Everyone Has It Figured Out but You - part 1 (R) Logan/Kurt; Logan/Daken
Title: Everyone Has It Figured Out but You
Author: eva_roisin
Fandom: X-Books
Characters: Logan, Kurt, Daken
Pairings: Logan/Kurt; Logan/Daken (non-con, dub-con)
Description: Hurt/comfort; angst.
Rating: R
Words: ~10,500
Takes Place: During the “Reckoning” storyline and before “Second Coming.”
Warnings: Contains implications of non-consensual (and non-eroticized) incest.
Special Thanks: To beta readers mozzarellaroses and yehnica , who had the patience to see this through multiple drafts. All remaining mistakes are mine.
Everyone Has It Figured Out but You
Logan tells himself that it’s too late to call this off.
He knows this isn’t true. He could call this off anytime he wants to; he even thinks about sending Daken a text. Forget about this thing-I’ll take care of it. (What he really wants to say is this: I’m not going to lie to you. I’m not going to use you to get to Romulus. I’m not going to use you like everybody else.)
He could fail to show at their designated meeting place. Or he could call Daken and postpone this task indefinitely. Or he could show at the meeting but tell a thinly-veiled lie: he can’t find Romulus, or he’s too busy, or they’ll have to do it some other time.
When it comes to betraying your son, there are a hundred ways to get out of it, a thousand little lies you can tell. Alone on the cliff, with only the occasional passing car to remind him that another world exists, Logan wonders how it came to this: so many secrets and double-crossings, no trap door in sight, no way to parachute to safer terrain.
But when he sees Daken pull up in this expensive Italian sports car-and he knows it’s Daken because he can hear the bass of one of Daken’s favorite songs thumping half a mile away-he stops moralizing about possibilities and missed opportunities. Daken’s here because he doesn’t deserve pity. Doesn’t need it, either.
Daken’s red car rolls to a stop. Logan approaches, peers in through the window and gives his son the once-over. And from behind the steering wheel, Daken returns the favor. He takes off his sunglasses and tosses them onto the dashboard.
Logan gestures for Daken to roll down the passenger-side window.
Daken obeys and sticks his head out. “What?”
“Pull your car up farther,” Logan says. He points to the patch of grass next to his motorcycle, which is very close to the cliff.
“What?”
“You’re too close to the road,” Logan says. “Get your car out of sight. You can’t be seen here.”
“My tags are clean,” Daken says. “And I wasn’t followed.”
Logan experiences a small wave of repulsion and fascination. He wonders how in the goddamn world Daken-fugitive on-the-lam Daken-managed to procure a red sports car with clean license plates. “Just fuckin’ move it.”
Daken rolls his eyes and restarts the car. He noses it off the road and comes to a complete stop next to the motorcycle. Without bothering to set the parking break, he climbs out of the car into the clear, bright morning and grins.
From a distance, they exchange greetings. Daken continues to smile, and everything about him is polished up, from his head to his boots. His shirtsleeves are carefully folded around his elbows, and his pants aren’t even wrinkled with the inevitable creases of suitcase living. His eyes are clear, present, and awake, and nothing about him is blotchy or hurried or frenzied.
Logan turns back to the cliff. This particular brand of nonchalance, Logan thinks, is the one certainty about Daken: his ability to escape atonement is his masterpiece, his life.
“You missed me,” Daken says.
Logan tenses. He tries his best not to seem so uneasy, but it’s already too late for that.
“It’s okay,” Daken soothes. “I missed you too.” He stops inches from Logan, his fingers hooked through his belt.
Logan wonders, just for a second, if Daken is going to kiss him.
Daken seems to figure out what Logan is thinking, and what he wants, so he stops. He always seems to know how to dangle the promise of closeness, and how to take it away. He sniffs.
Logan restrains himself and tries not to react physically. It’s that act of sniffing he absolutely hates-Daken’s transparent attempt to read him-along with his proprietary attitude toward everyone who crosses his path. He’s trying not to think of Africa, but in trying to steer clear of the memory, he’s already inside of it. (A sliver of experience: the night when Daken crouched over him, looked down, and quoted somebody famous. “‘Cruelty has a human heart,’” he said. He squeezed Logan through two layers of clothing. “Tell me what I want to know and I’ll let you go.”)
Logan steps back. “On the lam, huh.”
“Just vacation,” Daken says. “Lucky you.”
“I called you here to tell you my plans.”
“You didn’t call me here to buy me breakfast? To congratulate me for a job well done?”
Logan pauses, half-distracted. He hates to be interrupted.
“For playing you so well for the past year,” Daken explains slowly, as if speaking to a small child. “Thanks to me, Wolverine is relevant again.”
Logan feels every muscle in his back tighten. “That’s just . . . bullshit,” he says before immediately regretting the fact that he just gave into the impulse to quibble, to argue, to dance around the real issue. He always lets Daken get to him.
Daken laughs. “No, it’s not. Before I put on your spandex, you were just another aging superhero growing second-rate and fat on your tenure. Thanks to me, Wolverine has won the hearts and minds of the God-fearing and the middle class.” Daken stretches confidently and sighs. “I mean, let’s face it. Blowing those soldiers up in Oklahoma? That was a brilliant move on my part. Now everyone knows that that wasn’t you. So you’re you again, and now you’re more virtuous than ever. And wronged. Vindicated, too. You should be on your hands and knees thanking me, but maybe we can postpone that for later. Now what do you want?”
“Romulus,” Logan says simply, hoping to steer the conversation back into his own territory.
Daken looks up. “What about him?”
“It’s time to bring this thing with him to a close.”
“It’s not time, old man,” Daken says. “It’s long overdue. It should have been done last year. It would have been done”-he pauses-“if you hadn’t stopped me.”
“Well,” Logan says, “now you’ll have your chance. I won’t . . . stand in your way.” His voice trails off. It’s a stupid thing to say. Unnecessary.
But Daken-strangely merciful, or perhaps just tired-lets Logan get away with this momentary awkwardness. He breaks their gaze and untucks his shirt. His collar is popped. This odd, juvenile fashion choice makes Logan think of the students; consequently, he sees Daken as very young. And vulnerable. And then he just wants to stand in front of Daken and fix that collar with both hands, just as you’d adjust a kid’s tie before his first big date.
Logan watches as Daken lowers himself to sit on the hood of his car. He hates this.
His son is fucked. He knows this. It’s an ontological reality. Ontological. It was a word Emma Frost used, and there was something about it-like her-that was pretentious and yet oddly fitting. He thinks of her, of the conversation they had weeks and weeks ago.
“There’s something you should know about Daken,” she told him one night when he tried to slink out of Utopia after bleaching the latest X-Force mop-up out of his underwear at two in the morning. At first he thought that she was trying to punish him for waking her up-“The spin cycle makes a lot of noise,” she told him-but then he saw that she was serious, that this thing about Daken had been weighing on her. Keeping her awake, perhaps.
He stopped in front of her, his still-damp laundry in a bag under his arm. “What?”
“You need to sit down for this,” she said.
So under the pale-moon kitchen lights and over a cup of unsweetened tea, they talked. They talked about a lot of things. She outlined for him several things that he already knew about Daken. “I know,” he said at one point, but his tone betrayed his defensiveness. It’s always uncomfortable to hear Daken talked about. It’s something Logan won’t ever get used to.
And it-what Emma Frost referred to-wasn’t much of a secret at all.
Here, right now, in this spot so windy that even their shadows don’t stay put, Logan explains his plan. He feels Daken’s heart slow down, his scent dissipate in the morning air.
Means he’s hiding something.
Logan finishes talking. They exchange words.
The conversation seems to be over, and for that Logan is privately relieved. The betrayal, in its actual moment of completion, was not as difficult or remarkable as he imagined it would be. He turns to face the steep drop-off, the craggy earth, the water below them. He wonders if this used to be a simple ravine, a barren place without water, a place that didn’t know what it was going to become.
Behind him, Daken gathers himself to leave. He says a few things Logan finds predictable. Then he says the thing that Logan finds the most predictable-and the most galling. “Don’t be in such a hurry either.”
Logan glances back at Daken.
“Because once Romulus is out of the way, we have our own unfinished business to take care of.”
Logan turns to stare at Daken. Then he remembers himself. Daken wants a reaction. He’ll give the kid one he doesn’t expect.
“Son,” he says.
Daken’s already reaching in his pocket for his car keys. He has somewhere else to go.
“We go through with this, I need to know a few things. I need to know that you’re going to be okay.”
Daken pauses. He slowly takes his hand from his pocket.
“This is big, by any measure. Romulus is dangerous. What he stands for is dangerous. And . . . this could get ugly. Could get personal.”
“Personal is what I like, Wolverine.” Daken angles his body away from Logan and fakes a self-satisfied smile, one that is predictably flirtatious. “We all have our talents.”
“I know, but . . .” Logan draws closer to Daken. This is a moment he’s been practicing. Waiting for. This is a moment he’s designed, a moment he hopes will send Daken back to the only person who’s ever meant anything to him.
It works. Daken flinches just slightly, so slightly that Logan would have missed it if he hadn’t been paying attention. There it is: the ever-so-slight crack in Daken’s almost-perfect façade. The kid doesn’t know how to handle genuine concern, the type of concern that can’t be faked or masked or suppressed or couched as something less ingenuous. I am not nothing to you, Logan thinks. And that’s one thing we both know.
He inches even closer to Daken and sets a hand on his shoulder. “Daken. This is the guy who took your mother from you. Your childhood.”
Daken wrenches away, jerking his shoulder forward. He spins around and looks at Logan. “Trying to use this situation to win some sympathy? Hoping our little rendezvous with Romulus will make me think twice about ending your shitty existence? God, you’re so predictable. I’ll be okay, Wolverine. Don’t you worry.” He fishes for his keys again and walks to the other side of the car. The skin around his eyes crease with laughter; the clouds part enough to light up his face and fill in the hollows beneath his cheekbones. “It’s not me I’d be worried about.”
Logan watches as his son gets into his car and drives away, the tires kicking up mud and dust and dirt. He understands, all too late, that despite his vigilance, despite his urge to witness and to observe and to catalogue everything about this situation, he still missed it. He still wasn’t paying as close attention as he should have. This is the last time he’ll see Daken before he betrays him.
***
Logan would prefer to leave town right away, but he’s got to tie up some loose ends first. His things are back at his apartment; his kitchen is still cluttered with unwashed dishes and his bags are unpacked. He spent the evening talking to Kurt when he should have been getting ready to leave.
He spent the better part of the early morning hours on the phone with Kurt when he should have been trying to sleep.
It’s that part he wants to forget. Not the confession about Mariko-that was one thing. (That was a convenient smokescreen for the sum of his guilt.) It’s the late-late-night phone call he made several hours later that gives him pause. The one he made after having had several drinks. The one where he confessed everything. (Well, not everything. But a lot.) Where are you? Kurt said. Tell me where you are. Logan said no, forget it, the sun was coming up anyway and he had to go meet Daken.
He stands in the middle of his room and shrugs about the dust and the unwashed clothes. He’s never tidy, and he’s never prepared. Or, if he is prepared, it’s always for the wrong things. Like, he’s prepared to go toe-to-toe with Bastion and Romulus and whomever else life might throw at him, but in this efficiency where he sometimes squats, he doesn’t even have an ice tray. He washes his clothes in the tub. He has only one pillow, which makes life difficult when someone wants to spend the night. (He’s always prepared to have sex; just not prepared to be nice about it.) “I don’t suppose that you have an extra toothbrush,” a guest said semi-recently. A woman. (Is it terrible that he doesn’t care to remember who? He’s sworn off guests, just as he’s sworn off women. Before that, he swore off mutant women. Then he realized that it doesn’t matter-a woman will always want a toothbrush, regardless.)
He digs his suitcase out of the closet and starts to sift through a pile of clothes. He picks up a shirt. A large spider goes running for the closet, and Logan just kneels there and watches as it scampers away. He should kill it, but he finds it both gross and fascinating. All these nights he thought he was sleeping alone. He should have known better.
His phone rings. Elf.
He wishes more than anything that he hadn’t told Elf what he told him. He now has that raw day-after feeling, all regret and self-consciousness-the feeling you get when you suspect you’ve overindulged on someone else’s good will. He said too much. He didn’t say enough.
He decides to just flip open the phone.
“I’m outside,” Kurt says.
“Goddamnit, Kurt. I’m not even supposed to be here.”
“Your window. Not your door.” Pause. “Am I going to have to come in without your inviting me?”
Logan closes the phone and tosses it onto the bed. He walks over and throws open the window to find Kurt perched on the fire escape, hair pushed back from his face in the most plaintive, amusing way. Elf’s starting to get these etched-in expression lines that don’t go away when he stops smiling or frowning, and it’s sort of appealing.
“What’s up?” Logan says.
Now Kurt’s concern fades to exasperation. “You weren’t answering your phone. Given the tenor and tone of our last conversation, I was a little worried. Did you honestly think I wouldn’t call?”
“Had to turn off my phone,” Logan explains. “You know the drill. Things.”
“Ah,” Kurt says. He forces a smile and reaches for the windowsill.
Logan doesn’t smile back. He turns away and goes back to the pile of clothes and starts cramming them into his suitcase.
“You’re packing those clothes without having washed them first?” Kurt says, hovering.
Logan sits back on his haunches and looks up. “Kurt. Come on.”
Kurt smiles again and kneels down next to Logan. “At least fold them a little. You know, so you can find them more easily. When you get to . . . where you’re going.”
Logan’s glad to see Kurt (gladder than he’ll admit) but he also wants his space, and he knows that Kurt won’t be offended if he walks away. That’s what he likes best about their friendship: he doesn’t have to ever stand outside of himself and evaluate his own behavior. He typically doesn’t care what people think of him, but sometimes he’s piqued by others’ conclusions. He remembers the time several weeks ago when, after an X-Force job, Domino suggested they all get ice cream together. Well-everyone but him. He was in the other room. “Should we ask Logan if he wants to come?” Laura said. “Are you shitting me?” Dom replied, and then she laughed. Logan wondered-and not for the first time-how he’d gotten the reputation of someone who always said no. Certainly he wasn’t averse to the idea of ice cream or of going fun places. He just had a lot of things to do.
Logan gets up and leaves Kurt and his pile of clothes in the bedroom. He goes into the kitchen. He tries not to think of how Daken looked that morning, so clean and well-kept, as though he was waiting for something to happen to him-something good.
Kurt’s not asking him the details of his destination, the particulars of his new mission. That’s a change. And Logan knows that Kurt doesn’t judge him for the things he’s done, for what he’s going to do, and for what he said last night. That’s encouraging. But he wonders how long it’s going to take before Elf brings up the topic again.
“Logan,” Kurt calls from the other room.
“Don’t do it,” Logan says quietly, more to himself than to Kurt, and sure enough, Kurt appears in front of him.
“It would take us not long at all to wash those things,” Kurt says.
“No time,” Logan says. “I don’t have ‘not long.’ I really have to go.” He checks under the sink to make sure the pipes aren’t leaking. Then he quietly closes the cabinet door and wanders back into the bedroom. He finds that Kurt’s already folded half of his clothes. He kneels down again and begins to gently shovel them into his bag, trying to keep them neat out of respect for the work that Kurt’s just done, even though he really doesn’t care.
He’s going to see Daken again in two weeks, but no amount of time will prepare him for what he’s got to do. He’s got to betray his son. And not just by lying to him, by keeping things from him, and by stabbing him in the chest. He’s got to use the one genuine emotion that Daken has ever experienced-his unconditional loyalty for Romulus-against him.
He thinks of what Emma Frost spelled out. That night in Utopia, when everyone was in bed and Logan didn’t want unsweetened tea because it tasted like nothing and left him thirsty, Emma told him a few things about Daken, things she’d picked up from working with him. “You can’t read his mind,” she said. “No one can. But everyone has thoughts that lurk on the surface.”
And Daken wasn’t even trying to hide his. He still had a connection to Romulus-a connection that had grown out of sixty-odd years of programming. He already knew this. It made sense when you considered the facts: that Daken had walked away from the prospect of revenge, that he’d joined Osborn’s Avengers rather than finish things with Romulus, that he seemed generally unmoved by the facts of his mother’s death. Fair enough.
“But it’s not just that,” Frost said. “It’s more than just a connection.”
Discomfort welled inside of Logan. It was bad enough to know these things. It was worse to hear them from Emma. Emma!
Then he wondered, half-ashamed and half-horrified, how deeply she could see inside of him. Perhaps she sensed that his own feelings for Daken were more than just simple feelings of connectedness.
“My son’s not normal,” he snapped. “I get it.”
“Logan,” she said steadily. “I’m not telling you these things to pass judgment on someone’s private world, or their normalcy. I’m telling you because it’s information. Information that you can use.” She rose from the table and took her cup to the sink. “This thing with Romulus? Finish it already. For your sake, not ours.”
She finished her sentence so quickly that he knew that he was just being paranoid. She didn’t know about him. She wasn’t trying to read him. “You think I’m getting sloppy,” he said.
She turned to look at him and smiled. “If I thought you were sloppy I’d just push you off on your New York friends. No Logan, you’re never off your game. Not even perhaps when you should be.”
Now, in his bedroom, Logan glances up as the late-morning sun slants through the blinds. He finishes cramming his clothes into a bag without caring how neat or messy they were.
And when Elf calls to him again, when he offers to buy Logan lunch before he goes, Logan is still so distracted by his memories, and so waylaid by the idea that he’s a person who always says no, that he surprises himself by saying sure, why not. He accepts the offer before he has time to fully contemplate it. Now he will have to talk to Kurt. He will have to address in the daytime what he could only say at night.
***
In the restaurant-Carmichael’s, an old brewery turned mutant-friendly hotspot-Logan lets himself relax. The clank of silverware against plates and the hum of conversation provide a buffer, and Logan’s perfectly willing to let Elf do the talking. (Things they talk about: Scott. Public transportation. How the people in San Francisco are friendlier than the ones in New York City. Things they avoid: Norman Osborn. Daken. The unholy multitude of things that could happen next.)
Kurt doesn’t say anything when Logan starts on his third glass of whiskey.
“It’s getting bigger now,” Logan says about Luke and Jessica’s baby. “It’s starting to crawl, I think.”
“It?” Kurt grins.
“She. Sorry. You know what I mean.” He rattles the ice in his glass before taking another swig. “Every time I see her, she seems to have grown a whole hell of a lot. Cute, too.”
“Do they ever ask you to baby sit?”
“I think they’ve got it covered.” Logan sets his glass down. “Thank God, because they’re kind of anal. Organic this and all-natural that.”
“They sound like typical first-time parents. That’s good.” Kurt’s eyes are warm and musing. “Sometimes it feels strange to me.”
Logan looks up.
“It’s strange when I think of some of our colleagues and people we know starting families,” he continues. “Seems so out of the ordinary. Then I realize that that thought is strange in and of itself. It’s perhaps more remarkable that others haven’t followed suit. It says something about the lives we’ve chosen. The sacrifices people have to make, or that they feel they have to make.”
“You think a lot of people regret not having families?” Logan says.
“I think everyone wants peace. Some people see peace as going hand-in-hand with family. Others maybe not so much.”
And what about you, Elf? he wants to ask. He realizes, with the slightest prickle of guilt, that he really doesn’t know much about Kurt’s secret inner desires and wants. For so long he’s taken for granted that Kurt’s concerns are both more commonplace and more transcendent than his, that he wants what everyone else wants-a break from the constant drama, improved mutant-human relations, free health care-with increased opportunities to practice his religion and commune with the Almighty.
Now he feels like telling Kurt that having a family isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. He’s not missing that much. Just another headache.
But that, Logan knows, is a lie.
Ever since he found out about Daken, his life’s been filled with a weird energy, a selflessness he didn’t quite know he had. That, along with the anticipation and dread for what might happen next, is what propels him forward. From his current vantage point he doesn’t quite remember what he used to think about in the old days. He supposes he used to look forward to time off, to seeing a new place, to another night out, to getting laid, or to the passing away of some awful ordeal. When he learned about Daken, everything changed. His son is something that demands all of him-all of his energy, time, and love. He represents a future, a future that Logan might not ever achieve, but a future he has to work toward nonetheless.
Daken causes him more strife and anxiety than all of his old enemies put together, but Logan still loves him, and he wouldn’t trade his kid’s existence for anything. The day that Daken came into the world was, hands down, the worst day of Logan’s life, but the day that Logan discovered his son was still alive was sort of the best-despite everything that happened next.
Logan doesn’t want to divulge all of this to Kurt, doesn't want to talk about how complicated everything is. Luckily he doesn’t have to say anything; their food arrives. He welcomes the shrimp fajitas, which sizzle as the waiter sets the skillet on the table. Kurt ordered a veggie sandwich.
The food gives them a good excuse not to talk to each other, and Logan’s glad. He’s also relieved that Kurt seems unwilling to touch what they talked about the night before.
Then Kurt sets aside the saltshaker and changes the tone and trajectory of everything.
“Logan,” he says.
Logan waits.
Kurt picks up a napkin and crumples it in his hand. Then he focuses all his attention on Logan. “You’ve been through a great deal. And while I’m always here for you, and always available to listen, it occurs to me as we sit here that I might not be the best person to consult in matters regarding . . . the issues with your son.”
Logan pushes aside his plate of unfinished fajitas.
“Logan-”
“You’ve had all day to level your judgments against me, Elf. I’m wondering what took you so long. Damn, I should know better by now than to make these drunken fuckin’ confessions, right? I should know I’m not gonna get away with that kind of thing. You’re always going to want an accounting of me.”
Elf’s eyes dim; his body tenses. Then, as suddenly as his shoulders hunched up, they seem to relax. He lets go of his napkin and pushes it to the side. “You’re correct in assuming that I’m not going to simply forget or avoid what you’ve told me. You know, however, that I’m not judging you or using it against you. I don’t know why we’re constantly having this discussion. I don’t know how much plainer I can make it: I’m your friend, and I’ll always be honest with you even if that means giving you a candid appraisal of your situation. But nothing you say or do could ever change the fact that I respect you.”
Logan sits back. Well you’re just so damn noble, he thinks. But he knows that Elf honestly believes this. (He also wonders what Elf would say if he knew about X-Force.)
“I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” Kurt says, “and I’m happy to listen. But I don’t have any solutions to offer you . . . so I think you should talk to someone who knows more than I do. Someone who specializes in trauma. Family psychology.”
“Trauma! You gotta be shitting me, Elf.”
“What you’re carrying around is no small thing. I don’t want to see you so burdened anymore. You have to forgive yourself. But first you have to accept that it happened.”
“For God’s sake, I accept that it happened.” And it was his fault-who else’s could it be? He’s Wolverine. He doesn’t let things happen to him-he makes them happen.
“Your self-blame is another form of needing to control things,” Kurt explains, and Logan vaguely recognizes that kind of psychobabble as the stuff of daytime talk shows. “So you’ve rewritten this scenario in your head where you were a willing participant in what . . . Daken . . . wanted. But . . . I’ve met your son. And I know he’s not like you.”
He reaches for his hat, which is sitting on the seat beside him. “Are you listening to me? I’m a goddamn . . . I mean, who does things like that?” he says, and he wonders if by “who” he means him or Daken. And then he wonders if “who” doesn’t matter because Kurt’s wrong: they’re the same person.
He slips on his hat and grasps the end of the table so that he can get up from the booth.
Then he stops. He experiences that feeling of standing outside of himself. All at once he knows what he is: a grubby, moody guy in the middle of a restaurant raising his voice, telling off the same friend who’s just bought him lunch.
Self-reflexivity. What a bitch. “I’m sorry,” he says quickly.
Elf’s hand shoots out and grabs Logan’s wrist. “Stop.”
Logan doesn’t pull his arm away. He relaxes. And then he wonders if Elf means stop apologizing or just stop.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Kurt says. “We were having a nice time before. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
Logan settles back into the booth. He’ll wait until Kurt finishes eating (he no longer has an appetite to finish his fajitas) and then he’ll say a more proper goodbye.
The silence that passes between them is complex but not uncomfortable. Logan leans back and closes his eyes.
He tries not to think of Africa.
That first day, the sun was slow and intense, the heat oppressive. Logan’s skin turned and even though he knew that the damage wouldn’t last, that it would go away as soon as he got out of the sun, it still hurt, made him grit his teeth. Daken turned golden.
In the shade they rested. Logan fought to stay awake. Under a tree, he curled up and closed his eyes and thought about killing Romulus, about how it would go.
Then Daken was next to him. The heat from his body and breath did little to soothe the atmosphere. Logan opened his eyes.
Daken sat next to him and stared down at him, his gaze empty but wanting.
For as long as he’d been with Daken-five days now-the boy had been infuriatingly impassive and careful to ignore Logan’s attempts to make inroads. Don’t look at me, he seemed to say. Don’t touch me. Don’t think about me. He was blank and resistant-not in the way of practiced teenage defiance, but in the vein of jaded adult apathy. His concerns were elsewhere. Logan was just another hindrance to put up with.
But under the tree, things seemed to shift.
“We’ll leave soon,” Logan said.
“We can’t travel at night.”
“We won’t. We’ll stop again.”
“I don’t know where he is,” Daken confessed, sitting back on his haunches.
Logan sat up. “What? I thought you knew.”
“I don’t. He could be anywhere.”
Logan studied Daken. His scent was as thin as the dry desert wind around them. “It’s okay,” Logan said.
“It’s not okay. We need to find him, Logan.”
Daken had never called him by his name before. Come to think of it, he’d never called him anything.
“We’ll find him,” Logan said. And then he added: “I promise.”
Daken didn’t blink. He just nodded.
***
In the booth he does what he hates: he cries. He sits with his back against the wooden up-and-down seat and tips his hat over his face. He sniffles just once, but that’s because his sudden, shuddering breaths haven’t quite caught up with the steadiness of his tears. He hates tears.
He now knows why he came here, why he accepted Kurt’s invitation: he had to do this.
Kurt just reaches across the table and covers Logan’s hand with his. Then he abruptly pulls his hand away. Logan senses the waiter coming; he pushes his hat down farther. He hears Kurt tell the waiter that yes, they’d like the check and a box please.
When Logan opens his eyes again, Kurt is climbing into his side of the booth, his knees pulled up to his chest. (He didn’t bamf-something for which Logan is grateful.)
“It’s okay,” Kurt murmurs. “Let’s get you someplace. Someplace different than that . . . efficiency . . . where you’ve been living.”
“Not Utopia,” Logan says.
“Heavens no.” Kurt’s other arm finds its way around his shoulder.
“I need to leave,” Logan says, but it’s just a half-hearted protest. The shadows are growing longer, but it’s probably only two o’clock. Still, he knows he’s not going anywhere today. He feels depleted.
“The world isn’t going away. It can wait,” Kurt says.
Logan has the sneaking suspicion that no, it can’t; the world has interesting ways of getting him to do what it wants, and getting him to operate on its own schedule rather than his. But he’s not scheduled to meet Daken in Ankara for another two weeks. He can spare one afternoon.
part two