5

Logan hated the big demons. Not just because they were big, although that was certainly a factor. No, he mainly hated the big ones because it was a chore to kill them. There was so much surface area, and usually only one spot or two where they were genuinely vulnerable. Unless you knew exactly where the sweet spot was, you could be jabbing for hours.

The thing lunged at him since he was in the front, and Logan lunged to meet it, his claws slashing deep into its Moray eel-like face. It was like cutting through blubber, although it smelled like a sewer full of rotting meat. It reared back and opened a mouth you could have parked a Buick in, possessing small teeth as large as his forearms, and fangs as big as his torso. It had hot breath like a tire fire in an abattoir.

A gout of flame surged over his head and splashed against its distressingly dildo-like head, and Logan saw its four silver eyes, each as big as serving platters, contract slightly in the sudden brightness, hissing like a pneumatic drill press cranked up to eleven, as John shouted, “What the hell is that thing?!”

Logan saw the slashes on its 'snout' heal over like they’d never existed in the first place, and even though he was starting to sweat under the heat of the flames spilling over the demon’s head, it was cleary ignoring it. He thought its skin was starting to blacken … but no, it was hardening; he didn’t smell burning. “Giles, what the fuck is this?” he shouted, as he heard Giles cast a spell that seemed to slam up against the thing like a (mostly) invisible force field. Logan could see coruscation at the edges, and he stood just beyond it, still blocking the way with his body and his bared claws, but he knew his thing could swallow him whole in a second and take care of the others in less than two the second all their barriers failed.

“I think it’s a chimera.”

“The mutant?” Kitty asked, shocked.

“No, an actual chimera. A ravenous beast who’s virtually unkillable.”

“Virtually?” Logan asked. “What’s the weakness?”

“All magical. I’ll need to access a coven to help me.” The chimera seemed to butt its head up against the magical field, and Logan saw those tiny bits of light start to flicker. Holy shit, it could actually fight magic?

“It’s gotta have something else. What if I carve its fucking eyes out?”

“You’ll annoy it for three seconds. Its skin adapts to everything.” Giles had obvious strain in his voice. He was rapidly running out of strength; he didn‘t have the power to hold the chimera back. That‘s why he needed a coven. “John, Kitty, run. Get out of here and try to get as many people out of the station as you can. Logan and I will hold it here as long as we can.”

“Evacuate the station?” John repeated. “What, it’s gonna fuckin’ eat people?”

Logan knew it would be a bloodbath. This thing was huge, and if Giles was right, he could spend all day ripping open its skin, gouging its eyes out, and it wouldn’t even pause to flick him off.  Then he had a brilliant idea. No, scratch that - it would only be brilliant if it worked. If it didn’t, they remained fucked, but fucked with a brief false sense of hope. “Kitty, to me.” In a moment, she was there. She smelled terrified, but she was an X-Man, so she wasn’t going anywhere. You had to love that innocent, stupid kind of bravery. He retracted a set of claws and grabbed her hand, saying, “We’re gonna run through that thing. When we hit the gut, you let go of me and keep running.”

Flames reflected in her now huge dark eyes. “What?  Logan, do you know -”

“Yeah, I do,” he interrupted. “You let go of me, damn it. That’s an order. Giles, hold the field as long as you can. C’mon Kitty, do your thing.” And he’d barely finished saying that before taking a deep breath and running towards the chimera. She must have phased them out, as he didn’t feel the magical field Giles was projecting, and while the chimera opened its mouth to swallow them up, he didn’t feel that either.

If this didn’t work, he’d feel like the world’s biggest idiot. But at least there was a decent chance he might not live long enough to be truly humiliated.

****

“Is he letting that thing eat him?” John asked, still sending out flames against the chimera. Actually it was the same single stream of flame, kept in constant roaring life, near his hands but never actually touching them. Giles thought it was fascinating on a basic level, but he didn’t have time for a good visual scan, because it felt like he was vomiting up his very life force to hold this thing back. He was getting dizzy, and he was sweating so much he was half convinced he was melting.

“Not exactly,” Giles replied, trying hard to focus and ignore the vertigo. He'd figured out what Logan had planned the second he grabbed Kitty’s hand, but he didn’t know if it would work. Chimeras weren’t native to this plain, and not much was known about them, except they were vicious demons that would eat anything and anyone in their path and were extraordinarily difficult to kill or contain. All the Watchers tomes said about them was basically if you ever encountered one, run, because it was better to die pretending to do something. Still, he had to credit Logan for trying, even if it did end with him being digested by a demon. Could it eat adamantium?

Kitty appeared out the other side of the thing, but she was barely visible, and must have remained intangible, as the chimera thrashed against the spell he was using, and she’d have been crushed if she was solid.  She came back to them, looking stricken. “Did I kill him?  Do you think I killed him?”

“Logan killed himself,” John told her. “You had nothin’ to do with it.”  A cold but wholly accurate assessment.

The ground felt like it was shifting under Logan's feet, and his vision was tunneling, starting to become a bright point. And that’s when the chimera made a funny noise.

Now he didn’t know what a chimera sounded like, so he couldn’t say for certain that it was funny, it just sounded strange. Sort of like a wet burp, and then it began thrashing in earnest, crashing up against the walls of the subway so violently brick dust rained down on them. There was a thick, wet noise, and claws popped through its skin somewhere in the midsection of its body and ripped down like a zipper. Logan stuck his head out and gulped in air before continuing to tear the thing to pieces from the inside out. Giles had already dropped the field, mainly because he had to. He had to lean against the tunnel wall to stay on his feet.

“Holy shit!” John exclaimed, jumping back. Blood that smelled like a charnel house splattered the far walls, and tissue as dense and rubbery as truck tires flew around in chaotic spurts.

Giles felt Kitty latch onto his arm, clearly alarmed, but also trying to support him. “Are you all right?”

He really wasn’t sure how to answer that question. He considered and discarded several potential answers before deciding on, “I’m fine.” Sometimes the blandest answer saved a ton of explanation.

Finally there was a huge wet plop, and Logan emerged from the broken center of the beast, covered in gore, shoulders hunched and hands hanging loosely at his sides. For very good reason.

It wasn’t just gore he was dripping but digestive acid, which bubbled when it splashed on the ground. That was why his hair and his clothes appeared to be missing, and metal glinted silver where his fingertips should have been. Much of his skin appeared red, but only because it was actually eaten away, and in fact a few of the darker patches were exposed muscles. Some of his skin was visibly growing back, but not all of it, not yet. Giles had no idea how he was standing up; he must have been in excruciating pain.  Stomach acid was one of the most corrosive liquids around, even when it wasn’t demonic.

“Oh my god,” Kitty gasped, gagging slightly.

“Is it dead?” Logan rasped. His voice sounded raw and wrong, suggesting that acid had damaged his vocal cords at some point and they hadn’t completely healed yet. It looked like his eyes were just finishing the healing process.

Giles pushed himself off the wall and looked at what was left of the chimera. It wasn’t completely cut in half, but enough of it was that it wasn’t healing, and it certainly wasn’t moving. It was possible it could heal, he supposed, but it would take ages. It would most likely be hit by a subway train before that could happen. “If it’s not, it’s wishing it was.”

Logan gave a single nod of acknowledgement, not looking at him, resolutely staring at the far wall. For a single second he thought maybe that it was embarrassment, but no, Logan never seemed bothered by nudity or ashamed of extreme violence. Giles realized he was just trying to hold his composure together, trying very hard not to scream.  He’d just bathed in acid and was missing an awful lot of his skin; it was understandable.

“See?” John said. “This kinda shit is exactly why I never wanted to fight him.”

“I will never watch 'Alien' the same way again,” Kitty said, looking at the gaping wound where the beast’s stomach used to be, a hand over her mouth.

“Dude, should we … do we need to wrestle you up some clothes or somethin‘?” John asked, looking at Logan sidelong.  Giles wasn’t sure if he just didn’t want to see Logan naked, or if he didn’t want to see him naked and partially skinned. It was a disturbing sight. Well, not the naked part alone, unless you were a rather insecure man.

“I think I have enough in me for one more teleport,” Giles lied. One more teleportation spell would probably knock him out, but the truth was they had to get out of here now. Yes, the watchdog demon was now dead or as good as dead, but there was still the problem that he was dealing with one powerful sorcerer or a group of them, and they had to know they were here now.  That, and all the noise would bring regular authorities - police - to the scene.

“But what about the girl?” John asked. “Weren’t we here to rescue her?”  He wasn’t so much gung-ho to rescue her as obviously confused.

“We’re coming back,” Logan rumbled, his voice a bit better, but still more gravelly than it usually was.  It made it sound ominous, but then again it was.

When they came back, they were bringing a fucking army.

****

Giles kindly teleported them back to the mansion and landed in a hallway, not far from Logan’s room. He noticed Giles passed out the second they materialized, but he expected that, so he wasn’t surprised. Giles looked sweaty and pale, like splotchy oatmeal, and figured he’d pushed himself beyond his limits.  He definitely knew the feeling.

He left John and Kitty to deal with it as he went to his room and ducked into his bathroom, grabbing a towel and shoving it in his mouth before screaming. The funny thing was, when his dermal layers were originally eaten away, it only hurt for a moment - when the nerves were destroyed, there was no pain no matter how much flesh and muscle mass he lost subsequently. He felt weird, he knew his body was being eaten away and he was going into shock, and he was on the verge of some synaptic failure, but he also knew if he passed out he was dead (or, as Giles said, he would wish he was dead).  He bulled through it, and it wasn’t so bad.

But then his nerve endings started to heal, grow back along with his muscles and skin. There was no word for the pain. Agony seemed far too anemic a term. He felt like he was on fire, burning from the inside out, and the more he healed the worse it got.  His skin was still exposed in several areas, and air on naked nerves hurt like broken glass being vigorously scrubbed into an infected wound. It even hurt to scream, as his vocal cords hadn’t totally healed yet either. Tears of pain trailed over raw skin, and the salt in them burned him, causing even more pain. There was no way to win here. He wished he would pass out, but he knew that wasn’t in the cards. He never seemed to pass out when he wanted to.

He decided to step under the shower and wash the stinking blood and remaining acid off, even though the water pelting down on him hurt too. Good thing he still had the towel to scream into. He sat in the corner of the tub and watched the water, tinged pink with his blood, swirl down the drain. He tried to make it a Zen exercise, tried to focus on it and distance himself from his body.

Eventually he got numb to the pain, as he thought he would, but the water was getting cold. He got out gingerly and wrapped a towel around himself, looking at himself in the mirror. The hair on his head was already starting to grow back, it looked like he had a severe buzz cut, his hair more a suggestion than a reality, and he had the beginning shadow of some stubble on his face. Good - he looked really funny bald. Not all his skin had healed yet, but he had most of his fingertips and toes back.

He went out into his room and stopped short, as there was a woman there he’d never seen before. She was petite, maybe five four in height, no more than a hundred and forty pounds, somewhere in her early thirties, with a dark complexion and sloe-eyed beauty that suggested she was of Middle Eastern origin.  Her glossy black hair was cut in a very short bob, and she was wearing a white coat that gave away her status here. “You’re the new doctor.” It wasn’t a question.

She dipped her head once. “Shaheen Khoury.” She had a vaguely French accent. Algerian? “Your bloody footprints seemed to indicate you needed help.”

“I gotta healing factor, I’ll be okay eventually.”

“I can help,” she said, and stared at him in an oddly intense way.

He was about to ask her what her problem was when he felt his skin crawling.  Looking down at his arm, he saw the skin seemed to be growling back faster than normal.  He watched one of his fingertips reconstruct itself in record time.  “How’re you doing that?”

She relented in her intense stare, and admitted, “It’s my utterly useless mutant power. I can increase the intensity of other mutant’s powers. I knew I was positive for the X gene, but I used to think I had it with no actual abilities until I came here.” She shrugged and grimaced in embarrassment. “I must say, I still feel a bit cheated. But at least I don’t feel pain, and there’s that possible immortality thing.” She paused very briefly. “Are there any painkillers that work on you at all?”

“Um … if you got ketamine, you could give me an overdose. It might make me feel okay for a couple minutes. Are you really immortal?”

Again he got the shrug. “Preliminary tests indicate my cells have stopped aging. I don’t know if I have any ketamine. How do you feel about Oxycontin?”

She seemed very low key and blasé about everything; a female Vulcan. Actually, he found that kind of nice. “That’s an opioid, right? I’m pretty immune to most of ‘em.”

“Well, we can try it. I’ll find the strongest dose I can and double it. You can’t die from a drug overdose, can you?”

“Haven’t yet.  So probably not.”

“Okay then. Be right back.”

“How’s Giles?”

She paused by the door. “Exhausted, probably dehydrated, but he should be fine.  Did you really allow yourself to be eaten by a big sewer monster?”

That was presumably what John or Kitty said.  It sounded more like John. “It was in the subway, actually.”

She looked at him impassively, then nodded, as if that confirmed her suspicion. “Keep that up, and you’ll lose your shot at immortality. Not that I blame you. You probably should increase your fluid intake, but try to make at least half of it non-alcoholic.” And with that she left the room as abruptly and mysteriously as she had entered it.  Odd woman.  He could grow to like her.

He got dressed quickly, just throwing on some jeans, and was pulling on a t-shirt when there was a knock at his door. “Yeah.” He was expecting Shaheen with the drugs, but it was Storm who came in, and did a double-take looking at him. He grimaced, saying, “I know, I look funny with short hair. It’ll grow back in a few hours.”

“You were really digested?”

“Partly. I started cutting my way out as soon as I got solid.  I was holding my breath, y’know.  Needed to get air.  Figured I had under a minute to get air and get out of the acid before I was totally fucked.”

Storm’s look continued to be one of utter disbelief. “And that was plan A?”

It was his turn to echo Shaheen’s disinterested shrug. “Didn’t have a lot of time. It was do somethin’ drastic or have it kill a lot of people.”

“But you didn’t know if it would be vulnerable inside its skin. What if you were wrong?”

Again, he could only shrug. “Then maybe I bought a minute or two for the others. I had to try somethin'. ”

Storm pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed impatiently. “You are the craziest son of a bitch I have ever met.”

“I get that a lot.”

She gave him an odd look that was half stern and half kind, like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to pat him on the back or pimp slap him across the parking lot. That too was something he got a lot. She shook her head. “What am I going to do with you?” He was about to answer, but she held up her hand and said, “That was rhetorical. Giles is conscious and he wants to talk to you. He said he needs to do something, but since he can't stand up at the moment without passing out, he says he needs you to do it. Which sounds pretty ominous.”

“Prob’ly is.” Well, there was no sense in hiding it from her, especially since she’d worked most of it out herself already.

She smirked at his admission. “So now you’re going to be honest. Are you sure you’re up to this?  Don’t be macho, you just got half eaten by a chimera.”

“I’m good. Let’s go.” That disbelieving look returned to her dark blue eyes again. “Really, I am. The Doc helped.” His pain was down to a very tolerable level, and most of his skin was back. Oh, he could feel a patch missing on his back, but it was covered with the shirt.

She seemed to reluctantly concede the point, but he could tell she hadn’t wanted to. She turned her back to him, her hand on the doorknob, and seemed to pause for an excessive amount of time. Then she said, in a voice so low he could barely hear her, “I don’t hate you, Logan. Jean loved you; I could never hate you.” As soon as she finished the sentence she was out the door and gone. Was it to avoid discussing it further, or to give him a moment to recover? He didn’t know and didn’t care, as her words stung him for a moment. Had Jean told her that, or was she just guessing? He knew they'd been close, he just didn’t know how close.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over his dresser, his strangely naked face displaying a bleak sort of hurt with no hair to hide it behind.  He frowned at himself. “You can take acid burns but you can’t take a broken heart? Yer a fuckin’ pussy.”

It was what he needed to hear right now, as bizarre as it was. Affecting a slightly disgruntled expression, he headed out after Storm.