Drafted

Drafted

Prologue

Pinwheel Universe: Original Timeline, October 2015

Two Rivers Research Facility, Alberta, Canada

His organs were still struggling to become whole again as he snarled, shoving dozens of men off him, roaring as he plunged his claws into anything with a fucking heartbeat. Anything that breathed, anything that moved. Around him, bullets pebbled his skin, sirens sang overhead, and his breath was only a shudder, because he knew. He knew deep down in everything he was. Poisoned. 

“Med Bay A, now!” Rogue shouted, and something in him registered her words, even as the knowledge pulsed deep and wild. Poisoned. Sick. Dying. The roar of a jet. Charles’ voice in their minds. A turned corner, and then a fresh swell of guards. He only threw her a wild, savage look, and she nodded quickly as she began to work on the code for the Medbay door and he pivoted to slice jugulars and disembowel intestines and end life after life. He was barely holding on. Blood everywhere. The walls, his canvas. Grief, his muse. 

These fuckers can inject you with a poison that will leave you dead in five minutes.

She was dying. 

And then the sound of his name on the air as she called to him just as he finished off the last guard in the latest swell, and he staggered forward once more, retracting his claws and wiping the blood out of his eyes with one shredded hand quickly knitting his own skin back up where the claws had done their damage for the billionth time over. He growled, bared his teeth, as he realized at once what she needed. A little girl, no older than five, unconscious on a cot. Two boys hovering in a corner. He quickly scooped up the unconscious girl with the vicious “M” scarred on her face, and clutched her to him, holding her head to his chest as Rogue ushered the older two boys forward. Then, it was only running. Desperately closing the space between them and the extraction point at the end of Block A. 

Hearts thumping wildly. The thrum of the Blackbird overhead. Then one of Blink’s portals snapping open, and he was through it, handing the girl off to Storm, ushering the older boys into the jet, and then, he turned.

No. 

There she was. Tears streaming down her cheeks, and yet somehow face stern and set. Fate accepted.  Something had gone dark around her eyes. She smelled sick. Toxic. Poisoned. And worse, she wouldn’t go to him. Wouldn’t dare move.

“ Come ON!” he roared. Then, a quiet acceptance in her eyes. A deadening. 

“No,” she said simply, and he was all instinct, pure rage, as he shouted her name again.

“Marie!”

“It’s done, baby,” she murmured her voice struggling, and then something from last night cleared itself in a place in his mind, amidst the fire. 

“You knew…” he finally breathed.  “You knew it would come to this. That’s why, last night, you wouldn’t…” he stopped, voice breaking.  

“I love you,” she said, fiercely, just beyond the rift. “You hear me? I love you. Always have.”

“Marie, baby, don’t do this,” Logan begged, but, as he reached for her again, she took a step backward, while also pressing him back through the portal from where he had tried to grasp her hand. He already knew: she was stronger than him. He couldn’t stop her.

“I’ll see you in another life, sugar. A better one,” she stammered. Logan was seething, unable to comprehend. She didn’t understand. She didn’t realize. He had already seen that world. He’d dreamt of a family at peace. He’d seen a cottonwood tree in a front yard, a rope swing, like the one she talked about from her childhood during those late nights in the Canadian bunker. He’d seen a swath of sky full of stars. He’d seen a son they would never have, shafts of light in his dark hair in the late afternoon sun. He’d seen a life immune to pain and tyranny. He’d seen love and compassion and time spent making up for all the fucking years he’d been hiding from her. He was going to make it up to her. Goddamnit, this was the part he was gonna make up to her.

“No. Baby, baby-” he was stammering, about to stumble back through the portal toward her. But there were arms pulling at him, a nod from Rogue to Blink beyond the divide, and, just like that, Rogue, Block A, and the blood pooling at Two Rivers was gone. Just...gone.

He blinked...chest convulsing, the animal in him confused and bewildered as he stared at the steel interior of the jet, body still splattered in the blood of his enemies.  Her words reverberated through his head, over and over again, even as he was forced into a seat by Blink and Storm, even as the bombs fell, even as he heard the screams of destruction on the wind. The Blackbird rocketed forward as fast as it ever had before, the children they had brought on board crying silently, and it was as he shut his eyes tightly, he felt it. The same deadening. A black hole. A dead star. Slowly compacting everything in him down into a flat, black sphere. A decaying universe.