the blue of happy days
Title: the blue of happy days
Author: windfallswest
Characters: Max Guivera, Logan Cale, assorted cameos
Rating: PG-13, but not for anything exciting
Fandom: Dark Angel, X-Men YYH, ST, HP, etc
Dislaimer: <---
Word Count: about 3K
Author's Notes: Also on AO3. Another bit of Woods and Waters, which means crossover, so don't panic if you don't know everyone. Title from the play Hassan by James Elroy Flecker.
Summary: In the future, on another planet, Season 2 takes an abrupt left turn.
"Yaaaaah!"
By the time Logan cranked his head around to locate the source of the shriek, it was too late. A weight landed on him. Logan barely had a chance to register the tan and blue blur before he was socked out of his head. He didn't know it, but that was when he started screaming.
Max shouted, "No!" but her lunge forward was prevented by a barrage of gunfire from the police, no longer one step behind.
The figure crouched on top of Logan on the floor spasmed. Blood had been dripping from under the damaged trench coat and onto the concrete. It was flowing now in a steadily expanding pool. Shiny, blue-black hair fell away from one side of the figure's face and Max froze in shock.
It was a woman. She might have been beautiful, under other circumstances. Smudges of dirt and blood didn't hide the slight up-turning of her nose or the delicate, foxy cast of her face. Neither did the short blue fur covering it.
Her lips were blue, too, but whatever she said, it was too badly slurred for Max to make it out. A flash of very white teeth and foil-bright blue eyes, then her head dropped gently to the side.
Max shook herself out of it and rushed to Logan's side. He looked awful; pale. Almost as bad as I do when I'm seizing, Max thought. She pulled off a glove and reached out to take his pulse. It was like plugging into a live wire or something. Max fell back on her ass with her breath going funny.
The police ran in and pushed Max out of the way. One of them rolled the assailant off Logan. He recoiled visibly. Max recognised him as the one who'd been hitting on her at the station. Heh. If only he knew. Using Logan's overturned wheelchair as a prop, Max levered herself up onto her knees for a better look. She was feeling oddly jittery, speaking of seizures, and barely noticed the policeman passed out on the floor next to her.
Now that she was lying still, the assailant's-assassin's?-mutations were impossible to overlook. In addition to the blue fur that appeared to cover her body, both hands had only three thick digits. Her feet were bare with what might have been pads on the bottom and each bore two long, gripping toes.
A surge of movement drew Max's attention back to Logan.
"Ta me da! He's convulsing!"
At last, something she could help with. Max joined in the effort to keep him stationary with a will. The sergeant in charge of the squad was frantically radioing for the EMTs.
Logan hadn't stopped screaming, but it was now more of a disturbing, jerky shout and he kept trying to clutch at his head. At last, someone managed to get a rolled-up wad of cloth in Logan's mouth to keep him from biting anything out or swallowing his tongue. The muffled sounds weren't any better, in Max's opinion.
Max's eyes searched frantically for the cause. No wounds that she could see; all the blood seemed to have come from the assailant; and by some minor miracle, none of the bullets looked to have punched through.
"What've we got?" a voice asked. The paramedics Finally.
"He's convulsing; no visible injuries. Lost movement in his legs-"
"-about eight months ago," Max supplied. "It was a bullet wound. He's still got some shrapnel in there."
"All right; let's get him strapped in and out of here. Help us lift him onto this stretcher. One, two, lift!"
Max was forced back by the paramedics hurrying forward. They moved efficiently to strap Logan down and rush him to the ambulance. Max followed on their heels all the way to the ambulance.
It was two o'clock in the afternoon; the sun was shining. It is very unlikely that Max noticed. She climbed into the back of the ambulance, crouching out of the way. The EMTs were checking Logan's vitals, or trying to.
"Ow! Shit, get a temperature on him. You can barely touch his skin." The paramedic shook out his hand like it'd been burned.
One of his colleagues glared at him. She turned back to Logan, about to administer a sedative, and gasped.
"What's happening to his skin?"
"He's breathing alright," the EMT by his head observed somewhat dubiously. There was definitely an unusual tint to Logan's complexion. As they watched, it grew darker. Distinctly blueish, in fact. Max's blood went cold.
"Poison?" someone suggested.
"Or a virus."
The second paramedic, who seemed to be more or less in charge, swore under her breath. "Call someone and tell them to get those cops into the hospital. We all need to be quarantined until we know what we're dealing with here," she called up to the driver. "If it's a virus, we all may have been exposed. You'll need testing, too," she told Max.
"Wasn't planning on leaving anyway," Max replied distantly.
By the time they reached the hospital, Logan was something like the colour of the sky they moved him under. People in biocontainment suits herded them into a hastily cleared corner of the hospital.
The head paramedic was rattling off Logan's stats to the suited doctors. Max ignored her pointed suggestions and kept following Logan's stretcher. She wasn't about to feed her genetically-enhanced fugitive blood into the hospital computer system, thank you. And the fact that she hadn't started going all blue was probably a good sign.
Max raised her head when the door opened. The quarantine order had been lifted hours ago when the results of the first blood-work came in. As best the doctors could determine, whatever it was was genetic and everyone had come up clean except for Logan, of course, and Max because she wouldn't let them test her. They said his metabolism was inexplicably accelerated, everything from heartbeat to cell division, so he was being pumped full of nutrients. Otherwise, he was under mild sedation, though still restrained. Any other problems were mental. Tests results still pending on what precisely was turning him blue. One of the policemen was in an unexplained coma. Max tried not to think about it.
A nurse had come through about twenty minutes ago to check on Logan, so it was still a bit early for another round. It was the doctor, Beckett. He smiled kindly at her and closed the door softly behind him.
"There are more comfortable places to sleep, you know," Beckett said in his lilting accent.
"I don't sleep," Max replied tiredly.
"Nonsense; everyone needs a bit of shut-eye here and there. Much as I hate to say it, there's nothing more any of us can do for him right now."
Max mustered up a ghost of a smile. Beckett sighed.
"Results are starting to come through on some of the genetics tests, both for him and the woman."
"What to they say?" Max asked.
"That something very strange has happened," replied Beckett after a thoughtful pause.
"Gee, how enlightening."
"There are pieces of his genes that don't match what we have on record for him," Beckett elaborated. "I've never seen anything like it before. It's almost as though someone has spliced some of this woman's DNA into Mr. Kale's, if you follow me. And not just in one place; it's everywhere."
"Can you do that?"
Beckett snorted. "Well, I certainly couldn't. It must have taken incredible technology to achieve, except there's apparently no evidence of any." Casting a perplexed and frustrated glance at his patient, Beckett looked as lost and tired as Max felt. "You were there; I don't suppose anyone has asked you if you saw anything."
"Nothing medical. We followed some-um, stuff to the warehouse. She just jumped out at him, bam, right before the police showed up and gunned her down. She touched him and he started screaming."
"And the convulsions? When did they begin?" Beckett asked. He slung his hip over a stool and looked very sincerely at Max. Max would have been more suspicious if Beckett wasn't such a complete teddy bear.
" 'Bout a minute after. I was trying to take his pulse and he just went off." Max shrugged. Logan's face was creased with worry. It was strange seeing that kind of expression on it. Mostly, Logan's stress lived behind a smooth mask of bravado and pissiness. He looked disturbingly naked without it.
Beckett heaved another sigh. "Well, I have no idea what's caused this. Are you sure you wouldn't like to have a lie-down somewhere more comfortable? I promise we'll take good care of Mr. Cale. If there's any change in his condition, we'll let you know."
"Thanks, but I'm cool."
'Well, if you're--"
"Carson?" Someone stuck his head through the doorway.
"Doctor O'Malley?"
"Hey Max. How's our boy doing?" O'Malley asked, slipping the rest of the way into the room.
"Kinda blue, actually."
"Yeah, about that, I swear it was nothing I did. Carson figure it out yet?"
"No. I could try bleaching him, but it's rather unscientific."
Max smiled despite herself. "So you guys know each other, huh?"
Beckett turned abruptly redder than Logan was blue. O'Malley cleared his throat and pulled on what was probably supposed to be a poker face and coughed out, "Just, you know, professionally. Same hospital."
Uh-huh.
O'Malley cleared his throat again and dropped Max's gaze like a red-hot iron. "Anyway, can I borrow Carson for a minute?"
"Help yourself," Max said, amused. Besides, the occasional assassination attempt aside, nothing happened in a hospital at three in the morning.
"Hey." Max looked up at O'Malley. "We're doing everything we can to fix him, okay? Trust me on this. If there's a way to make him better, we'll find it." He took her hand and squeezed it gently. There was compassion in his eyes, understanding for something Max wasn't sure she wanted to have to be understood.
"Thanks," she managed.
Max didn't sleep. Not much, at least, and especially not recently. But she was well on her way to lost in thought and worry by the time dawn rolled around again. The nurses were used to working around her by now. On the medicinal front, Doctor Beckett had more or less determined what was happening, if not how or why. Max figured that that part was going to be her job.
"Hey."
Max's chin jerked down-she'd been staring vaguely ceiling-wards-so quickly she almost bit her tongue.
"Hey yourself," she said. "Feeling better?"
"My head feels like the ball in a Pareses Squares match." Logan made as if to rub it but came up short against the restraints. "What is this?"
"You were going a bit wacky there for a while. What d'you remember?"
Logan let his head fall back on the lumpy hospital pillow. "A street. In a little town, at night. There were...places to hide, or. No," he frowned. "The forest was so cold..."
"Logan?" Max tired again.
"Logan," he repeated, as though trying to remember something much more obscure. "Yes. It's all so confusing, inside my head. There's...more...now." Logan turned his head and looked at Max. His eyes were bluer than they should be. Or maybe it was just his skin.
"There was a woman. Someone must have sent her after you. We were in a warehouse. She jumped you and hit you with some sort of whammy. You've been in pretty rough shape these past coupla days."
Logan considered this for a minute. "Yeah," he said at last. "I feel like I did something to my back. Again."
There was an uncomfortable silence.
Max did not fidget in her seat because that sort of reflex got trained out of you in the sort of places she'd been raised. Well, he was inevitably going to find out at some point.
"There were, um, a few side-effects," she started.
Logan looked at her sharply. "Side-effects?"" he said slowly. "Like what?"
"Well, it's..." Max suggested. Something between suspicion and creeping dread was taking over Logan's face. Max concentrated on unbuckling one of the padded cuffs. Her fingers brushed the skin of Logan's wrist briefly. It was a darker blue now, practically black, like the rest of him. Both of them flinched back from the contact like they'd been burned. Max felt dizzy. Logan felt his vision go double. He brought his hand up to scratch his nose or perhaps claw his eyes out. Damn but his head-
"Feifei de piyan!" Logan swore.
"...mostly that kind."
Logan glared at her. It never took long. Max felt better almost immediately.
"Hey, you should see the other guy."
Logan looked up from undoing the other wrist restraint. "Other guy?" He pronounced the words carefully.
"She's, well, furrier. Something wrong with her hands and feet."
"But still blue?"
"Yep." Maybe this wasn't the best time to mention the tail.
"So it's related somehow."
"The doctor says you caught some of her genes somehow. It might be wearing off, though. You already look a little lighter than you did this morning."
"Wait, wh-"
"Why didn't anyone tell me you were awake?" Doctor Beckett hurried into the room.
"I just woke up a minute ago. Would someone please help me with these?" Logan indicated the ankle restraints. "So you're the doctor who turned me blue," he said as Beckett fussed with the buckles. Beckett shot him a quelling glare.
"You were already turning blue when I got you, and I'll have you know I am as perplexed as you are as to why," he shot back just as tartly. "There you go."
Beckett put his hand under Logan's ankle to lift it from the restraint..
Logan hissed. "Don't do that! It...tickles..." he trailed off, staring wonderingly at his foot. Very, very slowly, he picked it up and moved it a few inches inward on the thin hospital mattress. Then he tried the other one.
"Nurse." Beckett backed towards the door and flagged down a passing R.N. His eyes were very wide. "Page Doctor O'Malley here at once. Please."
Logan was still staring numbly at his legs. Max held her breath as he swung himself into a sitting position and, cautiously, lowered himself onto his feet. He didn't fall. He let go of the bed. His expression, when he finally raised his eyes to meet Max's, wasn't anything she could put into words. There was something like fire, and something like wonder. That look stayed with her for a long time.
"Look ma, no hands," Logan said softly.
"Oh my god," said O'Malley's voice from the doorway.
"It's incredible." Beckett glanced briefly at O'Malley before returning his riveted gaze to the spectre of Logan, standing upright. "It must have functioned as a gene therapy. Rebuilding the damaged tissues..."
Logan took a halting step forward and stumbled. Max caught his gowned shoulders to steady him.
"Muscle atrophy. Guess I'm going to be keeping Bling around for a while yet." He was smiling.
"Oh dear."
"Oh, wow."
"What?" Max and Logan demanded in unison.
"Well-"
"There's, uh-"
"Er." Beckett gestured for O'Malley to proceed. O'Malley swallowed.
"You kind of have a tail?" His voice went up at the end of the statement and there was a mighty curious expression on his face. A good bedside manner could only go so far; some things just weren't covered in medacad.
It took some brow-beating. It took a fair amount of brow-beating, actually, but Beckett still looked stuffed and had a tendency to stare vaguely off into space with his lips moving for the next several hours and O'Malley was having trouble delivering complete sentences in Logan's proximity. Logan, on the other hand, was back to his usual bossy self. He insisted on seeing his assailant's body, and then he insisted he be released. You could do things like that, when you weren't on a Core planet, and Windesan wasn't a Core planet yet. The hospital didn't have any real grounds to hold him, after all. It was weird, but it wasn't contagious. From what Max gathered, that was more or less what made it so weird.
Bling drove them back to Logan's pad. Logan didn't say much of anything until they were alone and several minutes of dramatic brooding out the window had passed. Okay, so it was less melodramatic brooding than him standing in a shaft of sunlight and soaking it up like a sponge. He was smiling still. Actually, he looked almost torn between letting loose with some sort of jig and having one of those oh-fuck-we're-doomed moments. He hadn't let anyone touch him since he woke up. Max was trying not to be worried.
"Feeling all right there?" she ventured.
There was that smile again. "Fine. Mostly. There's something I need to tell you."
There followed a long and bizarre story which Max might not have believed had she not been a genetically assembled super-soldier and Logan wasn't sprouting fur.
"So they hired her to find Eyes Only and ferret out all his inconvenient secrets. And if I died, well, it happens. They didn't know what they had, of course. She was just faceless local muscle. Otherwise they would have been after her a hundred times more seriously than they're pursuing you."
Max processed. "Lucky me."
Logan snorted. It was almost a laugh. "Yeah. I've got one world back and lost another. There's irony for you. Or something."
"Welcome to freakhood. Not much of a change; you already had the government on your tail. Not to mention everyone else you've managed to piss off."
"Yeah, well, when the Alliance discovers their agent's death and her...peculiarities, my cover is well and truly blown. Something like this isn't going to keep quiet in those circles."
Max raised her eyebrows. "You thinking of pulling out?"
Logan sank into a chair and shifted uncomfortably. Max tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle a snicker. Logan tried, unsuccessfully, to glare at her. They both ended up laughing like idiots.
"This damn this is uncomfortable," Logan complained, gasping for breath. "Maybe when it gets longer it'll be useful for something other than complicating my wardrobe.
"No, really," Logan began again, "I need to find a way to control this, this, " he gestured vaguely.
"How?" asked Max. "You said she never figured out how. And she had all her life to work on it."
"I have resources she didn't. And a few ideas. Maybe the fact I wasn't born like this will help."
"Maybe."
"Anyway, the sooner I'm gone, the safer I'll be. The safer everyone will be." Moody briefly gained the upper hand.
Max tilted her head curiously. "Finally abandoning the crusade?"
"You know me better than that. Let's call it a hiatus."
"Cool. When are we leaving?"
Author: windfallswest
Characters: Max Guivera, Logan Cale, assorted cameos
Rating: PG-13, but not for anything exciting
Fandom: Dark Angel, X-Men YYH, ST, HP, etc
Dislaimer: <---
Word Count: about 3K
Author's Notes: Also on AO3. Another bit of Woods and Waters, which means crossover, so don't panic if you don't know everyone. Title from the play Hassan by James Elroy Flecker.
Summary: In the future, on another planet, Season 2 takes an abrupt left turn.
"Yaaaaah!"
By the time Logan cranked his head around to locate the source of the shriek, it was too late. A weight landed on him. Logan barely had a chance to register the tan and blue blur before he was socked out of his head. He didn't know it, but that was when he started screaming.
Max shouted, "No!" but her lunge forward was prevented by a barrage of gunfire from the police, no longer one step behind.
The figure crouched on top of Logan on the floor spasmed. Blood had been dripping from under the damaged trench coat and onto the concrete. It was flowing now in a steadily expanding pool. Shiny, blue-black hair fell away from one side of the figure's face and Max froze in shock.
It was a woman. She might have been beautiful, under other circumstances. Smudges of dirt and blood didn't hide the slight up-turning of her nose or the delicate, foxy cast of her face. Neither did the short blue fur covering it.
Her lips were blue, too, but whatever she said, it was too badly slurred for Max to make it out. A flash of very white teeth and foil-bright blue eyes, then her head dropped gently to the side.
Max shook herself out of it and rushed to Logan's side. He looked awful; pale. Almost as bad as I do when I'm seizing, Max thought. She pulled off a glove and reached out to take his pulse. It was like plugging into a live wire or something. Max fell back on her ass with her breath going funny.
The police ran in and pushed Max out of the way. One of them rolled the assailant off Logan. He recoiled visibly. Max recognised him as the one who'd been hitting on her at the station. Heh. If only he knew. Using Logan's overturned wheelchair as a prop, Max levered herself up onto her knees for a better look. She was feeling oddly jittery, speaking of seizures, and barely noticed the policeman passed out on the floor next to her.
Now that she was lying still, the assailant's-assassin's?-mutations were impossible to overlook. In addition to the blue fur that appeared to cover her body, both hands had only three thick digits. Her feet were bare with what might have been pads on the bottom and each bore two long, gripping toes.
A surge of movement drew Max's attention back to Logan.
"Ta me da! He's convulsing!"
At last, something she could help with. Max joined in the effort to keep him stationary with a will. The sergeant in charge of the squad was frantically radioing for the EMTs.
Logan hadn't stopped screaming, but it was now more of a disturbing, jerky shout and he kept trying to clutch at his head. At last, someone managed to get a rolled-up wad of cloth in Logan's mouth to keep him from biting anything out or swallowing his tongue. The muffled sounds weren't any better, in Max's opinion.
Max's eyes searched frantically for the cause. No wounds that she could see; all the blood seemed to have come from the assailant; and by some minor miracle, none of the bullets looked to have punched through.
"What've we got?" a voice asked. The paramedics Finally.
"He's convulsing; no visible injuries. Lost movement in his legs-"
"-about eight months ago," Max supplied. "It was a bullet wound. He's still got some shrapnel in there."
"All right; let's get him strapped in and out of here. Help us lift him onto this stretcher. One, two, lift!"
Max was forced back by the paramedics hurrying forward. They moved efficiently to strap Logan down and rush him to the ambulance. Max followed on their heels all the way to the ambulance.
It was two o'clock in the afternoon; the sun was shining. It is very unlikely that Max noticed. She climbed into the back of the ambulance, crouching out of the way. The EMTs were checking Logan's vitals, or trying to.
"Ow! Shit, get a temperature on him. You can barely touch his skin." The paramedic shook out his hand like it'd been burned.
One of his colleagues glared at him. She turned back to Logan, about to administer a sedative, and gasped.
"What's happening to his skin?"
"He's breathing alright," the EMT by his head observed somewhat dubiously. There was definitely an unusual tint to Logan's complexion. As they watched, it grew darker. Distinctly blueish, in fact. Max's blood went cold.
"Poison?" someone suggested.
"Or a virus."
The second paramedic, who seemed to be more or less in charge, swore under her breath. "Call someone and tell them to get those cops into the hospital. We all need to be quarantined until we know what we're dealing with here," she called up to the driver. "If it's a virus, we all may have been exposed. You'll need testing, too," she told Max.
"Wasn't planning on leaving anyway," Max replied distantly.
By the time they reached the hospital, Logan was something like the colour of the sky they moved him under. People in biocontainment suits herded them into a hastily cleared corner of the hospital.
The head paramedic was rattling off Logan's stats to the suited doctors. Max ignored her pointed suggestions and kept following Logan's stretcher. She wasn't about to feed her genetically-enhanced fugitive blood into the hospital computer system, thank you. And the fact that she hadn't started going all blue was probably a good sign.
Max raised her head when the door opened. The quarantine order had been lifted hours ago when the results of the first blood-work came in. As best the doctors could determine, whatever it was was genetic and everyone had come up clean except for Logan, of course, and Max because she wouldn't let them test her. They said his metabolism was inexplicably accelerated, everything from heartbeat to cell division, so he was being pumped full of nutrients. Otherwise, he was under mild sedation, though still restrained. Any other problems were mental. Tests results still pending on what precisely was turning him blue. One of the policemen was in an unexplained coma. Max tried not to think about it.
A nurse had come through about twenty minutes ago to check on Logan, so it was still a bit early for another round. It was the doctor, Beckett. He smiled kindly at her and closed the door softly behind him.
"There are more comfortable places to sleep, you know," Beckett said in his lilting accent.
"I don't sleep," Max replied tiredly.
"Nonsense; everyone needs a bit of shut-eye here and there. Much as I hate to say it, there's nothing more any of us can do for him right now."
Max mustered up a ghost of a smile. Beckett sighed.
"Results are starting to come through on some of the genetics tests, both for him and the woman."
"What to they say?" Max asked.
"That something very strange has happened," replied Beckett after a thoughtful pause.
"Gee, how enlightening."
"There are pieces of his genes that don't match what we have on record for him," Beckett elaborated. "I've never seen anything like it before. It's almost as though someone has spliced some of this woman's DNA into Mr. Kale's, if you follow me. And not just in one place; it's everywhere."
"Can you do that?"
Beckett snorted. "Well, I certainly couldn't. It must have taken incredible technology to achieve, except there's apparently no evidence of any." Casting a perplexed and frustrated glance at his patient, Beckett looked as lost and tired as Max felt. "You were there; I don't suppose anyone has asked you if you saw anything."
"Nothing medical. We followed some-um, stuff to the warehouse. She just jumped out at him, bam, right before the police showed up and gunned her down. She touched him and he started screaming."
"And the convulsions? When did they begin?" Beckett asked. He slung his hip over a stool and looked very sincerely at Max. Max would have been more suspicious if Beckett wasn't such a complete teddy bear.
" 'Bout a minute after. I was trying to take his pulse and he just went off." Max shrugged. Logan's face was creased with worry. It was strange seeing that kind of expression on it. Mostly, Logan's stress lived behind a smooth mask of bravado and pissiness. He looked disturbingly naked without it.
Beckett heaved another sigh. "Well, I have no idea what's caused this. Are you sure you wouldn't like to have a lie-down somewhere more comfortable? I promise we'll take good care of Mr. Cale. If there's any change in his condition, we'll let you know."
"Thanks, but I'm cool."
'Well, if you're--"
"Carson?" Someone stuck his head through the doorway.
"Doctor O'Malley?"
"Hey Max. How's our boy doing?" O'Malley asked, slipping the rest of the way into the room.
"Kinda blue, actually."
"Yeah, about that, I swear it was nothing I did. Carson figure it out yet?"
"No. I could try bleaching him, but it's rather unscientific."
Max smiled despite herself. "So you guys know each other, huh?"
Beckett turned abruptly redder than Logan was blue. O'Malley cleared his throat and pulled on what was probably supposed to be a poker face and coughed out, "Just, you know, professionally. Same hospital."
Uh-huh.
O'Malley cleared his throat again and dropped Max's gaze like a red-hot iron. "Anyway, can I borrow Carson for a minute?"
"Help yourself," Max said, amused. Besides, the occasional assassination attempt aside, nothing happened in a hospital at three in the morning.
"Hey." Max looked up at O'Malley. "We're doing everything we can to fix him, okay? Trust me on this. If there's a way to make him better, we'll find it." He took her hand and squeezed it gently. There was compassion in his eyes, understanding for something Max wasn't sure she wanted to have to be understood.
"Thanks," she managed.
Max didn't sleep. Not much, at least, and especially not recently. But she was well on her way to lost in thought and worry by the time dawn rolled around again. The nurses were used to working around her by now. On the medicinal front, Doctor Beckett had more or less determined what was happening, if not how or why. Max figured that that part was going to be her job.
"Hey."
Max's chin jerked down-she'd been staring vaguely ceiling-wards-so quickly she almost bit her tongue.
"Hey yourself," she said. "Feeling better?"
"My head feels like the ball in a Pareses Squares match." Logan made as if to rub it but came up short against the restraints. "What is this?"
"You were going a bit wacky there for a while. What d'you remember?"
Logan let his head fall back on the lumpy hospital pillow. "A street. In a little town, at night. There were...places to hide, or. No," he frowned. "The forest was so cold..."
"Logan?" Max tired again.
"Logan," he repeated, as though trying to remember something much more obscure. "Yes. It's all so confusing, inside my head. There's...more...now." Logan turned his head and looked at Max. His eyes were bluer than they should be. Or maybe it was just his skin.
"There was a woman. Someone must have sent her after you. We were in a warehouse. She jumped you and hit you with some sort of whammy. You've been in pretty rough shape these past coupla days."
Logan considered this for a minute. "Yeah," he said at last. "I feel like I did something to my back. Again."
There was an uncomfortable silence.
Max did not fidget in her seat because that sort of reflex got trained out of you in the sort of places she'd been raised. Well, he was inevitably going to find out at some point.
"There were, um, a few side-effects," she started.
Logan looked at her sharply. "Side-effects?"" he said slowly. "Like what?"
"Well, it's..." Max suggested. Something between suspicion and creeping dread was taking over Logan's face. Max concentrated on unbuckling one of the padded cuffs. Her fingers brushed the skin of Logan's wrist briefly. It was a darker blue now, practically black, like the rest of him. Both of them flinched back from the contact like they'd been burned. Max felt dizzy. Logan felt his vision go double. He brought his hand up to scratch his nose or perhaps claw his eyes out. Damn but his head-
"Feifei de piyan!" Logan swore.
"...mostly that kind."
Logan glared at her. It never took long. Max felt better almost immediately.
"Hey, you should see the other guy."
Logan looked up from undoing the other wrist restraint. "Other guy?" He pronounced the words carefully.
"She's, well, furrier. Something wrong with her hands and feet."
"But still blue?"
"Yep." Maybe this wasn't the best time to mention the tail.
"So it's related somehow."
"The doctor says you caught some of her genes somehow. It might be wearing off, though. You already look a little lighter than you did this morning."
"Wait, wh-"
"Why didn't anyone tell me you were awake?" Doctor Beckett hurried into the room.
"I just woke up a minute ago. Would someone please help me with these?" Logan indicated the ankle restraints. "So you're the doctor who turned me blue," he said as Beckett fussed with the buckles. Beckett shot him a quelling glare.
"You were already turning blue when I got you, and I'll have you know I am as perplexed as you are as to why," he shot back just as tartly. "There you go."
Beckett put his hand under Logan's ankle to lift it from the restraint..
Logan hissed. "Don't do that! It...tickles..." he trailed off, staring wonderingly at his foot. Very, very slowly, he picked it up and moved it a few inches inward on the thin hospital mattress. Then he tried the other one.
"Nurse." Beckett backed towards the door and flagged down a passing R.N. His eyes were very wide. "Page Doctor O'Malley here at once. Please."
Logan was still staring numbly at his legs. Max held her breath as he swung himself into a sitting position and, cautiously, lowered himself onto his feet. He didn't fall. He let go of the bed. His expression, when he finally raised his eyes to meet Max's, wasn't anything she could put into words. There was something like fire, and something like wonder. That look stayed with her for a long time.
"Look ma, no hands," Logan said softly.
"Oh my god," said O'Malley's voice from the doorway.
"It's incredible." Beckett glanced briefly at O'Malley before returning his riveted gaze to the spectre of Logan, standing upright. "It must have functioned as a gene therapy. Rebuilding the damaged tissues..."
Logan took a halting step forward and stumbled. Max caught his gowned shoulders to steady him.
"Muscle atrophy. Guess I'm going to be keeping Bling around for a while yet." He was smiling.
"Oh dear."
"Oh, wow."
"What?" Max and Logan demanded in unison.
"Well-"
"There's, uh-"
"Er." Beckett gestured for O'Malley to proceed. O'Malley swallowed.
"You kind of have a tail?" His voice went up at the end of the statement and there was a mighty curious expression on his face. A good bedside manner could only go so far; some things just weren't covered in medacad.
It took some brow-beating. It took a fair amount of brow-beating, actually, but Beckett still looked stuffed and had a tendency to stare vaguely off into space with his lips moving for the next several hours and O'Malley was having trouble delivering complete sentences in Logan's proximity. Logan, on the other hand, was back to his usual bossy self. He insisted on seeing his assailant's body, and then he insisted he be released. You could do things like that, when you weren't on a Core planet, and Windesan wasn't a Core planet yet. The hospital didn't have any real grounds to hold him, after all. It was weird, but it wasn't contagious. From what Max gathered, that was more or less what made it so weird.
Bling drove them back to Logan's pad. Logan didn't say much of anything until they were alone and several minutes of dramatic brooding out the window had passed. Okay, so it was less melodramatic brooding than him standing in a shaft of sunlight and soaking it up like a sponge. He was smiling still. Actually, he looked almost torn between letting loose with some sort of jig and having one of those oh-fuck-we're-doomed moments. He hadn't let anyone touch him since he woke up. Max was trying not to be worried.
"Feeling all right there?" she ventured.
There was that smile again. "Fine. Mostly. There's something I need to tell you."
There followed a long and bizarre story which Max might not have believed had she not been a genetically assembled super-soldier and Logan wasn't sprouting fur.
"So they hired her to find Eyes Only and ferret out all his inconvenient secrets. And if I died, well, it happens. They didn't know what they had, of course. She was just faceless local muscle. Otherwise they would have been after her a hundred times more seriously than they're pursuing you."
Max processed. "Lucky me."
Logan snorted. It was almost a laugh. "Yeah. I've got one world back and lost another. There's irony for you. Or something."
"Welcome to freakhood. Not much of a change; you already had the government on your tail. Not to mention everyone else you've managed to piss off."
"Yeah, well, when the Alliance discovers their agent's death and her...peculiarities, my cover is well and truly blown. Something like this isn't going to keep quiet in those circles."
Max raised her eyebrows. "You thinking of pulling out?"
Logan sank into a chair and shifted uncomfortably. Max tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle a snicker. Logan tried, unsuccessfully, to glare at her. They both ended up laughing like idiots.
"This damn this is uncomfortable," Logan complained, gasping for breath. "Maybe when it gets longer it'll be useful for something other than complicating my wardrobe.
"No, really," Logan began again, "I need to find a way to control this, this, " he gestured vaguely.
"How?" asked Max. "You said she never figured out how. And she had all her life to work on it."
"I have resources she didn't. And a few ideas. Maybe the fact I wasn't born like this will help."
"Maybe."
"Anyway, the sooner I'm gone, the safer I'll be. The safer everyone will be." Moody briefly gained the upper hand.
Max tilted her head curiously. "Finally abandoning the crusade?"
"You know me better than that. Let's call it a hiatus."
"Cool. When are we leaving?"