chest.

He’d been after a condom or two for his wallet (well, you never knew when you’d get lucky, although he usually did), when he noticed the top of the box had been ripped off, and placed beside the band-aids. He discovered that Logan had written something on it, namely: Fragmenting bullet through the eye. It took him a couple of minutes to understand why Logan had written that. Was Leonie killed that way? Why the fuck would he write it on the torn lid of a condom box?!

Then he got it - Logan was telling him how to kill him, if worse came to worst. A fragmenting bullet through the eye would probably do it; it would burst into dozens upon dozens of tiny pieces of shrapnel on contact, and would bounce around the inside of his adamantium plated skull, shredding his brain like it was caught in a tornado of razor blades. It was unlikely that his healing factor could compensate for such massive damage rapidly, or at all. It was the perfect way to kill him if you could make the shot, and Marc knew he could make the shot.

So, obviously, did Logan.

Why would he worry about having a death contingency plan unless he thought it was highly possible those bastards would catch him and brainwash him again? And the fact that he decided to stick the note in his medicine cabinet and not tell him indicated that he didn’t want him to know right away - another bad sign. Shit.

Now he knew Logan had something of a suicidal streak in him, and he would take the most stupid, boneheaded risks, assuming he would survive and the gamble would be worth it. Marc enjoyed that style of logic himself, but - unlike Logan - he knew his limits. There were some roads that could only lead to pain. Logan had taken one of those, hadn’t he?

Oh, fuck him! What the fuck did he think he was going to accomplish? Did he think he could cut some kind of deal with those lying bastards, get them to spare his friends? How could he, for a single second, believe that they would ever live up to their end of the bargain? He was smarter than that.

But he was also desperate, and sometimes, when you were hurt, you just lashed out without thinking. Logan was really good at doing that. Shit.

Now he really knew he should leave early. What if that stupid bastard had gotten himself into some real trouble?

He rubbed his eyes as he grabbed the cordless phone and barked, “Yeah?” Mentally he was already deciding what weapons to take.

“Marcus, where is he?” Xavier asked, his voice cold.

“I don’t have time for you,” he snapped. “Look, he hasn’t called yet. When I know, you’ll know.”

“I hope you realize I didn’t want to do this,” Xavier replied, and Marcus knew what he was going to do the instant before he did it. He intended to toss the receiver away, but Xavier, that bastard, had him.

“Son of a bitch,” he snarled through gritted teeth, as he knew Xavier had just trespassed into his mind. “You had no right - “

“He left you instructions on how to kill him?” Xavier gasped, appalled. “And you still wouldn’t tell us where you sent him?”

“He is not one of your kids,” he snapped, still feeling like throwing the phone across the room. “And your idea of helping him is pretty fucked. You keep information from him ‘cause his mind is “fragile”, yet when he suffers yet another devastating blow, you expect him to swallow the pain until he chokes on it. Do you wonder why he didn’t go back to you guys?”

“He wished to protect us.”

“And you never fucking helped him, ever, in your entire goddamn life. You gave him a place to crash, but that’s it.”

“That’s hardly true.”

“Oh really? What have you done for him lately, huh?”

Xavier was quiet for so long, he wondered if he was actually going to admit he’d done squat. “You sent him back to those people,” he finally said, his voice like liquid nitrogen.

“I gave him a purpose,” he shot back. “I gave him a reason not to lose his fucking mind.” Xavier said nothing to that, because what could he say? After enough time had passed that Marc felt his point had sunk in, he added, “I’m comin’ with you.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I know these people like you never could,” he replied just as coldly. “I know how they lay out their bases, and what weaponry they prefer. Can you say the same thing?”

“There will be no killing,” Xavier demanded. “I will not have it.”

“I will not have you telling me how I can or can’t defend myself or others; I’m not one of your people. I’m going as an independent, only for Logan’s sake. Is that clear?”

Xavier was silent for another long moment, and he could almost feel the waves of disdain over the telephone line. “At least try to be a team player. We all want to make sure Logan is all right.”

Xavier was no longer holding him frozen to the spot, so he moved to his bedroom, where an oversized duffle bag filled with weapons sat on his bed, waiting to go. His laptop, in a carrier bag, sat beside it. “You know as well as I do, physically he’ll always be fine. Mentally and emotionally is another story.”

“I realize that.”

“Do you? Then start acting like it before you lose him for good.” With that, he pressed the receiver button, and hung up on him, tossing the handset aside for good measure. It was so funny how a telepath, who should have known almost everything, sometimes knew nothing.

Oh shit - did he ask where they were going to pick him up? Oh damn it! Well, he’d get up to the roof - they had a jet, right?

He bet they didn’t even serve peanuts, the cheap bastards.

11

The funny thing was, he felt feverish and disoriented, like maybe he was having someone else’s dream.

Dreams, actually. Plural.

The constant films felt like the visual equivalent of getting crap shoved down your throat. It would have been like A Clockwork Orange if they put some kind of apparatus on his eyes to keep them from closing, but they didn’t have to, and they knew it. Logan couldn’t help but look, especially when they had sound. His life as a car crash.

He stopped telling himself it was faked about twenty two murders ago.

Right now there was some kind of grainy color footage - time coded in the lower right corner, showing a tall man with movie star good looks and reddish brown hair, who walked around like he knew exactly how good looking he was. He had come to understand by the fact that people’s heads blew up in sudden, glorious Technicolor that the smooth pretty boy with the glittering gold eyes was Timebomb. He seemed pretty damn impressed with himself, and never seemed to exert in any way to use his power. Xi was right - he just made people’s heads explode. Theoretically, a very limited power, but there was no denying it was pretty fucking effective. He wondered if Timebomb ever tried to turn his ability on the Organization - maybe that “lucky ricochet” that capped him wasn’t really all that lucky. There was an arrogance in his stance that suggested he only did something if it was worth his while, or a laugh. Otherwise he was out the door.

He’d seen Xi too, looking achingly young and wild eyed, shimmering slightly due to her activated force field. He’d also seen Static, beautiful and fierce; Reaper, the epitome of detachment; and he’d seen, several times, a frail and icy looking brunette who, without warning, shot fire from her hands, and often had her entire arms catch on fire, with no appreciable injury - obviously Inferno. With a sick twisting in his stomach, he occasionally saw Shrike; the bastard looked smug and insane even back then. Every now and then, he saw mutants he didn’t recognize, and wondered if any of them were the names Chameleon had mentioned in her note. Not all of them apparently used their power on screen.

Not all the films had sound, and they were evenly split between color and black and white, but most were taken at odd or oblique angles, suggesting that most were taken secretively, or by security cameras. They mostly seemed concerned with breaking into things, breaking things, and killing relatively anonymous soldiers … and the occasional mutants. He did a lot of killing; he was very good at it.

He also seemed to bark a lot of orders, at least before he went totally psychotic. Is that what Dorn meant by “leading his own team again”? So why didn’t he recognize himself?

Of course he did, physically at least - although sometimes he would have sworn his eyes looked blue. What the hell was that about? But his postures, movements, something … something made him almost unrecognizable to himself. It was surreal. It was like having an out of body experience, but then glimpsing your twin in a parallel universe, removed from your own.

He was wondering if it was getting to him, or they were pumping in a gas he couldn’t smell, because he felt strangely enervated and defeated, the heat in his mind making his eyelids sag. God, he was just their little robot, wasn’t he? Why the fuck did he draw the lucky straw?

Maybe he had joined them voluntarily, once. Then he found he couldn’t leave, and they made an example of him. Or at least that was an interpretation that he felt he could live with.

When this film finally came to an end, the pause between reels, he hung his head to his chest, and muttered, “Make it stop.”

“Are you ready to talk this over like civil Human beings?” Dorn’s voice replied.

“Whatever the fuck,” he said, feeling hollow behind his eyes and in his mind. Maybe they had drugged him. “Just stop it. I don’t want to see anymore.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have let you see so much. It is hard to take in all at once, isn’t it?”

The cuffs suddenly unlatched with a click, and Logan realized how heavily he was hanging from them only when he almost fell to the floor. He managed not to, but his arms hung limp at his side, fiery hot from his healing factor going to work on his strained and torn shoulders. He leaned against the wall, trying to will strength back into his legs, rubbing his arms as soon as he could move them.

The wall beside him suddenly unsealed with a gasp, revealing a door he had never seen. It opened on a dimly lit steel lined corridor, and he expected more soldiers to come in, but they didn’t. He crept towards the door curiously, braced for a paralyzer or maybe another drug dart, but there really was no one out in the corridor. It was a very narrow hall, featureless metal, and seemed to dead end about fifty feet down, although surely there was another hidden door.

He could have started slashing his way through, he knew it, but he heard a hidden door hiss open on the left side, and curiosity got the better of him. Besides, there was question he needed to have an answer to before he could move on.

Peering in the doorway, he found Dorn sitting alone, behind a metal desk. That’s all that was in the small, boxy room - Dorn, his desk and chair, and an unoccupied chair. Something was very wrong here - where were the guards? Dorn gestured to the chair before him. “Please, Logan, have a seat. How are your arms?”

He glared at him and didn’t answer as he slumped down into the chair. “Why me?”

“What?” He looked genuinely puzzled.

“Why me? Why the fuck was I picked to be your guinea pig? Why did you have to control me? Why didn’t you let me go?”

“Ah, that.” He sighed, and clasped his hands together on top of the sterile desk, giving him an anemic, insurance salesman sort of smile. “Well, that is a tricky question, and I don’t have the entire answer, if there is one. But you were special, Logan. Your healing factor is difficult to replicate. There have been other mutants with healing factors - Shrike, for example - but none had factors quite as wide ranging and powerful as yours. We’ve attempted to induce it in others, but the results have been mixed.”

“Chimera,” he said glumly.

Dorn nodded. “That was a sad state of affairs, and a worst case scenario case in point. But it is an excellent example.”

“That was it? My mutation?”

“Well, before it officially became the Organization - before it was known you were a mutant - you were highly prized for your language skills. Oh, you did have quality fighting skills - you were strangely good with blades, which are - as you know - tricky weapons. But you were more highly prized as a polylinguist.”

He stared at him blankly, still in the grasp of that strange hollowed out feeling. This still seemed totally unreal. “What?”

“Yes, I know - a bit odd, isn’t it? But according to the records I’ve seen, your linguistic abilities had already garnered you major attention in the intelligence community; there was some general jealously that Canada snagged you first. I mean, everybody had linguists in their employ, but one who spoke almost every major language, and fluently at that? They said you could talk to people in five different languages at once, and never fuck up, never lose your place or your stride; it was all like one language to you. On top of that, you had an ability to get lost and blend into a city like no other, and some thought you had Sherlock Homes-ian levels of deduction. Of course, when it came out that you were a mutant, it quickly became obvious that it wasn’t superior deduction you possessed, simply the ability to smell and sense things that standard Humans could not. But in the intelligence community, pre-mutant “outing”, you were an extremely hot property. Anyone can be trained to use a gun or surveillance equipment; most people cannot do it while speaking English, Portuguese, and Mandarin.”

His mind reeled at this. “I was a spy, not an assassin?” And they wanted him not because he could kill,
but because he was polylingual? He was having an out of body experience.

Dorn gave him an avuncular smile, like he was indulging him in a particularly silly fantasy. “Well, some might argue that that can be one and the same. But when you joined the Canadian branch of the group that would eventually become the Organization, you were famous for your language skills, not your more lethal ones.”

“The group that would become the Organization?” It felt like there might be an out there, at least from a moral standpoint.

“Yes. The Organization sprung out of a secret intelligence network born in the ashes of World War Two. Several allied countries - namely America, Canada, and Britain - saw gaps in the existing intelligence services in their own countries, and put together a secret unit that could work with each other, but independent of any formal government tie - so they didn’t have to play by any rules, you understand. Worked well for a while, as far as I know. Which is not at all, because it was deeper than black ops. No files exist - can you believe that? So I’m going on hearsay, you understand.”

“It was a dirty group,” he said numbly. Deep black ops, no records, no government ties … all that didn’t exactly add up to legal fun, did it?

Dorn shrugged, but he looked absurdly pleased with himself.  Logan wanted to tear his face off. “Is an  
act committed in the name of democracy ever dirty?”

He glared at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“No, I’m not - not really. But I thought it might make you feel better.”

He was going to kill him. He’d do it now if he didn’t feel too defeated to move. “So it became the Organization, and devoted its energies to hunting and killing mutants?”

“Not overnight. Initially it was mobilized to handle the emerging threats of mutants, long before the word mutants entered the public vernacular. I think it was shortly after that time that you went missing.”

“Missing?”

“I don’t know all the details, but it’s said you faked your own death on a mission behind the Iron Curtain. It was hard to swallow, because everyone was convinced you were the luckiest man alive - did you ever get hurt? - but considering the group and the place of your death, it was near impossible to confirm or deny - no one could get enough proof one way or another.  But someone higher up insisted you were still alive, and were out there; they insisted you be hunted down.

“Still, it seems cooler heads prevailed. It was only then that they began to realize that the burgeoning mutant threat could only be handled by other mutants. They knew, from a genetic profile checked just before you left that you were indeed one - and didn’t that make sense? Your ability to avoid injury seemed positively supernatural, and you hadn’t aged at all, or ever taken a sick day. That’s not even mentioning your ability with languages, although that’s never been conclusively proven to be a mutation. It’s said they cut a deal with you, and you returned voluntarily, under the new code name Wolverine. But
it was an uneasy alliance that eventually fell apart - some say it was a mission that went South, others say Stryker was somehow involved, perhaps both - and you stormed off, saying that you quit. You were free for several years, as you were adept at falling in between the cracks of society, keeping a low profile, a dozen aliases, and not leaving an evidence trail.  Some say you were trained far too well. We have some proof you were married to a woman in Japan during that period of time. Were you aware of that?  I never pegged you as the settling down type; you were always the perfect stereotype of the misanthropic loner.”

Logan said nothing, just glared at him. Was he getting some of his strength back, now that he was breathing cleaner air? “You kidnapped me.”

Dorn dipped his head in confirmation. “By that time Stryker had worked his way up the chain of command, and he wanted you back quite badly. He felt you were an ideal test subject, and Control agreed this was a worthwhile endeavor. There had been others before you, but in general they … died.
It wasn’t pretty.”

“Shrike didn’t.”

“No, but he was considered a failure. Not only was his healing factor sub-par - he almost died after the first operation - but his mental state was questionable at best.  He had a history of mental instability, but Stryker had grown to like him, and he was Control’s right hand man for some time. They just didn’t want to admit he was a liability.” Dorn leaned forward, as if he was about to impart great wisdom. “I’ll be the first to admit that was a mistake. No one should have made you their test subject. You were an extremely valuable operative, and still are. We’d like you back with us, Logan, but this time we’ll do things differently. No more lines, no more telepathic manipulations; we think it’s in everyone’s best interest to work together. And no more senseless deaths of mutants either! There are much more grave threats in the world, and Humanity must realize that the mutants they scorn could very well be their only saviors in the time to come.

“You will have a team of your own choosing, and full intelligence access. You don’t have to cut your ties with Xavier, but I’m sure you can understand that this might not go down well with him. We’ll even give you a home. My first thought was a high tech condo overlooking the Potomac, but I then realized that was not your typical dwelling of choice. So you can have a cabin in the wilderness, any wilderness - the Russian Steppes if you desire, so far away from other people they‘ll be just a rumor. You name it. We want you back, Logan. And we want to make it up to you for all the senseless suffering.”

Logan nodded, letting out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. All this because they wanted him to come in from the cold? They wanted to atone for their misdeeds?

Did he believe one word of what Dorn had told him about his supposed past? And the supposed reasons for bringing him here?

In a single swift movement, he jumped to his feet, popped the claws on his right hand, and buried them in Dorn’s throat. “You want to make it up to me?!” He roared into the man’s startled, pained face, his pale eyes as wide as silver dollars. He’d reached up and grabbed Logan’s wrist, but now he didn’t know what to do, because if he tried to wrestle his arm away he would shred his own throat. Blood was already coming out, staining his shirt, and he started to cough, gasp for air, and it began oozing out of his mouth. “You fucks tortured me, you took my life, and then you murdered my fucking daughter! You used me as a puppet - you made me murder again and again and again in your name! You have destroyed everything I ever cared about, even destroyed my fucking mind, and now you want to kiss and make up?!” He stank of acrid fear, the smell so pungent it was making his eyes water - or at least that’s what Logan told himself was making his eyes water. “Kiss my ass, Dorn!  Fuck you all!” And with that, he ripped his hand away, and spun to face the door.

He heard Dorn’s head hit the ground long before the dull thud of his body followed, the chair casters squealing on the matte steel floor.

Logan popped the claws on his other hand, so livid and seething with pent up rage his entire world seemed to take on a reddish tint. He had killed the head man, so he knew a shitstorm would be coming down on him. But he didn’t care. He hoped they were prepared to beat him down until his face looked like ground chuck and he had a hole the size of a bread box through his abdomen, because that’s what they were going to have to do to stop him.

He was so angry right now, he felt like he could kill the entire fucking world.