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21. Coming Back (Part 3)

Summary: Logan’s trip continues…until. Well we all know what happens.

“How many?”

Sitting sideways to Logan, Yukio was almost did not want an answer to her question. And judging from Logan’s silence she wasn’t going to get one….not unless she pressed her point. And press she did.

“How many?” She asked again, a tone a little tighter this time, a voice a little commanding.
“…” Once again there was no answer, with the only reaction being the almost subconscious way in which Logan flexed his fingers, tightening them into a fist, as if fighting the urge to let out the metal blades sheathed along his forearm.

“How many Logan-sama?” The third time she reached forward and grabbed his hand, taking care to keep her own fingers away from those knuckles of his. She was free, she was adventurous, she was many things, one that Yukio was not was stupid. She knew well enough what would happen to her human hide at the slightest knick from even one of those claws.

Also, maybe it was just her imagination, but she could have sworn that the way she was holding tight onto his arm, she could almost feel each individual claw underneath.

She would have held on until he answered, had it not been from the other hand, the free one coming up to grip her own. The slightest of pressures (for him) at her wrist and she let go with a silent gasp…one which turned audible as he finally gave the answer to her insistent query.

“Stopped countin’ at fifty.”

“Fifty!” Her hand turned to dead weight in his, Logan gently set it on her thigh, retreating back…almost as if giving her the space that he knew that she would want.

“Yeah.” He sighed, his already battered conscious feeling…reliving the weight of each of those fifty men and women, and others after that. The fifty that he had shredded to pieces, to death with these very hands of his.

Many thought that because he was ready to kill if needed, that he did so for the sheer sick fun of it and that he did not care about who or what he killed. And the truth was, even though he did not remember it, somewhere in the back of his mind, in the dark ruins of his previous life, the one before and during his time with Weapon X, before he became the Wolverine, he used to be just like that. Even in this life, he had lost count of the people he had killed, the lives he had taken…destroyed. But unlike before, every single kill of this life, every time his claws found purchase in human or mutant skin, blood and muscles, there was a valid reason for each and everyone for them…even for the latest one, especially for them.

Every. Single. One. Of. Them.

For this time it wasn’t his life that was on the line, it was of someone precious…it was that of his baby girl. And as much as the guilt of what he had done in all those months, when he drive, ran, walked, dove around the country…all three countries, Canada, America and Mexico, destroying anything and everything he thought could be one day used against her and against his little angel, James, all that guilt, all that suffering, none of it weighed enough, was dark enough to wipe the image of how Kendall had cowered in the corner when he had found and sliced open the door locking her in. A heavy power inhibitor collar around her neck, a chain running from her one leg to the wall, she had been unable to even smell to recognize him, her scared, bloodshot eyes had been too wild to even focus on him.

She had thought that he was one of them, one of the ‘bad men’. It was only after he slipped a claw tip through the locking mechanism, freeing her powers…her senses, whispered soft nothings to her ear, cradled her in his embrace that she grew coherent enough to recognize him, recognize her daddy…her dada.

Daddy is going to get the scary monsters…and the bad men.

That had been his single line note for his daughter the night he first left the mansion, the same note that she had shown to him when he returned back, her bright eyes telling him of her confidence in him and that he would return one day…that he would come back home to her, mommy and James. There had been no anger, no suspicion, no hate, nothing but love in her golden-brown orbs. The love that told him that not only would she forgive him for everything that he had done, she would do so with open arms. She had confidence in him.

If only Ororo had shown the same trust…the same confidence.

--

“Ororo knows about this?” Yukio’s words brought him back into the present.

“Nah.” Logan did not even trying moving his head this time, not trusting it to stay in place if he even tried it. It was feeling that heavy…almost as if instead of just being coated with Adamantium, his entire skull filled with it. “Never got a chance…”

He could still feel the lightning she had called down upon him…or maybe it was just the pain from how in all but a few moments, his entire life had fallen around him. He had returned….to her, more beast than man, both man and animal content in the trust that she would be there for him, that they could find the shade of peace in her soothing embrace.

How wrong they had been…both of them, both Logan and the Wolverine.


“You didn’t try?” Yukio voiced her surprise.

“I…” Logan started only to stop, as he felt his healing factor starting to grind to a halt. ‘No, not now,’ his mind cried out. ‘Not now. I can’t sleep. Not here. Not in front of them…not with the kid.’
“Logan?” Yukio’s voice, clear only a few seconds ago, seemed to echo through an ever thickening haze. He needed to get out from here….away from here.

He needed to get out from here NOW.

“Yuki…Yukio. I…,” shaking his head to clear it, he pushed himself up, his abrupt movement startling both Yukio sitting beside him and Mariko working inside. It was after nine and Amiko had already been send to bed. “I gotta go.”

“Where are you going to go like this?” Yukio practically pulled him down, such was his exhaustion. “And like this? Are you crazy or what?”

“I can’t stay, not with a kid in the house,” Logan snapped at her, by now moving only by sheer will, his body just about ready to give up. “I can’t…”

At the mention of Amiko, even though Mariko might have been afraid about the wellbeing of her daughter, Yukio knew well enough what that meant. Logan was getting nightmares nowadays…and from the looks of it, that was just about all that his mind and body was getting. In his current state, he was in no position to be kept within such a confined space…yet she just couldn’t let him leave. The idiot might hit something and hurt himself and more importantly someone else.

Calling out to Mariko that she would be late and that she should not stay up for her, she quickly hustled the semiconscious Logan out the door and down the stairs, not trusting him with the enclosed space of the elevators.

--

It would be almost four days before Mariko saw the strange man again, the one about whom Yukio told not only her but also to Amiko. The only difference was that Amiko’s narrations were all told in the form of semi-fairy tales, ones set in ancient and medieval Japan. But instead of traditional Japanese tales, they were the ‘Adventures of the Masked Samurai.’ Yukio told them with such flair, such clarity that Amiko, with her fertile imagination, had even visualized scenes from those tales on paper, complete with a yellow and blue armor for the Samurai.

As with the first time, even this around Logan-san was dressed in a flannel shirt and tight faded blue. He still had a tired look on his face, the reason for which Yukio had told her a little about. But unlike before at least his eyes were clear.

The next few minutes, until Yukio came up from the garage were spent in an awkward silence, only broken when Logan apologized for his actions from the other day. He went on to try to assure her that he meant no harm to either her or Yukio and most of all not to young Amiko. Mariko tried her best to assuage him, telling him that Yukio had told her about his children and that as a parent she also understood what it felt like to be away from one’s child.

By the time Yukio came through the door, not only was Logan sitting at the dining table, shoveling down the rice and beef stew that Yukio had prepared specially for him. When Mariko asked why beef and not the fish they were to have themselves, Yukio had grinned and answered.

“It’s the one thing that I make for him….and I make it a point to prepare it every time he comes. It’s a ritual, sort of how you and I have for the day we first met.”

--

Sitting down on the empty chair directly across Logan, she waited patiently, only making her move once he was done eating.

“You can call them if you want.” She did not say…she did not need to say who.

Yet he asked. “Who?”
“Who know who,” she shot back. Sliding her hand along the flat glass topped surface, she lifted it back once it reached his plate…revealing the photograph that Logan had had in his shirt pocket. It was one of all five of them…it was a copy of the same photo that a few thousand miles away, Jubilee had left in Ororo’s room.

Instead of answering Logan just picked up the photo and returned it to its place, right next to this heart.

“They must be missing you, you know.” Yukio did not let up. “Especially Kendall. Even I’ve seen how she used to stick by your side.”

Still no answer.

“I wonder…” she moved in for the kill, knowing that she was just about to step her bounds. “I wonder if she cried when you did not come pick her and her little brother up….I wonder if he….”

“Stop.” The growl was so low that even Mariko who was just a few feet away in the kitchen, even she did not hear it. But Yukio did.

“Logan…” although pedaling back, both in her tone and in her barbs, Yukio wasn’t quite ready to give up. “At least tell someone. If not Ororo, if not the children…call up the firecracker.”

That Logan did not even crack a smirk at the use of her nickname for Jubilee, was a clear indication of how closed he had become. Yet, within her, a small of Yukio congratulated her for coming up with this idea.

--

And the idea reached action as not even six hours later, standing in front of a public phone, a calling card in one hand, the hand piece in the other, Logan entered the number of the phone installed at the apartment where Jubilee was living now…or so he thought.

“Hey. You’ve reached Jubilee,” the answering machine piped up, and Logan let out a sigh of relief. Even though he was calling the kid, he did not exactly want to talk with her. He just wanted to let her know that he was alive and to tell her to tell the same to Kendall and James.

Waiting for the pre-recorded message to finish, his ears perked up when the message started to speak to him.

“…and if this is Logan, I am going back to X’s.” Already suspicious as to why Jubilee was returning to the mansion, his heart nearly tore free from its Adamantium cage at the next words. “Please come back soon. Ororo is very sick. She might not….” The recording space ran out, not that Logan was even there to listen to it anymore…


….or the phone for that matter.

Note: Well, next we pick up from where chapter 17 left off. Both Ororo and Logan have had the time to think, re-think and re-re-think their actions and words. So what now?

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