Drafted

Drafted: Epilogue 

Pinwheel Universe: Revised Timeline, 2023

Westchester, New York

The soft, natural light. The laughter. The way the impossibly clear windows let in the late afternoon sun, and the way the smells of dinner being prepared in the kitchen permeated happily about the room. The way everything looked rich, colorful. People, who were real and warm, hearts beating steadily in their chests. All around, the fear was absent. 

The steam from the coffee was furling up from the warm mug, steading his hand as he gripped it, sitting calmly at a small table in the Westchester dining room. Since he'd woken up that morning, Logan had spend the whole afternoon out on a bike, presumably belonging to the sorry bastard's body he'd stolen. He’d thought about nature, the patterns in a timber tree. How its purpose was simply to grow. Like an animal might be. Unaware of its own existence. It was what it was.  And Logan...wasn’t. 

He was sure it had been her, in the end. The only problem was...he was certain he would’ve died with her. Alongside her. Alongside Storm and the others. Instead, he had somehow lived, had not drowned, and he had once again abandoned them all, escaping through a crack in time, slippery bastard that he was. And now there were imposters in place of the people that he had loved, happy and healthy. He hadn’t seen her since he’d first open his door that morning, but he’d been trackin’ her scent all day nevertheless. Her scent was different, somehow, still nectar and earth, but it was now inlaid with a hundred other things that hung like mysteries in the air. But there was nothing ghostly about her, like sensing her presence at the end had felt. 

A stranger. They all were.  Logan wanted to smoke a cigar, drink a bottle of bourbon, and then somehow find a way to get back. To his Rogue. To his people. But, of course, now, there was nowhere to go back to. He had erased it all. And he was once more displaced. Despite Charles’ efforts to soothe him, Logan knew what he had done. He was in the body of a man he’d just sentenced to death, the other Logan’s consciousness, a man who had lived fifty years of his life differently from his own, was no more. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, either. Maybe that man had been soft. Maybe that man had been weak. Maybe that man had been an asshole. Maybe not. But Logan was a soldier, and now, sitting in this place of joy, the relative silence and stillness of around him, he felt wrong. 

And then, “wham!” A pile of books landing on the table in front of him. He growled a little, and looked up begrudgingly to stare at who had distrubed him, already aware who the intruder was. Older, thinner. More refined. Beautiful and professional with tumbling brown hair and deep chocolate eyes, in a black blazer and a soft cotton button down and a pair of dark jeans, hand on one hip. She was lookin’ at him annoyed, like something was off kilter. Like she couldn’t figure him out. Like maybe...someone had run off with the old Logan and put this strange, stoic man in his place. She’d be right about that.

“Hey,” she said expectantly, as if she were telling him to stop slouching during class.

“Hey yerself,” he grumbled, and then she was taking the seat opposite of him, and he narrowed his eyes in annoyance at the further intrusion, now only a steaming mug of coffee and a pile of books and a whole other lifetime’s worth of experience between the pair.

“So,” she said, her eyes focused and determined, and he realized she was going to figure him out. She was going to get to the bottom of this. She was going to worm her way in, settle inside his goddamn heart, and ruin him once more. And this time for good. 

“So…” she said, a challenge in her eyes. “Spill.”

--

Forty one years later...

Pinwheel Universe: Revised Timeline,  August 2044

Westchester, New York

Neither of them said anything. Words didn’t quite need sayin’. Logan had finished the story, the book for Marie’s class, Mutant History 101.  It had been a hard thing to do, to write, and back in the cabin, Marie had read his notes, his interpretations of what he had experienced even though she had every memory Logan had. She read his notes studiously, with a sort of due-diligence only she could possess. She had cried during parts, was enraged during others, and afterward, with a tear-stained face, she’d ask to end her meditation, and go outside for real.

It was a still summer night in August, and Marie had chosen to forgo her shoes and now the neatly tended-to grass was cool and crisp under her feet. The school year was set to start soon, and it had been weighing on them all. She’d almost come to blows with Laura the other day over the academic schedule, and afterward they had apologized and split a six-pack on the veranda. Now though, the sun had set, the crickets chirped, and the moon was out, and Logan took it all in from her perspective as she finally found what she was looking for. On the northern side of the mansion, the pillars, commemorating each person who had lost their life for this institution and the ideology it represented. Marie’s hands only shook slightly as she ran it over the Professor’s, Hank’s, Kitty’s, Scott’s and the rest, and then, finally.. Storm’s. She paused there, and frowned.

“You knew a different woman than me,” she said to the dark air, to the man that now only resided in her mind.

She was the same woman, kid. Same soldier. Same spirit. 

“She sacrificed so much,” Marie whispered.

You did too. We all did, Logan thought tiredly. And then, he could feel the fear, the regret, bubbling up inside Marie.

Marie? He nudged her gently. But she didn’t respond immediately, choosing now to sit in the cool grass just before Storm’s headstone, just like the way she would do with Logan’s back in Hay River sometimes. 

“I just...I want to get this class right. I want to...we need to get it right,” she whispered as she drew her knees up to herself. Logan hesitated a second before responding. There was no way, really, to know all the had happened, all the pain and moments of hope and loss they had all felt. No way to know the former Marie’s awful end, and all the moments in between that had filled her short life.

I know, darlin’, he finally responded. 

“Will you help me? Get it right, sugar? Or as close as we can to it?” she whispered to the dark. At this, he softly chuckled and spread out his consciousness to her, warming her, and she responded by smiling.

Always, kid. Trust me. Together, we’ll tell their story.

We’ll get it right.

-End-