Fic: Another Kissing Game (X-23) - R
Title: Another Kissing Game
Author: eva_roisin
Characters: X-23, Miss Sinister, Wolverine, Hellion, Domino, New X-Men
Pairing: This is not a pairing fic, but it contains references to Laura/Claudine (non-con) and Laura/Julian
Books: X-23, X-Force (most specifically X-23 #6 and #2)
Rating: R
Genre: Angst, general
Summary: While in Miss Sinister’s laboratory, Laura remembers the people who matter most to her.
Warnings: non-graphic non-con, assault, self-harm
Another Kissing Game
1. Julian
This never happened.
It’s not happening, Laura thinks, strapped down in the chair. She looks down at her arm that Claudine gouged just seconds ago. There’s no proof. Her arm is healed now, good as new, and she has no evidence of having been hurt except the drying blood, which will flake off when it means to. Laura’s watched her own self-inflicted cuts heal dozens of times and right now her body doesn’t let her down. Her skin closes the way it always does, not even leaving a notch or the promise of a scar. The pain hangs on a little longer, like an unpleasant memory, and then the fear sinks in. Claudine hurt her, and now she plans to do worse.
Claudine is readying her laboratory. Her crude machines are flickering to life.
Does it matter if there’s no evidence? No other question-perhaps apart from the question of the soul-occupies Laura so much. She watches as Claudine prepares her equipment, poised in front of the computer. She jabs at the keys like someone who never learned to type properly and Laura once again wonders who made this woman, where she came from. Claudine is like her in some ways, but not in others. She was made, but not made in a facility.
Gambit, please come. Please hurry. Please come help me before it begins. She wants to cry out.
Claudine looks at her as if sensing that she’s trying to summon someone. “Relax,” she says.
Laura is once again helpless and strapped down-the subject of someone’s experiment.
Gambit, please. She wishes she was another type of person, a person who could make things happen with her mind.
Claudine smiles and the smile is forced and not at all pleasant. She doesn’t want to wait anymore. She doesn’t want to pretend to be something she’s not: nice. “Sorry-this thing is slow. It’ll just be a few more minutes before we’re ready. If it’s any comfort, I can promise you that you won’t feel much pain with this procedure. Unless you want to. And if that’s the case, I think I can accommodate you.”
Laura stares at the ceiling. She tries not to tense, tries to remember what Logan taught her about suppressing fear. She knows she smells like fear, sweaty and stale, too many quick breaths. Her armpits are damp. She doesn’t look down, but she knows dampness, knows the darkening of her shirt. “I am not afraid of pain,” she says-more to herself than to Claudine.
“I know,” Claudine says. “It’s why I’m looking forward to this body. Why I already love it so much.”
Laura glances down at her arm, at the cut now completely healed. Her knuckles are white, fingers clenching the armrest. She forces herself to look at Claudine’s face.
“I love you,” Claudine says, and her breath catches a little. Excitement, Laura thinks. Maybe fear? But Laura knows the smell of fear, and this isn’t fear. Anticipation. Desire. Something in between. “Well, not because I really love you. I love your ignorance about life. It’s to be admired.” She takes off her helmet and approaches Laura again, standing over her chair. She crouches down.
Laura stares straight ahead, pretending not to know what’s going to happen next-she wishes she was another girl, a girl who didn’t know what was coming. When Claudine touches her cheek and then kisses the corner of her mouth, Laura tells herself that it’s not really happening. It’s just happening to her body, and because it’s her body, no one will ever know.
***
A game. A game where you kissed people you didn’t really love. A playing card was passed between people by mouth. A card you couldn’t touch with your hands. You pressed the card to your lips and inhaled. And then another person pressed her lips to the card and inhaled as you breathed out. And this continued with many other people. To drop the card-to exhale when you should have inhaled and to let your lips touch another person’s-was to lose. To lose was to drink more. Laura did not lose this game-but then again, she did not lose any game. She got the card from Cessily and gave it to David and inhaled their breath as though it was her own.
They sat in Nori’s bedroom. They drank cheap beer. Victor got it from his friend in the city. There was a bottle of wine-deep, red, expensive-and no one wanted to tell Laura where they got it.
“Oh God, you’re not going to tell on us, are you?” Santo said.
“She won’t tell,” Nori said quickly, tucking a wisp of hair behind her ears. “Laura’s cool. Now, thank God Sooraya’s not here.”
“Oh, that’s not nice,” Victor said, but without any spite or passion. He leaned back against the wall, legs crossed.
Laura wouldn’t tell. To tell something was to tell everything, to get caught once was to get caught always. She imagined herself alone in Ms. Frost’s office, and Ms. Frost would say, “And what else, Laura? What else do you have to say?” And what if Laura couldn’t contain herself; what if she said something about the team? Everything would be over, and Logan would be in trouble, and Mr. Summers, and the rest of the team. Everyone would know everything they had ever done-Josh, Warren, Jimmy, Rahne. She wasn’t keeping the secret for her but for them. You can’t tell anybody anything, Logan said. Silence is best. Tell one person one little detail about where we were last night, and suddenly nothing fits your story, and everything’s out of the bag. Laura understood and obeyed.
Another thing Logan told her: If you never lie, you never have to remember anything. But this made no sense. All they did was lie. There was so much to remember.
Her friends didn’t know about her-she knew they didn’t know because she could read their faces. They didn’t look at her for longer or shorter periods of time than they did before, and when they asked her where she was and she told them the lie that Logan had instructed her to tell-that she was studying late at the library downtown, or that she was helping Logan with something special-they didn’t ask. Not even Cessily. People liked simple answers, Laura thought. People accepted her explanations and smiled and went back to thinking about themselves.
It should have been more difficult to keep the secret. Laura suspected it was more difficult for Josh and Jimmy. But Laura was quiet-and she found that staying quiet was easy. Unlike Josh or Jimmy, she didn’t have to confide in anyone. She wasn’t expected to disclose things to close friends or a significant other. She wasn’t accountable to anyone.
Now Laura looked at Nori and didn’t hesitate or blink. “I won’t tell anyone.”
But Cessily was the one who replied. “We got the wine from Ms. Frost’s office,” she said. “She left it unattended. It was in a fruit basket of some kind.”
“A fruit basket she got from Tony Stark,” Nori said, grinning and looking uncharacteristically impish.
“Christ, Nori,” Julian said. He stood over them and his hair fell in his face. “Like she’s not going to miss that. Shit. We might as well all schedule ourselves for year-long detention now. I hope you enjoyed your last trip to the city.”
“We’ll get rid of the bottle,” Nori said. “She won’t find it. And if she can’t find it with us, she can’t prove that we did anything.”
“Absence of proof isn’t proof of absence,” Victor rattled off. Then he laughed, drunk and happy. “Especially not for Emma Frost. She doesn’t need proof. She already knows. Might as well live it up tonight. Circle up.”
Cessily crouched on her knees.
Victor started fiddling with the bottle. He placed his hand on its neck. Positioned it away from himself and gave it a good spin. Laura recognized this as another game, another kissing game. This game was more straightforward than the card game but more bizarre, and she never quite understood its logic. Why kiss someone you might not really want to kiss under normal circumstances? Why kiss someone at all? Laura was both mystified and intrigued by kissing, by how it was something people liked to do for its own sake. Laura secretly thought that kissing was unsettling-if it didn’t lead to sex, it was pointless, and if it did, then it was part of the act itself. And sex was another thing she didn’t talk about. She knew more than other kids her age, and though she wasn’t quite sure how much they knew about her-or about how much they knew about sex in general-she now understood that they needed to buy into the fiction that they all had almost-equal levels of knowledge. Those who were virgins exaggerated their experience, and those who had slept with more than one person pretended that they hadn’t. One day she had been at the pool with Nori and Alani, and they had been in bikinis, and Santo had been there, and he cracked a joke about someone getting a facial. “Oh, go to hell,” Nori said, but she wasn’t angry, just annoyed, and Santo laughed. Laura just stared straight ahead at the trees. She didn’t even dare to look down at herself, at her squarish, compact body for fear that it might betray her-and she understood, just tenuously-that she could never be the sort of girl who got to be annoyed, not angry, about a joke.
The bottle spun.
“No powers, Julian,” Nori warned. “Let the bottle stop where it stops.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Julian said, sitting back in Nori’s beanbag chair with his hands behind his head. “There’s nobody here I’m, like, jonesing to kiss. Least of all you, Nori.”
Nori blew her bangs out of her eyes.
“I think you protest too much, Julian,” Victor said. The bottle stopped spinning. It pointed to the place where no one sat. It pointed to the door.
“Well, that’s a sign,” Santo said. “The universe does not want you to kiss anyone, Victor. Why are we even doing this? How twelve are we?”
Victor spun the bottle again. “I’m doing it for you, Santo. Because this is the only action you get.”
“Ouch,” Nori said.
“No, this is the only action you get. This gives you an excuse to grope everyone you stare at all day.”
“I don’t need an excuse.”
Julian laughed lightly. Then bottle stopped spinning, its opening pointing in the direction of the bean bag chair. Almost right at him. Not quite.
He rose to his feet and stepped into the circle, arms outstretched. “C’mon, Victor. Let’s show these people how it’s done.”
Victor jumped up, his socks sliding along the carpet. He skidded into Julian’s arms. Julian grabbed hold of him and tilted him back, kissing him on the mouth, no hesitation.
Everyone laughed. Someone made a whooping noise. “Yeah,” Santo said. “Make your mothers proud.”
The kiss lasted for five seconds. When Julian pulled Victor upright again and let him go, Victor was grinning but not blushing. (Laura was certain she was blushing. She reminded herself to breathe normally and hoped no one was looking at her to chart her reaction. This would pass. This whole thing was just a game.)
Victor went back to his place in the circle and sat down, and Laura could not tell whether he was smug or triumphant or just drunk. He raised his beer can to Julian.
“That’s the highlight of your month, huh Victor?” Santo said.
“Or yours,” Victor replied.
Nori tucked her legs beneath her. “Julian, it’s your spin.”
Laura watched as Julian crouched between David and Cessily and grabbed the middle of the bottle. She tried to make herself sit very still, hoping that she might draw the opening of the bottle to her by willing it. She took a sip of beer and thought about Logan-wondered why he drank so much when it was so hard to get drunk on beer and it tasted so bad. Everyone around her was boozy and a little wasted, but she was not. She thought about Julian, about how easy it was for him to kiss Victor. Other boys would have protested, or they would have pretended to protest. David, for instance. Or Josh, who wasn’t there. But Julian could kiss Victor, and he could kiss him meaningfully, and it didn’t mean anything. Or it was funny. Because he was Julian, he could do whatever he wanted.
The bottle stopped at Cessily.
Laura could feel Cessily tense. She tried not to tense herself, tried to remember what Logan taught her about suppressing undesirable emotions, about pushing past pain. She tried to ignore the tiny twinge of her heart.
Cessily turned to face Julian and crouched on her knees. They traded a quick kiss and then it was over, and then she turned back and sat down.
Cessily spun the bottle and it stopped Laura. Laura leaned into the circle, expecting another quick kiss, but Cessily held on a little longer this time and when she pulled back she looked down and then sat back, her hair in her eyes.
Laura's turn. She got Victor and his kiss was confident and impersonal, and he even slipped her a little tongue. He was good at kissing.
The evening continued, and Laura kissed most of the others at some point-most everyone except Julian. She wondered if that happened by design or chance. It didn’t seem to matter; what happened happened. She couldn’t get what she wanted by willing it; she knew this. In the end, Nori passed out on her bed and Julian in the bean bag chair, and some of the others curled up on the floor. Laura slipped out of the room, sober and alert. She went back to her own room and to bed.
***
Right now Laura wants to be woozy and drunk. Instead she is awake and too alert and too alive.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Claudine whispers. Her whisper is closer than her kiss.
Laura tries not to twist in her chair.
Claudine’s lips are on her neck, her hand on her abdomen, stroking her waist. She repeats her question, and Laura knows what she’s really asking: Are you a virgin? Do you come easily?
Claudine rises over her. Laura turns her head and waits for Claudine to touch her again. She’ll try not to flinch this time, she promises. She even hears herself say something to this effect aloud. Claudine’s hands are cold, but she won’t flinch-not when Claudine touches her, slipping one hand under her shirt and the other down her pants. She wants to know Laura’s body before it becomes her own. In a few minutes, she will be inside her.
Julian- Laura thinks. She closes her eyes, not wanting to think of him, but already he is there. She remembers the time she sneaked down to the gym to watch him doing physical therapy with Madison. He didn’t know she was there, and she felt bad about that now-felt that perhaps she had invaded his privacy. They threw a ball back and forth, and Julian kept trying to catch it with his stumps. (That’s how he referred to them. Let’s face facts, she overheard him say to Alani once. I’m a cripple. He was trying to be upbeat but his voice had an edge.) He kept dropping the ball. Sometimes he used his powers. “No powers,” Madison said, “you’ll never learn if you keep using them,” and Julian said, “Fuck you.” Finally he picked up the ball with both stumps and let it drop. He walked away. “Oh, come on, Julian,” Madison said, and Julian headed for the door.
In English class they were scheduled to read a story about a black man who was burned in a fire and lost his face. Miss Frost changed the schedule so that they read Maggie, A Girl of the Streets instead.
And now she thinks of it-of the last time she saw Julian. Not the very last time-not the time she looked in on him while he was sleeping-but right before she went to hell, right before Logan hurt him. When he was trying to keep her from hurting Logan. I’m doing this for you, Julian had said. And how reasonable he’d seemed-and how irrational and chaotic she must have looked to him. What she couldn’t bring herself to tell him: Logan-or what looked like Logan-had touched her. How could she make Julian understand this? What words could she say? She didn’t even understand it herself-the proximity of Logan’s touch, the way someone’s hands could be something you loved, and then something you hated. Wolverine would never. He would never do to me what other people-
She couldn’t bring herself to articulate what had just happened. He hadn’t really touched her. But now he had. Yes, he had, just like everyone else, but it wasn’t him. Or it was his body that had touched her, but not his soul. Like everything, his touch was the memory of what had already happened to her in a previous life, and the fear of what might come next.
2. Domino
An evening in Colorado, just like any other evening. The TV was on low and Laura was sitting at the table doing her math homework. X-Force had been busy lately, but Logan insisted that she keep up with her schoolwork. In fact, that was part of the deal they had all made-she, Logan, and Cyclops. “She needs to keep up with her schoolwork,” he told Cyclops. “The kid falls behind, she’s off the team.” Cyclops agreed that that was fair. He said he’d tutor her on his own time if she needed it.
She didn’t. Between missions she was diligent. She opened her books and got her work done. She memorized dates and locations. She read Beowulf in one sitting. She did her math homework and wrote papers on Warren’s laptop computer. “Ugh, how can you stand it?” Josh said. He said that he had no energy left after the missions, and he needed to call Alani besides. Laura offered to help him with math-but this usually meant that she ended up doing most of their calculus problems herself.
On this night, Josh had already gone to bed and left her doing the homework alone. She knew that the next day he would wrestle the answers from her, and she would pretend to be indignant and tell him that he was breaking the rules, but then she would leave her homework unattended and he would copy the answers that he needed.
In Colorado she felt alone, even though she wasn’t. Logan wasn’t there that day, true, but the others were. But Josh was going to bed earlier and earlier, and Jimmy didn’t like to be disturbed when he was watching the TV, which was most of the time. Warren occupied himself elsewhere. And if she had been the sort of person who liked to talk to other people, she wasn’t sure that she would have talked to him anyway. He seemed to have his own life, his own adult-like concerns. He lived in a world that had nothing to do with her.
Then she heard it: A muffled noise. The quiet hastening of tears. She considered ducking into the common room and telling Jimmy to turn off the TV so that he might also hear the sound. Instead, she paused in her work and then slowly rose from the table. The noise didn’t come again. Still, she knew what she had heard. She needed to know what was happening. She pointed herself in the direction of the noise and left the dining room.
Warren’s house was mazelike and big. Laura picked up the scent and followed it past the racquetball court and to the locker room. She paused outside, her hand on the door. Then she pushed it open.
Domino sat on the bench alongside the wall. She was hunched over, her legs tucked under the bench, and one of her pant legs was rolled up. Her shirt was torn, shoulder exposed. She was holding a compress to her upper arm. “Close that door,” she said without looking up.
“You’re injured,” Laura said. “You were crying.” She stepped inside and let the door close behind her. “Are you in pain?”
Dom’s head snapped up. She looked at Laura, considering her, and her eyes were red-rimmed but not wet. “What does it look like to you?”
Her tone was neither hostile nor sarcastic, Laura thought. It was neutral. “I will get Josh,” she said. But she didn’t move.
“Don’t get Josh,” Dom said, and again her tone was flat, her words tossed off. She stood from the bench but kept the compress pressed against her arm. In front of the mirror, she peeled away the bandage and looked at the wound’s reflection. It was an angry gash and it bled. “Look, it’s just a flesh wound.” She turned to face to Laura. “Besides, every scar is a triumph.”
“What happened-”
“Simple recon mission. Got complicated.” She leaned against the sink.
Laura once again felt the need to move toward the door. “We must tell Logan. You might have been followed.”
Dom’s mood shifted. She turned her body to look at Laura, and Laura could tell at once that she was exasperated. Dom was often unsympathetic to her, but her transparency was something Laura appreciated. With most people, conversations were about deflection and refraction, about saying I want you to think this about me, so I need to say this, or I’m only being nice to you because it’s what’s expected of me, but Dom was direct and forthcoming, if occasionally sarcastic. “Logan was the one who sent me, so don’t waste your time being all suspicious. You can ask him yourself when he gets back, and God knows when that’ll be. And as for being followed? I wasn’t.”
“But if you were followed, you wouldn’t know for sure.”
Dom’s expression was stiff, and then she chortled. “Give me some goddamn credit. I’ve been doing this longer than you've been alive.” She slumped against the sink and stared at her own reflection in the mirror.
“I did not hear about any recon mission.”
“Yeah. Exactly.” She smiled, but the smile turned into a grimace. “That must really burn you up, huh? God, look at you. All keyed up. The things you must be thinking right now. You hate to miss a fight, huh?” She turned away from the mirror and then limped back to the bench and sat down. Looked up at Laura again. “You know where we keep the pain pills, right?”
Laura nodded, and her gaze slid away from Dom’s. She slipped out of the locker room.
In the closet she found the lockbox with the pain killers. Keeping the pills in a lockbox was pointless because the box was unlocked-Logan said that he didn’t trust them not to become addicted, but that he seriously didn’t have time to baby-sit. “Use the shit wisely,” he said. “You get hooked on oxy, that’s on you. I ain’t helping you out.”
Laura took the bottle of Vicodin out of the box. She shook three pills into her hands and put the bottle back.
When she returned to the locker room, Dom was wrapping a strip of gauze around her upper arm. Her hand shook. Laura fetched a glass of water from the sink and brought it to Dom.
Dom swallowed all three pills. Then she closed her eyes and gripped the bench with both hands. She paused. “I hope I don’t puke that shit up.”
Laura sat down on the bench next to her but far enough away so that they weren’t close. “You think you might vomit?”
“I’d say I’ve got a fifty percent chance.” She paused. “You can go now. You can take your creepy little stare back to the kitchen. Or get me a beer or something.”
Dom often called her creepy. Laura had learned not to take it personally-not that she would have been offended anyway. Underneath Dom’s words was affection. Admiration maybe. Sometimes in the mornings they played racquetball together. Dom was good at it. “Boy, you’re just thinking about killing me right now, aren’t you?” Dom said once, almost smiling. “You hate to lose. But losing’s a part of winning.”
Now Laura sat back and thought about her homework, about how pissed Josh would be tomorrow morning when he tried to copy her answers and couldn’t find any. She knew that Dom shouldn’t be alone. “Would you like me to get Warren?”
“Yeah, I’d love that. I’d love it if you went and called Scott Summers on the phone, too.” She almost laughed. “Or, say, Hank McCoy. Or Emma Frost. These are the people I turn to during my dark moments. The goddamn X-Men.”
“You’re having a dark moment?” As soon as she said that, she regretted it. She just wanted to know how Dom defined “dark moment” because she wanted to compare it to her own. She knew that Josh had dark moments-he certainly listened to enough sad music-and though Logan had once baffled her, she now intuitively understood his moods. But she wasn’t quite sure about Dom. Dom was like no one else she’d ever met. She didn’t take things personally.
Dom leaned back against the wall, her eyes closed. “I’m about to have a moment of unbearable lightness. Let’s just wait a few more minutes.”
Laura sat back. She wanted to ask if Dom missed Logan. But she already knew the answer. Laura missed him too. But she knew that Dom’s desire for Logan was sexual, not familial, not even personal. In that sense, Dom’s interest in him was less complicated. Laura wished that Logan was around more, but other than that, she was not quite sure what she herself wanted from him.
Beside her, Dom relaxed. She reached up to wipe her eye with the back of her hand, and Laura realized that she was crying again. Worse now. Harder.
“Are you still in pain?” Laura asked. She put her hands on the bench to get up. She would have to get someone else to help Dom-Jimmy maybe.
Dom opened her eyes and tilted her face toward Laura. Her expression had softened, but she didn’t make eye contact. Her pupils were dilated. She looked past her, looked to the corner of the room. Then she reached out and touched Laura’s wrist. “Sorry I . . . . It’s just stress.”
Laura understood. She realized that Dom was doing what Laura thought she usually didn’t: she was masking what she wanted. What Dom was saying was this: Don’t leave me. Don’t tell anyone you saw me like this. This never happened.
“I know,” Laura said.
***
In front of her door, Dom stopped and turned to look at Laura. “Do you want to stay in my room tonight?”
No, Laura thought. She did not want to. But Dom was deflecting again. I don’t want to be alone, she was saying. Please stay with me.
“Yes,” Laura said. “I will stay in your room.”
In Dom’s room, Laura pulled the covers from the bed. Dom steadied herself near her dresser. With her back turned toward Laura, she stripped off her clothes and reached into her drawer for a pair of shorts and a shirt. She left her bloody clothes in a pile and nudged them away from her with her foot.
“What are you doing?” she asked when she turned around again.
Laura was sitting down on the floor next to the bed, and only then did Laura understand what she’d known all along: that Dom wanted her to sleep next to her.
Laura pulled back the covers on the other side of the bed and shuffled out of her shoes. Then she lay down on Dom’s sheets with her clothes on.
For a while neither of them spoke. Then Dom said, “Do you miss San Francisco?”
Laura thought. She knew that she should say yes, that most people would expect her to say yes because San Francisco was a place you were supposed to miss. And she was supposed to miss her friends. But she wondered how much they missed her. As more time went by, she understood that the person she had been at school did not really exist. She was not two halves of the same girl. She was one girl, this girl, and this girl was in X-Force.
But then there was this: Dom next to her. Dom reached over and touched her shoulder and slid closer, and Laura remembered what she’d never really forgotten-the touch of a woman who was not her mother but close enough. She wanted to curve her body so that they were closer. She wanted Dom to touch her hair, or put her arm around her waist, maybe.
Dom’s speech was slurred. “You should go.”
“Go?"
“I mean, go. Just get out of here. Forget Logan. Forget the team. Go as far away from other mutants as you can. Mutantkind is seriously a dark, black cloud of unhappy people. Trust me.” She laughed. “Go somewhere else and go get lost.”
Laura was quiet.
“You should stop doing this. You’re too good at it, and you’re getting better. Go to New York, maybe,” Dom said, and now her voice was gravelly and muffled. “No, not New York. Logan goes there too often.” Dom shifted toward her, touched her cheek against Laura’s shoulder. “I’m just saying. I mean, don’t listen to what I’m saying. I think this is a conversation I had once with someone else. Without you. I mean, someone had it with me when I was younger. I mean, I can’t remember.”
Laura almost said, “I don’t want to go.” But what she wanted to say was I don’t want to go without you. And then she wanted Dom to say, I don’t want to be without you either, Laura. Or: I can’t stand the idea of not having you around.
But Dom would never say that. She definitely wouldn’t say it now-she was already asleep. Her breathing was heavy, her heart rate slow. Laura was left with a thought that she’d had before, but never so clearly: the knowledge that this would be over soon, one way or another. This-the team, this time-wouldn’t last forever. Someday in the future she would no longer get up in the morning and see Dom at breakfast or play her on the racquetball court. Someday they would no longer fight side by side. The worst part about this was that Dom probably would just move to another team-she might not even think about Laura except in passing, except to tell someone, Oh, I knew Logan’s little clone. The girl with the claws? Yeah, she’s his clone. They’re so much alike, it’s funny.
And since Dom had taken painkillers, she wouldn’t even remember this night well enough to discard it from her recollections.
When Laura awoke in the middle of the night, Dom’s hands were pressed against her back. She sat up and slid out of the bed and fumbled for the door.
3. Logan
The first thing she noticed about cotton candy was how light it was, how it disappeared inside her mouth. The second thing she noticed was the aftertaste. “I need something to drink,” she told Logan.
He tipped back his hat and looked at her. He was almost smiling.
“Soda,” she said.
“You’re thirsty?”
“Basically.”
“Soda with cotton candy? That’s a lot of sugar, darlin’. You should get something to cut the sugar first.” He stepped up to the hotdog stand. “We’ll split one.”
As she watched him pay the vendor, she thought about what he’d said to her before. I’d like to adopt you. We’re family. This was a day she’d remember, she thought. A great day, perhaps, because Logan had taken her somewhere to spend time with her, and he’d done so to ask her a question. He hadn’t asked the question back at Utopia or on the wharf. He’d taken her to a place that was just for her, a place she’d never been before. A place where people took their children.
She looked out into the crowd and watched the other people walk by. A boy held a gold fish in a plastic bag filled with water. A little girl, his sister maybe, watched him as she sipped a slushie. The people around her were loud, but not so loud that she couldn’t tune them out. Will I call you dad? she thought. She wanted to ask him this. But more than that, she wanted him to bring it up so that she would know for sure. Don’t call me Logan anymore. She felt something expand inside of her.
Logan turned back to her and handed her half of a hotdog. It was plain. His had mustard and relish. “You don’t want anything on yours, right?”
“No.”
He smiled, this time more broadly. “I thought not.” He put his hand on her back between her shoulder blades. Then he took his hand away and ate the half of his hotdog.
“So people come to these places a lot?” she asked, looking around.
“When the weather’s nice. Like, in the summer.”
She looked down at her hotdog and took a small bite. “Do you come here a lot?”
He laughed. “No, can’t say I do. Haven’t had much of a reason. When I was growing up-” He stopped and cleared his throat. “They had a thing called the World Fair.”
She waited for him to continue.
“Oh, I didn’t go,” he said. “But I saw pictures.” He cleared his throat again, and his voice got quiet. “The things you remember.”
When she finished eating, she looked down again at her stuffed bear. She knew it was childish to want a toy so much, and she knew she shouldn’t cuddle it in public, but she couldn’t help it.
“You want to ride the Ferris wheel?” Logan said.
She looked up at the gigantic rotating apparatus. “I do not understand the point of it. It doesn’t go fast and it’s predictable. It stops often to let people off.”
“That’s the point of it,” Logan said. “It’s to give you a chance to look at things. To give you some perspective. Plus, it gives you a chance to talk. If you’re with someone you want to talk to.”
Her stomach dropped a little. Logan wanted to talk. There was a lot between them that they hadn’t discussed. X-Force . . . the future they’d seen and the future they hadn’t . . . school . . . her classmates’ distrust of her. Everything happening back at Utopia was big and messy.
She hesitated, but Logan went forward. “Come on, X. I promise you’ll like it.”
He was right. Up in the air the breeze was cool and above the trees there was a certain clarity she hadn’t known before. She held her stuffed bear in her lap and looked out at the park and the city. She smiled. Logan talked to her, but he didn’t ask her things, and he didn’t say the things that she worried he would.
It was the greatest day, she thought, taking in the trees and the buildings. It the greatest day because Logan was there, and he had called her his family. But beyond that, it was perfect because they hadn’t talked about X-Force or the war, and nothing was fraught or disquieting. The sky was just as near as Logan. If her life had been a movie, this was the slow fade-out she would have chosen for the ending: the sunset, the birds flying beneath them, the arc of the world.
***
The park closed after dusk. She followed Logan past the turnstiles. “Where to now?” he said. “Well, I suppose we should be getting back.”
She tightened her arms around the bear. She foresaw the train ride back to the city, the inevitable ferry ride back to Utopia. She could smell that it was going to rain, and she could already imagine how raindrops would pockmark the smooth water of the bay.
“You know,” he said. He turned to her. “Maybe we shouldn’t be in such a hurry. Not like anybody’s expecting us. I got a sublet in the city. You want to see it? Maybe we could have dinner there. And then head back.”
“I would like that very much.”
At night the city came alive. She’d seen it before, but she was glad she was with Logan. She knew that people thought odd things about a girl who walked around alone at night, and even though Laura didn’t care what regular people thought, she was relieved to pass unnoticed-to not have to think about anything like that.
They took the BART and got off a few stops later. Logan’s apartment complex was a tall, stark building with squarish windows. He unlocked the front glass door with a key and led her down a carpeted hallway and up some stairs.
Logan stopped in front of a door. “This is it,” he said and put his key in the lock. Once they were inside, he flicked on the light.
Laura looked around and sniffed without thinking. She felt a momentary sense of disappointment, though she didn’t know why. She had a desire to go back and undo the trip to Logan’s apartment, to make a different decision when they were still at the park and everything was perfect. I’d like to go back to Utopia, she should have said. Home. Utopia was not her home, but seeing Logan’s apartment underlined a crucial fact: this was not her home, either.
Logan’s apartment was sloppy, with clothes strewn around and books stacked on the coffee table and scattered on the floor. The sofa was frayed, and a mess of sheets and blankets were balled up on one of the cushions.
“Sorry for the mess,” Logan said. “Hold on a sec. I’ll make a place to sit down. You want a glass of ice tea or something?” He picked up a stack of newspapers off the floor.
She looked down at the bear. Stuffing poked out of the hole in his head. She hadn’t realized that she was clutching him so tightly. “No, thank you.”
The apartment smelled mostly of Logan-of aftershave and deodorant and Logan’s distinct smell-but it also smelled faintly of a woman. There was perfume in the air, maybe lotion, and there was sex.
She sank slowly onto the sofa, the bear in her lap. She wasn’t upset that Logan had a girlfriend. (Perhaps he had many girlfriends, though she could smell only one.) She wasn’t even unsettled by what she didn’t know. What upset her was this: Logan lived another life that she didn’t know about-he lived more than a couple of lives.
Her friends at Utopia. Her friends were angry with her because of the same thing-because she had also lived another, secret life. But X-Force hadn’t seemed like so much of a choice at the time. X-Force had been necessary. But Logan’s other lives-all his secrets-were just a part of who he was. He wasn’t a member of the Avengers because he had to be. He chose his teams, his friends, his obligations.
And then she had a realization that felt both upsetting and obvious-perhaps upsetting because it was so obvious: After he adopted her, nothing would really change. Life would be just like before, but with one small difference: she would not be a part of X-Force. She would not be indispensable to one part of Logan’s life; she would be another girl for whom he felt responsible. She would have only Utopia and the friends who didn’t trust her; she would have her schoolwork, in which she was already falling behind. (Ironically, she had never gotten better grades than when she was with X-Force.) She realized all of a sudden how much she missed Dom, Dom who teased her. But the teasing was a form of recognition. Dom saw her for who she was. Logan did too-but Logan wanted her to be different.
As she thought about all of this, she realized that she was angry with herself for having these thoughts. This was a great day, a perfect day. Logan had offered to officially adopt her so that she wouldn’t be alone anymore. He wasn’t her father, and he hadn’t chosen the circumstances that had brought her into the world, but he was going to adopt her anyway. It was an especially generous thing for him to do, and it was going to cost him time and money. She understood that the appropriate response was gratitude, not envy or resentment.
Logan was bent over, scooping up his clothes. He paused and looked up at her. “Hey X. You okay?”
She glanced up and nodded.
“You hungry?”
“I could eat, but I am not very hungry.” What she wanted was for him to stop being so nice, so formal. She wanted him to stop offering her things to eat and drink. At Warren’s house, things had never been so formal (she ate when she wanted to, she made her own meals), and Logan had never been so nice.
“Well,” he said, straightening. He disappeared for a minute, putting his clothes and things in the other room. When he came back, he’d taken his hat off. He scratched the back of his head. “Got a pizza in the freezer. Or we could carry in Chinese or something.”
“Pizza is fine.”
“Pizza it is, then.” He sounded cheery and enthusiastic, but there was a hollowness in his tone.
He went into the kitchen. She heard him turn on the oven and pop the cap off a bottle. She heard the hiss. Then she smelled the beer. A few minutes later, she could smell something burning-old food left on the bottom of the oven, pizza crusts and fish sticks. She looked down again at the stuffed bear in her lap. She had loved the bear when she won it, but now she wondered if she might give it away. What would happen if she gave the bear to Julian? She couldn’t imagine giving it to him in front of other people. No, she would leave it by his doorway at night while he slept. Or maybe she would put it in his room when he wasn’t there.
“You know, you can put the TV on.”
Laura looked up. Logan stood in the doorway.
“Jesus, X,” he said. He crossed his arms and stared at her. “You’re not okay.”
“I am tired.” She paused. “The rides were exciting. I was not expecting them to be so exciting.”
He studied her. “Don’t lie,” he said, but his tone was not accusatory. She could tell that he was upset but not angry.
She rose from the sofa and set her bear down. She wanted to be alone for a minute. She needed to go into the bathroom. “I am tired.”
“C’mon Laura.” He shook his head. “We’ve always been straight with each other. Let’s not start bullshitting now.”
“I am not,” she said. She walked past Logan.
“X,” he said. He reached out to grab her but then changed his mind.
***
The truth stung. All these things that Logan was doing for her-the niceness, the adoption-were done out of guilt, perhaps. This was the worst realization of all. He felt bad about the things that had happened; he felt bad about X-Force. Adopting her-well, perhaps it was his one last effort to atone. Save her.
In the bathroom she put the toilet seat’s lid down and sat. Her leg twitched. Then she rolled up one sleeve and unsheathed a claw.
She could smell the crust burning. Logan should have already taken the pizza from the oven.
Outside, there was a shout in the street. Then a honk.
Her boots felt too tight. Maybe she should get another pair. (Maybe she wasn’t done growing yet.)
The curtains covering the window were musty and old. They needed to be cleaned. Replaced, maybe.
The first trickle of blood brought relief. Her leg stopped twitching. She was no longer anxious and nervous; she no longer needed to distract herself from her memories by focusing on the sounds and smells around her.
Her blood was leaking faster now; she needed something to stop it before it leaked onto her clothes. She looked for a towel. No, Logan would see a bloody towel. She reached for the roll of toilet paper even though she knew it wasn’t thick enough to soak up the blood. Too bad she had not thought to do this in the bathtub.
The doorknob rattled. Logan. Logan was calling to her. Then there was a crack.
She hurried to wipe up the blood with the toilet paper, but she knew that the act of hurrying was futile. Ceremonial, even. Logan pushed open the door.
“What-”
She didn’t have to look at him to know how horrified he was. She just had to feel him there.
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
She started to get up, but before she had a chance, he had grabbed her by the arms and pushed her against the wall next to the toilet. “Why are you doing this?”
She couldn’t catch her breath to speak.
“You need to stop it.” He shook her when he said stop it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why I am doing this.”
He stepped back and took two deep breaths. Looked at her. Then he looked away and shook his head in disgust. She could not tell if the disgust was for her or for himself-or for the situation. “Here,” he said. Calmer now. He reached down and under the sink and brought out a towel. “Here. Hold that . . . there.” He gestured to her.
She pressed the towel against her arm. “I heal quickly,” she murmured.
“That’s not the point!” Logan said.
She flinched but didn’t look up. Now she did not know what to say. This moment was so uncomfortable, so beyond either of them, but it felt familiar. She had displeased him again. As always. And this time she had displeased him directly. After every X-Force mission--every mission she completed successfully--she could sense his dissatisfaction with her. But this, this was worse.
Again, she felt the need to undo the day. She wished they had parted after the Ferris wheel.
She dabbed at the blood with a towel and sat down on the toilet again. She didn't dare look up. “If I didn’t do this, I would do something else.” She paused. “Something you wouldn’t like.”
He lunged for and grabbed her arm. “Don’t tell me what I would or wouldn’t like.”
His anger relieved her; it was something she could recognize, and it was better than his niceness. All the antagonism of their relationship was being brought to the surface.
He exhaled through his nose and put his hands on his hips. Then he stepped back. “You-” His voice faltered. When it came again, it was higher and softer. Unsure. “You do this all the time, don’t you?”
She didn’t look up.
“Your arm,” he said.
She remembered those hours in the infirmary when she had waited for it to grow back, Logan standing over her, asking what had happened, Nemesis laughing to himself, Cyclops hoping she wouldn’t ever tell or do anything or say anything to anyone. It grew back, she wanted to say, but she knew that this was not what Logan wanted to hear.
“You cut off your arm,” he said, “didn’t you? Jesus. You cut off your arm to get away, and you didn’t even feel it.”
Even though she had stopped bleeding, she pressed the towel tighter to her arm.
“Because you’d do anything. Anything, no matter the cost to yourself-because you just don’t care-” His voice broke and he looked away. He pointed his face at the wall and shook his head.
She still couldn’t look at him.
There was silence then. And although she was not the sort of person who felt a need to break silence, she decided to speak. “I did not cut off my arm, Logan. A member of the facility did. Kimura. She used a chainsaw to sever it from my body.”
Logan steadied himself against the sink. He closed his eyes and touched his forehead with his thumb. A crease formed between his eyes.
“She did this to torture me. I did not want to tell you because it didn’t seem relevant at the time.”
Logan was quiet. Then he wiped his left eye with the back of his hand.
“Once I was free, I took my arm to another part of the facility and cut out the claws. Then I burned it.”
Logan dropped his hand. “You burned it?”
“I incinerated it. They could not have it. They would have made more of me.” She stood from the toilet and drew closer to him, hoping that he would let her pass. Hoping that this would be the end of it.
He didn’t budge, but his gaze softened. He knew what she was trying to say.
“There cannot be more of me.”
“X.”
“No more of me, Logan. That would be a bad thing.” She remembered for a moment. “I think there will be more of me in the future. In fact, I know this.”
“You know this? How?”
“Deadpool told me.”
“Deadpool?”
“When we time traveled,” she said. “When we saw him, he said-“
“Wade’s full of shit.”
She looked down. Then, suddenly, Logan put his arm around her. “You know what it would be like,” she said, “to have more. You know what it would be like for me. Because you know what it is like for you.”
“It’s not like that,” he said. Against her he felt real and solid. He was crying, and she realized that she was crying too.
She squeezed her eyes closed and tried not to think.
“It’s not like that. It’s not. And there won’t be more, I promise.” Then he pulled away from her and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “There won’t be. And if there were-and this doesn’t matter because there won’t be-but if there were, it wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t be you. Just as you’re not me. We don’t share each other’s memories, darlin’.”
She could see the girls of the future, girls who were just like her, who looked and smelled like her. Logan didn't understand. Once again, her meaning had gotten lost. "I would have to take care of them. Look after them. Just as you look after me.”
He dropped his gaze. “I don’t though. Oh, X.” His face crumpled. “I’m sorry. I never should have-X-Force-I’ve been lousy.”
She wanted to tell him that her life with him hadn’t been so bad-at least not compared with the bad she could remember-and that she remembered mostly good things anyway. Instead she said, “The pizza’s burning.”
“Oh, damnit.” He wiped his eyes again and went to go see.
She followed him a few seconds later, but not before stopping by the sofa to pick up her stuffed bear. In the kitchen doorway, she leaned against the wall and watched as Logan took the pizza from the oven. “Damnit,” he said. The cheese was smoking. He put it on a plate and set it on the stove. “Totally fucking charred.” He wiped his eyes again, and Laura couldn’t tell if it was from the smoke or because he was still crying. “I’ll call for Chinese.”
“It’s okay that way. I don’t mind it burned.” She held the bear close to her chest. “I actually like it.”
He looked down at the pizza again. “You like the cheese brown.”
“And the crust black.”
He moved to the drawer to get a pizza cutter. “You like that bear, huh?”
She decided to make a confession. “I’m thinking of giving it to Julian.”
Logan turned around and peered at the hole in its head. “Oh, I don’t know if that’s a good idea, hon. He might take it the wrong way. How is Julian? Has he talked to you at all?”
She said nothing.
He turned again and began cutting the pizza. “Give him a little time. He’s been through a lot. Here.” He nodded at the table.
Laura slid into a chair. The kitchen was small and warm.
Logan brought her two slices of pizza on a plate and gestured toward the bear. “I think you should leave it here.” He steadied himself on her chair and touched her shoulder. Then he went back to the stove to get his own dinner. She waited for him to sit down before she started to eat.
.