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Forge and Logan jumped quickly through the wormhole. Together they landed- Logan on his feet and Forge rolled to a stop- and just as suddenly the wormhole of time they’d travelled through disappeared. Logan, young but tired, checked himself for injuries. The dust of time and flecks of blood made his leather jacket smell a little musty but otherwise he was fine.

Gulping, he took in his surroundings. There wasn’t much. The whole point of a safehouse is to blend in with its environment, for it to matter to no one but to not be ostentatious. The sort of place kids will make stories up about and then forget in ten minutes when a better distraction comes along. This safehouse was a cottage in the countryside, appearing deserted in its disarray but there was little dust and inside the burlap sacks he could smell food supplies and a blanket with mothballs inside. It smelled like a grandmother had farted inside of it.



Forge groaned and Logan went to him. He flipped the teenaged version of the Native American over into the recovery position and began to feel his body for what was wrong. Even through the Kevlar of his costume, Logan could sense he was alright.

“Get off me, Wolverine,” Forge protested as he sat up. His voice had barely broken and at first glance, he seemed to be the most innocent of the pair. But Logan had come to know that appearances were deceiving.

“That was my father. You’re lucky you’re alive.” Logan unwrapped a lollipop as Forge searched his pockets for his pack of smokes.

“Isn’t it funny,” Logan mused out loud as the familiar scent of dime store strawberries and Lucky Strikes trailed him to the window. Outside the countryside was pristine with verdant fields, staked hay, and a few sheep. “No matter what time sphere we went to...cigarettes almost always look the same?”

“Yeah, it’s hilarious,” Forge snapped.

His voice was young, Logan thought, too young. Even he was too young to be thinking about their age difference: a fifteen year old and a twenty five year old.

“Well, we stopped Mojo. You completed your mission. What now?”



Forge looked up. Logan could feel him behind him, staring from the shadows. Forge may appear to be a child but he had yet to meet anyone faster to pull a trigger, ready to take that life, to shed no tears, but Forge was a hunted man and betrayed by the very Time Police he had pledged his loyalties to.

Logan’s father had shown what happened when hunted men were backed into tight corners: they fought back or died.

Logan licked at the sweet center of his lolly. He had already reasoned out to himself why he had been kidnapped- the mistake of taking the son and not the experienced father- and why he knew the only way he could go home was to help this trained psychopath take down the biggest corruption schemer of them all, Mojo, a disgusting overweight slug-faced manipulator who would eventually destroy the time streamline.

Logan had told himself all that, fought beside this man child, and it didn’t matter. In the end, he was still shocked at the notion that extended timetravelling had presumably only stunted the Native American’s growth and not his mind as well.

“Guess Imma go home a hero. Leave someone else to clean up the blood of the politicians and the martyrs,” Forge finally concluded.

They were both slim and muscled but now Logan had earned his instead of being blessed by a mutant gene. Both had long shaggy hairdos from life on the run. Forge had tried tying his back with a leather ribbon but Logan had let it grow. At six foot four, he seemed less like the out of place university scholar with his hair like this in his dirty, ill fitting uniform than the trendy buzzcut with side patterns he usually rocked. Underneath his wild bangs burned his dark grey eyes and a straight nose over taciturn lips. He chuckled to think- if he’d only taken up on those modelling jobs he was constantly being offered Forge would never have even considered him an option.

Logan crunched down on the lolly core with his molars, swallowed it and tossed the stick in a corner full already of refuse. He had a hard time separating the incarnations of the people he’d grown up with as friends and as family. Ororo, McCoy, Summers, Drake, Worthington...Forge. Especially his father as the Wolverine. All of them both kinder and far more cruel than he could ever expect.



But now it was over. Some might think he’d miss the adrenaline high of jumping from a flying airplane into a time wormhole or fighting a murderous gang to the death or rescuing helpless victims but for Logan, he was beyond ready to put that part of his life to bed. No one need know he’d become like his father, an X-Men, a hero. That was something he’d rather die with, a story that was forever alone and untold. After all, he’d worked his whole life to craft the image of the man who may look the spitting image of his father but would never throw a punch to destroy that now. His kids would benefit in the future from never knowing who he’d become in these past six weeks.

“Hey Logan, you saved my life back there. Good work,” Forge said, interrupting his thoughts.



Logan grunted and stared out the window some more. It was grimy with years of unused. Just the way a safehouse ought to be: safe. Soon he’d be back on the dirt path behind his dormitories, walking back to his cocoon of a safe world. He couldn’t remember why he was there at that time, it felt so long ago despite the short few weeks it had really been.



“A saved life is a debt. And I pay my debts,” Forge continued.

Logan rolled his eyes. “Consider us null and void after you saved mine so many times in that first week.” “Naw, doesn’t count. I didn’t exactly ask your permission to get you to come along so there goes that. Nah, I got you something better. And I think its going to be my first idea you actually like.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Hunh, yeah. Everybody has a moment. Just ten minutes of bliss they’d love to live over again, consequence free. While I was a time agent this was a big no-no, completely illegal and supposedly undoable. I’m still off the clock, Wolvie,” Forge chuckled as he flicked his cigarette to the ground and squeezed the butt out with his booted toe. Logan was reminded then that Forge was approximately fifty years old. He reminded him of his father, a man who lived outside of time. “So where do you want to go? Your childhood? Your mother just before she died of cancer? Your birth? You can go where you weren’t even supposed to be.”



Logan knew exactly where he wanted to go. But he needed more than ten minutes. He looked down at the ground and kicked at an imaginary pebble. “Why would I want to do that? No, I should keep this favour around for after finals or something. I know you can change the past and if there’s anything a university student might want to change....”

“And you know this a limited time deal. When I get back-“

“You assume you’ll be let back in as an agent. Do you know how many laws you’ve broken? I might not have studied the Time Agency 101 manual but I’m pretty sure you are fired. With a very nice severance package.”

It got quiet. Too quiet.

Logan turned around. Forge was just sitting there. Grinning.

He’d be back, Logan realized. Forge had more people to get to. And now no one would want to get in his way of that mission.

Logan licked his lips and returned to the windows view. Out there it seemed peaceful and quiet. There was nothing to disturb his mind out there.

“Logan, I’m going to make your wildest dreams happen all over again. Just tell me when and where and we’ll go already.”

“April 14th 1999.”

Forge didn’t ask why he had that date so ready in his mind. He just entered it into the device on his wrist.



“Okay, let’s go.”





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