4

Logan clawed his way back to consciousness, fighting against something he couldn’t see, only feel. He jerked awake, slumped in the corner of an empty room that was gunmetal grey, and smelled of nothing but purifying ozone, all walls and no doors. It was cold, but not Siberia cold.

“You never really thought you actually killed me, did you?” A familiar voice said, deep inside his head. He felt a chill run up and down his spine, completing a circuit, ending up curdling somewhere near his stomach. “Oh god no,” he croaked, hoping it wasn’t true, and yet kind of hoping it was true as well.

But didn’t he know? On some level, when he felt that sudden chill of a mind touching his own, he felt tendrils of telepathy unfurling in his mind like dark ribbons. It wasn’t good. It was someone with a grudge, someone who knew they’d face resistance and had to take him out so fast he couldn’t mount even unconscious defenses.

“Yes, Logan, it’s me,” Jean said, and appeared before him, wearing a fiery red outfit that almost matched her fiery red hair. That seemed a bit tacky, although it looked good on her. She stood in the center of the empty room, far enough away from him that she’d have a chance to get clear if he lunged. If she didn’t know it telepathically, if she didn’t use her telekinesis to embed him in the wall first. “You gave it the best shot that anyone ever could, if it’s any consolation. Your bravery - or is it insanity? How do you tell? - is always breathtaking. If you didn’t have a built in death wish, I bet you’d be a coward.”

“Let the kids go,” he muttered, dry washing his face. He wasn‘t sure he could look her in the eye. His stomach was knotting, and it felt like it was crawling up his esophagus and strangling him from the inside out. “Fair play to keep me, but they’re students, Jeannie. They got nothing to do with this.”

She cocked her head to the side and studied him for a moment, like he had just grown a spare head out of his back. “Two ploys at once: martyr gambit, and guilt. The kids will alert the others, won’t they? And you aren’t expecting me to believe you’re giving up without a fight, are you Logan? You’d fight a shadow. Raging against dying light is all you know.”

That was a very poetic way to put it. Also, true. But he sank back into the corner and finally looked up at her, unable and unwilling to keep the tears from his eyes. His eyes felt like they were burning, that looking at her was like staring at the sun. “I don’t want to kill you again,” he told her, his voice a strangled whisper. “Do whatever you want to me, I don’t care, I deserve it, just let the kids go.” He felt oddly broken, like he was a statue that had just been thrown down on a marble floor, and he didn’t even have the strength in his legs to stand up. He didn’t want to fight her at all. He thought it would be a karmic balance if she killed him, a righting of at least one of his million wrongs.

Her reaction was subtle but surprising. She stared at him, stared through him, her mind like a white hot spotlight burning his, checking for veracity, and he didn’t fight. As much as he had something in him that reflexively fought back against mental intrusion, there was another part of his mind that rolled over like a friendly dog wanting its belly scratched. He had been such a frequent victim of telepathic rape that part of him didn’t even want to fight it, figuring it’d be less painful and quicker if he just let them do what they wanted. They probably would anyways.

Her eyes had an oddly flat look, almost doll’s eyes, hard glass all the way through. He saw nothing of the old Jeannie in them. Her head slowly righted itself, but her expression never changed. “Holy shit. You’re telling the truth.”

“I killed you once. I’m done. I’m so sorry, Jeannie. Christ -” he considered not saying it, but she was a telepath, and chances were she already heard it in his mind anyways. “ - I loved you. I’m sorry it all happened. If I could rewrite the past, I would.”

Now her look hardened, setting like concrete. “You’re a killer, Logan. You destroy everything you touch, and everyone you love.”

“Yeah, well, then we’re perfect for each other, ‘cause you did too.” He didn’t say it with any rancor; he was simply pointing out a fact. She’d killed Scott, she killed Xavier (in a manner of speaking), and then she went on to kill people she hardly knew or didn’t even know. Their trajectories were opposite, but still parallel: he started out that way and ended here. She started out the opposite way, and ended there.

Her head jerked back as if he’d thrown a punch at her, eyes widening in shock at his temerity. “You compare me to you, you mad dog?”

“We’re both batshit. I had to come out of it, and you crawled back to it, but it’s our home. I can try and help you, you can kill me, I can try and help you but you can kill me anyways, it’s your call, but I can’t do this again. I’m not the Professor, I’m not them. I’ll do what I hafta to help you, fuck everybody else. I’ll protect you from them. Just say the word.”

Shock bloomed into horror, and she actually took a step back. “What - what the hell is this?”

He felt the metal floor. It was oddly smooth and almost slick; it was unlike any metal he’d ever felt before. What the hell was it? “This is a mindscape, right? No secrets here.”

“This isn’t what you are. You’re a killer!”

“I’m a killer, Jeannie, but I never wanted to be one. I just wanted to left in peace. You know that; you looked into my mind, and almost convinced me I wasn’t an animal. This is me, the me you always wanted to see. The me before my life became an unending series of nightmares. This is the actual Logan. Weird, isn’t it? Even I don’t recognize him whenever he crops up. Luckily, it’s not that often.”

She looked appalled and slightly angry, and that was kind of puzzling, but he was too emotionally distraught to think about it. “You bastard. Fight!”

He felt something like a machete cleave his face; his skin split in a deep horizontal line across his face, cutting his nose almost completely in half, but even as the blood started running down his throat, the healing had begun. He wiped tears and blood off his face, and said, “I’m not gonna fight ya, darlin‘. You wanna kill me, go ahead, but you’re gonna hafta do it in cold blood.”

Her eyes were bright with fury. “How dare you!” She then winked out of existence, disappearing as quickly as she had arrived.

That was okay with him. He curled up into a ball, resting his head on his bent knees, and felt his face healing. He was just waiting for the emotional injuries to heal too.

He knew that would be a long time coming.

****

When John woke up in a little metal box of a room, his thoughts immediately traveled to his igniter. He looked at his wrist, and was disappointed but not all that surprised to see it was gone. Damn it! His back up Zippo was gone too.

But his desperation book of matches was still hidden in his sock. Thank god. It was kind of a gyp to have a power that was useless unless certain conditions were met - in his case, the presence of fire - but what could he do about it? Just plan to always or almost always have fire with him if at all possible.

Of course, fire wouldn’t help now. The room looked to be a perfect metal square, fluorescents in the ceiling providing light, but it was otherwise devoid of everything, and if there was a door, he didn’t see it. There was nothing to burn; he doubted he could get a fire going so hot he could melt it. “So what’s the deal, huh?” he asked, taking off his gloves and feeling the wall. Mystique, the queen of all tricky bitches, had once told him that some places used holography and other things to trick people into thinking they were trapped in something more sophisticated than they were; she said your hands couldn’t lie, whereas your eyes could. It sounded funky, but since she was so good at escaping, he had to believe she knew what she was talking about.

Somebody did this, though. The problem was, who had captured them? Obviously mutants were involved. Maybe the Russian equivalent of the X-Men? Maybe they thought they were bad guys.

“What are you doing?” A familiar female voice asked.

He turned to see, in the middle of the room, Tasha. That was uber-weird, because he hadn’t seen her since the assault on Alcatraz. They weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend; they just hooked up a couple of times, no big deal. She was called Bullseye because she had inhuman accuracy (she could throw a marble and knock a construction worker off the twentieth floor of a building) as well as inhuman reflexes. There wasn’t a basket she couldn’t make or a bullet she couldn‘t catch. Magneto had given her something to hit Logan with, something to keep him “preoccupied” while the rest of them went after that kid, but something must have happened as she hadn’t made it, at least not to his knowledge. Had Logan killed her? John had told her to throw it from a distance, to not get close to him ‘cause he’d fucking kill her, but she insisted she wasn’t scared of him, making her pretty damn dumb. Maybe she never got that far; the fight was pure chaos, and energy was being slung around like no one’s business. Maybe she got baked by an errant shot before she even got close, or maybe she got hit by a flying body. He didn’t know if she survived the assault or not, but if she hadn’t started running before Jean went nuts, she wouldn’t have. Only Logan walked away from that. “Wow, hey, you hitched your wagons to these losers? Good to know you made it out. So who are these assholes and why did they lock me in a footlocker?”

She gave him a funny look, like he suddenly stopped speaking English or something. She had that good looking but exotic mixed race thing going on her; her skin was a kind of pale off bronze, her hair Japanese black, her eyes so brown you could’ve called them black and split the difference. He had no idea what her ethnic background was at all - at a guess? Hispanic, with either some white or black thrown in, or both - and she had never volunteered it. He didn’t even know her last name. He just knew she was originally from Tucson. “You think I’m alive?”

He scoffed, and turned back to the wall. “Whatever, hon. You gonna help me get outta here or not?”

“I’m dead, John. So are you.”

He looked over his shoulder at her. “No, I’m not. I have a pulse, I’m breathin’, and you’re talking, so I’m betting you’re alive too. But whatever. Does this mean you’re not gonna help me get out of here?”

“There’s no way out. We’re stuck here.”

He sighed wearily. “And where’s here?”

“Hell.”

“No, see, I was just there a coupla weeks ago, and it was much more interesting than this place. So cut the shit, huh? Why are you here?”

“She sent me here.”

“She? She who?”

“Jean.”

He stared at her, not sure he heard her right. “Jean? As in “telekinetic freak out, I’m gonna kill goddamn everyone” Jean? Crazy as a shithouse rat Jean?”

“Do you know any others?”

Was this a game? What was this? He shook his head, not hiding his annoyance. “She’s dead. Logan killed her. Like I thought he killed you.”

“I got hit with a lightning bolt. And Logan only killed the body of Jean.”

“And without your body, what d’ya got? A year’s supply of Turtle Wax? This is total bullshit. Although I’m sorry Storm tagged ya. That’s gotta suck.”

She was still staring at him, and he suddenly realized how odd it was. Was she even blinking? He wasn’t sure. There was something kinda zombie like about here, something about her total stillness that seemed off somehow. She was still wearing the last outfit he’d ever seen her in: jeans, black leather jacket, Mustang t-shirt. It didn’t even look the slightest bit crispy, but if she’d been given a lightning enema, you’d think it would. “You don’t get it. What did Magneto say about telepaths?”

He threw up his hands in surrender. So far, he hadn’t felt a single goddamn thing on the wall. “Don’t trust ‘em. But you know he had that mad on for the Professor. Did you ever get the feeling that the thing between those guys was kinda weird? Like they were more ex-husbands than ex-friends? It seemed too personal to just be two drinking buddies who wanted to kill each other. Kinda gave me the creeps thinking about it.”

“Some telepaths don’t need a body.”

He stared back at her, trying to match her non-blinking stare. His eyes started to burn a bit. “What are you saying? You’re saying Jean’s still alive? The Professor? Who?”

“Yes.”

“Yes isn’t an answer! Who is alive?”

“None of us here.”

He closed his eyes and attempted to count to ten to avoid getting angry, but fuck it - he got to five and gave the hell up. “What the fuck are you talking about?!” he roared. “You’re not making any fucking sense! I’m sorry if the lightning bolt scrambled your brains, but try and think about what you’re saying before you say it, okay?”

She met him with her depthless, vacant stare, and John realized she was seriously creeping him out now. When he’d gotten up he moved the matchbook from his sock to his sleeve, and he dropped it down into the palm of his hand, the rectangular cardboard kind of comforting as he slid the cover aside and felt the matches in his palm. He wasn’t going to light up if he didn’t have to, he really didn’t want to have to bake Tasha, but he wasn’t a hundred percent convinced this was Tasha. She usually was a bit more feisty than this; she was a bad guy, not a drone.

Wait - was this even her? Was someone making him see her? Why were they doing such a piss poor job of it? The last thing Logan had said was something about that weird noise maybe being psychic energy. Not that that made any sense, but he supposed it was better than nothing. “Tash, is it even you?”

“I didn’t survive the fight.” She said it flatly, almost like a robot.

“You keep saying that.” Suddenly he got a really bad feeling about all of this. “If you aren’t alive, how am I talking to you?”

“She kept some of us with her; I don’t know why. Maybe she didn’t want to be alone.”

“Kept? What do you mean kept? How?”

She shrugged, and he realized that was the first time she actually moved. “I think we’re like pets, or maybe toys. Something she could play with, keep herself busy with. So were those people.”

“What people? Wait - do you mean those people missing from the village? Jean took them? That doesn’t make sense.”

“She’s crazy. Nothing she does makes sense. But she said if we waited long enough, you would come.”

He swallowed hard. “The X-Men?” Oh god, he’d picked a horrible time to switch sides.

“Logan. She wants Logan.”

Not a real shock. “She’s gonna kill him?”

“Killing’s too nice. She has something else in mind.”

“What?” Oh, he was so glad he wasn’t Logan right now.

“I don’t know. I only know she thinks you shouldn’t be here; she thinks you’re wrong.”

“What does that mean?” But in between blinks of his eyes, she was gone. He was once again alone in the empty metal room. “What does that mean?!” he shouted to the ceiling. There was no reply, but he didn’t really expect one either.

If this was Jean, they were so fucked it was unbelievable.