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Author's Chapter Notes:
I know there is no Ororo/Logan interaction here but there will be some soon. Each scene is important to the story so bear with me guys. They come in together soon.
Secret Burdens

Chapter Two: The Gates We Leave Open

“And who knows who will trespass through the gates we leave open?”

Logan remembers something from the funeral, an instant, a moment, that never really clung to his memories before now, insignificant at first.

An image of Ororo, after the guests had left the small graveyard of tombs that housed the fallen X-men members. Three tombstones. She stood to the left, her hands held before her, and Logan remembers the stiffness in her shoulders, the stillness of her breath. He was watching for a few seconds at most, her grief never really moving him, never jarring him into action, as though they were strangers meeting at the funeral of mutual friends and nothing more. A stranger was probably the closest thing he could call her at that point anyhow.

She never stayed to speak with him longer than it took to extend a polite greeting or inquiry about his day. It wasn’t edginess or fear or even apprehension he would see grace her features when they spoke. It was more of an indifference, almost apathy he sometimes felt she held for him. As though she questioned why she should waste time on any subject that more than scratched the surface between them. He never thought about it much, probably because he was thankful she wasn’t the type to dig up his insides and try to decipher them, nor did he care to figure out all the gruesome little details about how she worked either.

But this one image of her standing at the edge of Scott’s grave had planted itself somewhere deep, somewhere far enough from consciousness he hardly realized it was actually a memory. He watched as she raised her hand and gently placed it atop the stone, in a reverence Logan was surprised she carried, and softly, so faintly he hardly recognized the motion, grazed her fingertips across the etched-in name. Her hand settled back to her side and in a moment she was up the steps of the mansion, throwing herself into classes and papers and administration for months on end. He had turned and wandered back to his bike, thinking nothing of the movement, an image that now, months later, burns with meaning.

He wants to, but knows he can’t, ask her about it. Make her answer the question that’s been wringing his mind for days, the question that makes him steer clear of her during breakfast, that makes him take separate routes through the mansion so as not to encounter her. But he knows she would never enlighten him. After all, who was he to ask her? And who was she to tell him? Ever since that incident in the med-lab, the quake he heard in her voice, the tremors he felt through her arms, he had to know. Because it changed everything. It changed everything he ever thought he knew about her, about Jean, about Scott. Like she had said, he wasn’t the only one, and that opened so many doors he didn’t even know which direction to start. So he went to the doctor.

* * *

“Logan, I am positively thrilled to see you, you know this, but is it really necessary just at this moment?” Hank McCoy was squinting at the petri dish he held atop his lab table, a needle held directly above it with his left hand and his other on the computer to his right.

Logan could only see the blue tufts of hair escaping the neck of his lab coat while the Beast faced his back to him, too engrossed in his experiment to turn and face Wolverine as he heard him enter through the sliding med-lab doors. Logan crossed his arms over his chest and smirked. “Why? What’s so important, furball?”

“Well, I suppose you could say I am suspending life at my fingertips.”

“Well, think you can suspend it for this conversation?” Logan pulled up next to the computer screen Hank was observing and leaned against the tabletop below it, his arms still crossed over his chest.

Hank threw a glance at Logan out of the corner of his eye before returning to his petri dish. “A conversation concerning what, my friend?” He dropped one more ounce of the liquid inside the needle to the dish below.

There was a pause before Logan spoke, and Hank thought he saw him tighten his arms over his chest. “Storm.”

Hank set down the needle and tapped a few keys with his free fingers before turning his wheeling chair to face Logan. He eyed him for a moment before asking, “And what about Ororo has you coming to me?”

Logan ground his teeth together a moment, glanced at the computer screen, then over to the other med-lab table.

“Logan, what is it?”

He turned his gaze back to Hank. “It’s about Scooter. I gotta know something.”

Hank cocked his head, looking at Logan behind his glasses, before reaching up and removing them from his nose. He set the rims down on the table and Logan heard him release a sigh. “You have questions about Ororo and Scott?”

“Yeah, you could call it that.”

“What sort of questions?” Hank turned back to Logan, his hands folded across his lap.

“The kind you probably won’t wanna answer,” he smirked.

Hank chuckled, shaking his head slightly. “Knowing you, that is most likely the case. But I must warn you, I am not at liberty to disclose any information I believe Ororo would consider an invasion of privacy.”

“I can respect that, Doc.”

Hank smiled warily. “Then ask.”

“There’s something I started thinking about, something I think I missed all these years. Or something she’d just been covering up, I don’t know.” Logan reached up and scratched the back of his head. “You see, I just remembered something. And I think I ignored it so long ago because it was fresh after Jeannie’s death, you know?”

Logan paused, watching Hank’s reaction to the word ‘death’ instead of ‘murder’.

When Hank did nothing but nod silently, Logan continued.
“And I got to thinking. That maybe all this time that I’d been chasing what could never be mine, there was so much more going on under the surface. Maybe there were things I never even got to glimpse. I mean, it was none of my business, they’d known each other for years. But it made me wonder, if all this time, there was something between Storm and Scooter that I had completely passed by.”

Hank was still staring at Logan, and Logan could tell Hank was fighting to keep his mouth closed. “I have to know, Doc.”

Hank pinched the bridge of his nose and turned his gaze to his hands. “No you don’t, Logan.”

Logan dropped his arms, took a step closer toward Hank’s chair. “Ya don’t understand. It changes everything.”

“It changes nothing.” Hank rose from his chair and picked up the needle, walking over to the other countertop where he held his tools.

“It does for me,” Logan almost growled, picking up to follow Hank across the room. “It makes her different. It makes this different,” Logan motioned his hands in front of him. “It makes…” he swallowed, curled his hands closed. “It makes me pathetic,” he sighed with slumped shoulders.

“And what exactly do you mean by that, Logan?” Hank asked as he wiped the needle clean and placed it next to a scalpel.

“It means I’m not alone.” It was almost a wish, a grasping at air really, because of all people, he realized he would not want to wish that on her.

Hank turned to him, almost glaring. “Do not think that that puts you on the same level as Ororo. That you have shared the same scars, that you know the same wounds. It means nothing of the sort.”

“I never said that, furball.” Logan clenched his fists, grit his teeth. “I’m not tryin’ to raise myself up here, redeem myself or some shit like that. I know I don’t know her. I don’t know her nearly enough to even call us friends, but you…” he dropped his voice a little. “You do. And you know. Or you know something about it that makes you keep quiet, if not for her then for your own hide.”

“I don’t keep my silence to escape Ororo’s wrath, Logan. It is out of respect.” Hank returned to the original table, collecting his glasses.

“Then just tell me what you feel.” Logan paused in his stride back across the white tiles. “What you can remember. That’s not an invasion of her privacy, right?”

Hank sighed, pulling the glasses over the blue fur of his cheeks. “I can’t tell you much, but only that for a time, I kept my distance from Ororo.”

Logan cocked his head. “Whaddaya mean, bub?”

“I mean,” Hank turned his head to lock eyes with Logan, “I could not approach Ororo myself because I thought, and perhaps it never was but…,” he dropped his gaze again, uncertainty shifting his eyes across the floor, and Logan took a step closer, bore his gaze deeper into Hank.

Hank closed his eyes, and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck.

“But what, Beast?”

“I thought…that Ororo’s tender heart,” Hank smiled softly, “was inclined elsewhere.” He looked back up to Logan, a hesitant and reluctant smile playing across his lips, the grooves and lines of his face making him seem so much older to Logan at that moment. “In a more human direction, I suppose you could say, then I was.”

Logan could not help the heaviness to his limbs, the stiffness in his back, his body’s unwillingness to move at the laden words Hank was spilling before him. The realization that it was a possibility. The burning suggestion that deep under those cracked and chipped layers, there was someone else carrying the same burden.

And hadn’t she said it herself? Hadn’t she laid it all out before him, without even meaning to? And hadn’t she just let him through the gates she never meant to leave open?

So. Where did that leave them now?

Logan was going to ask her.





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