Chapter Text
It was like stepping through a hole in time when Logan first entered the Alkali-Transigen facility. He wore blue jeans, a wife beater under his flannel jacket, and second hand Army boots. He bore a small pack on his back, its straps secured across his chest. Logan exhaled the overly sterile air in a quick huff. Sure, he’d seen the facility on Gabriela’s phone, but that hadn’t prepared him for the smell. Antiseptic despair. Chemical cocktails that shouldn’t exist this side of hell. Alkali had appended their name, changed the walls to clinical white instead of gray stone, but this was the same place. His body remembered. It knew.
The sharp copper scent of blood joined the miasma as Logan dashed through the facility, killing every guard he saw. There were precious few; they must have thought he was dead, or maybe they were short-staffed after the slaughter in New Mexico. Now that the X-23 kids were gone, he didn’t feel a need to discriminate. All who remained were mad scientists and whatever Reavers he hadn’t personally slaughtered before.
Charles was gone. Aside from a band of children, Logan was the only mutant left. And he was in no shape to tackle the entire mecca of mutant genetic experimentation in his current condition.
He had a plan. It was insane, and sketchy as fuck, but for something this important he figured it was best to stick with what he knew.
—
It was easier than he’d expected to track down the X-24 wing. The facility was arranged in a simple grid, and between various Reaver’s key cards, he seemed to have unhindered access. The female scientist he held pinned to his side had given up kicking after he’d pressed his fist, dripping with blood and gore, against the side of her head in an unmistakable threat. She was frozen in his arms, legs curled up halfway, as if she’d been turned to stone. Logan lugged her into a wide, white-walled room with human-scale medical imaging of that monstrous carbon-copy of himself they’d dredged out of the primordial muck to use against him. The shadows of his past never fucking went away. He crushed the woman against him, bruising, relentless.
“You know what I want,” he snarled. “Get it. No tricks, or I will hurt you in ways you can’t even imagine.”
He let her feet hit the ground and shoved her forward. Pulled one of the Reavers’ hand guns from the back of his jeans and kept it trained on her in warning. She staggered forward stiffly, reaching out to steady herself against a soulless white work desk. Her breath was steady, but her hands shook and her legs shuffled like they were made of wood. She went straight to one wall where a dimly lit, light-blue square bulged subtly out from the concrete, framing a flat, white panel. With her thumbprint and a retina scan, there was the hiss of air rushing into an enclosure and the panel lowered. A plume of frosty air billowed out, revealing behind it three rows of clear glass vials in various shades. The leftmost row of vials, he recognized. It was that bright green serum they used on their mutant experiments to make them stronger, more vicious and crazy, and to accelerate healing. Keeping a wary eye on the windows around them, Logan stalked up behind her to look over her shoulder.
“Name what each of those is for. Fast. Don’t think about it.”
She jerked at his voice, then pointed to the first vial in the row and started talking in a quick, flat half-whisper.
“Regeneration. On-the-spot use only, to speed healing for severe wounds and make you stronger.” There were a lot of those green vials going back into the wall cavity. Made sense, if it was used often.
The second row of bottles were clear. She pointed to one. “This is the source mutant DNA, suspended in a preservative solution. Saved to grow the next…” she blinked, seeming to realize who she was talking to, and Logan jabbed the gun into her spine. “The-the next weapon,” she stammered.
She pointed to the third in the row. There was only one of these bottles, a deceptively peaceful shade of lavender. “This is pure healing factor extracted from the sample DNA. Dr. Rice managed to turn it into an isolate, but we could never get it to work on anyone. Except the X-24–it didn’t seem to affect him at all. We did experiments with human mercenaries–volunteers,” she added quickly (as if that would make it better), “to make them more durable, but it killed them.” She shivered. “Horribly.”
Logan let out a breath–not so much disgust, or even outrage, but something far and above either. He pushed the woman aside, grabbed the last bottle, the isolate, and shoved it into his blood-drenched jeans pocket. Then he grabbed as many of the first row of bottles as he could in one hand and shoved them into the other pockets in his pants and jacket. They clinked dully together. If they broke, fine. The isolate was what he was truly after. Rapid healing on demand was just a bonus.
As for what remained–
Well. He had a grenade for that.
—--
He left her gagged and tied to the furniture in Dr. Rice’s office, where he’d dragged her next so he could load his backpack with hard drives, flash drives, anything he could find that looked like it might have information on it. Once she was tied up, he took the backpack off and stuffed everything into it, adding the vials from his pockets to the most cushioned pockets of his pack.
He should’ve killed her. Wasn’t sure why he hadn’t.
He had to take a different route to escape the compound. The way he’d come got caved in during one of the battles with A-T’s guns-for-hire. No telling how long he had, either, before they called in more guns. Someone had frozen the elevators. He took the stairs, practically sliding down them as he held the handrails, the skin on his palms searing off with the friction. The goddamn floors weren’t labeled inside the stairwell. Who does that?
He made it to the bottom and pushed through the escape in a staggering, limping run. Now that the rage of battle was over, his goddamn joints were giving him hell. He was vaguely aware of concrete-walled rooms around him, each with clear plexiglass panes in front to allow the “researchers” to look in on their “experiments.” They were all empty.
All, except one up ahead on his left. Huffing, coughing, he tried to make sense of what he saw in there as he neared. It was pale flesh-toned, rounded, but the shape didn’t make sense. Too small to be a bald head; misshapen if it was a knee. Forehead pulled into a deep scowl, Logan slowed his fairly pathetic run as he came around to the front of the cell.
No, it wasn’t a head or a knee. It was the stump of an arm, amputated halfway down the forearm. Logan stared down, stunned. All the Reavers were amputees. This could be any of them.
Except…
The man was naked. His dirty blond hair stuck limply to the back of his neck, far longer than the sharp-shaved undercut Donald Pierce had favored. The man was on his side, in a fetal curl with his face tucked defensively into the biceps of his handless right arm. His left arm was stretched out above him, the wrist attached to a short chain which attached to a sturdy bolt in the wall. He had a metal collar around his throat which wasn’t attached to anything, but Logan saw what could have been a microchip glinting in a recess of the collar. Alkali had never been shy about using shock therapy to keep its experiments in line.
The floor around the prisoner and the wall beside him were splattered with blood. Amid the smears were handprints, bare footprints, and boot prints. The man was a rainbow of bruises anywhere from faded yellow to fresh black; hardly an inch of his body was unmarked.
“Fuck,” Logan whispered. He hadn’t meant to say it; the word rode out of him on a wave of weary horror.
The prisoner’s shoulder twitched, then hunched inward. Slowly, as if with dread, he lifted his eyes from the protective cover of his biceps and rolled them upward until he could see Logan’s feet.
It was him. Broken, tortured, beaten half to death, but it was Donald Pierce.
Before he knew what he was doing, Logan slammed one of his stolen keycards into the pad on the door. He got it on the first try; the door whooshed aside for him. Pierce heard the sound and hunched tighter around himself, with a whimper like a dying dog. He didn’t look up; his face sagged toward the floor, hanging between his shoulders as he pushed himself, with an uncoordinated kicking of his legs and elbows, to try to put his back against the wall.
“How ya doin, Donnie?” Logan asked in a flat tone. “Your pals takin’ good care of you?”
Pierce’s head rocked back drunkenly at the sound of Logan’s voice. He lifted his gaze–eyes still so perfectly blue, the color of warm summer skies (if those skies were lined with the dull red glow and ashy darkness of missile airstrikes: between bruises and evident crying, his eyelids were black and red). Blood had dried in streaks down his forehead, crusted under his nose and on his chin. Some was still wet, and stuck to the floor in long strings that dripped from his chin as his head raised. Their eyes locked. Pierce’s face did something–pulled into some expression Logan didn’t recognize. Something raw and bitter. He tried to say something, but it came out on an unintelligible exhalation. His head dropped back onto his outstretched left arm. He seemed to realize he was naked. Tried to cover himself, but his shortened arm didn’t reach. His face spasmed, this time with clear, furious despair, and he struggled to shield his crotch by pulling in his legs.
Logan didn’t mean to look. Now that he was inside the cell, he could smell semen amid the blood and other bodily fluids. He had no real desire to see the extent of the torture Pierce’s comrades had inflicted on him. But his eyes tracked toward the movement as Pierce tried to hide from him, and he saw something he had not expected, drawn in thick, black marker across the man’s pale, bruised thighs like a curse.
Hash marks. Dozens of them–no, more than that, each quartet of parallel lines intersected by a fifth. Haphazard clusters of them lined his legs, his hips, the curve of his waist.
Logan knew what the marks meant. He’d seen (participated in, sometimes) scenes where girls or guys would let themselves be tied up and fucked, then marked by each person who rode them. In that context, it had been fun. A little sting of degradation to spice up the encounter.
This wasn’t fun. This was meant to destroy, to humiliate. Pierce had led his team into a battle they’d lost hideously. There was visceral hatred behind those marks. Some of them were faded, like the old bruises.
It had been three weeks since their last battle in New Mexico. Three weeks. And while the hair on Pierce’s head had grown about an inch, his face was clean shaven. It made him look younger, prettier, despite (or maybe because of) all the bruises and blood. He looked like the perfect victim.
Distant disgust rolled up the back of Logan’s throat, but it subsided quickly. He’d seen plenty of horrors in his long, long life. What was one more?
“Th’ W’lverine,” Pierce slurred, the wrecked voice a hollow echo of his original cocky drawl. Blood bubbled out of his mouth and dripped down his cheek. His gold tooth glinted through the blood as he managed a bitter huff of air that was probably supposed to be a laugh. “You’re such a—” Pierce stopped, his amputated arm flinching toward his ribs as he took a shallow, pained breath. “F-fuckin’…disappoin’ment,” he managed at last, glaring defiant hatred up at Logan.
Logan’s expression betrayed nothing, but the phrase hit him in the chest and then some. Xavier in those last days, floating between lucidity and madness, had said just about the same. What a disappointment you are.
“I’d kill you right now, but it looks like you got what was comin’ to ya,” Logan replied, deadpan. Pierce’s entire face flinched.
He believes it.
Logan had no idea what to make of that.
No—it didn’t matter. He had no reason to make anything of it. He let out a sound of disgust and started to turn.
“Nnnn! Nn, wait!” Even his pleas were smarmy and pathetic. Logan’s teeth bared in a repulsed snarl as he looked down again. Tears had made tracks through the blood on Pierce’s face. His mouth shivered over silence, as if he believed, no matter what he said, it would make no difference.
For the past three weeks, it probably hadn’t.
“Please don’ leave me here. I’ll do anyth’ng you want. Serious, anyth’ng. Don’ leave me—ple…ease—”
The last word trailed off into weak, shuddering sobs. For a crazy half second, Logan almost relented. Then he remembered that video clip of Pierce dragging an unconscious little boy by his leg into the room where he was to be “put to sleep,” and the moment passed.
“Rot in hell,” Logan growled. He turned on his heel and stalked out, resuming his former trajectory down the hall. From the room behind him, Pierce worked his voice up to a broken scream.
“Wait! WAIT! Y’goin the wrong way, fucker! ‘S a dead end!”
Logan lurched to a stop, squinting ahead. The cells on each side were so uniform, it created the illusion that any one of them could be an adjoining hallway until he got up close and realized it was not. He couldn’t tell for certain if there was a turnoff ahead.
“Fuck,” he muttered as he turned back, hauling his aching body—which felt heavier by the minute—back to Pierce’s cell. His cough was getting bad again, wracking his lungs against the prison bars of his ribs.
The sight of Pierce was no less pathetic the second time around, but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as it had been before he’d seen the hash marks and smelled the rank tang of old cum. He leaned against the open door and focused all the pain in his body into a furious scowl.
“I’m guessing,” he growled between coughs, “you’ll show me the way if I let you go, huh?” Pierce was such a slimy, bottom-feeding weasel: of course he’d use any lever he had to get what he wanted.
Pierce’s jaw clenched, spasmed. “Like I said. Get me out o’ here and I’ll do anythin’ you want.” He couldn’t keep eye contact as he said it; his gaze slid to the side and shadowed with what looked like (couldn’t have been?) shame.
“I’ll bet you will,” Logan snarled between coughs. Fuck, he was getting worse by the minute. He unsnapped the strap across his chest and shrugged the backpack off his shoulders, caught it in one hand and dropped it on the floor. He bent over it, scrambled at the pocket where he’d stuffed a few of the green serum vials. Pierce watched him fumble one out, along with a syringe. He said nothing, but his tension and impatience practically vibrated off the walls. Logan pulled on the plunger, extracting half the bottle before Pierce snapped, “Too much!”
Logan glared up at him. Some of the old Reaver commander was in his demeanor as Pierce looked sternly between Logan and the bottle.
“Use that much, you’ll go strong for a minute then fall apart. Y’only need a quarter o’ that.” Seeing the suspicion in Logan’s eyes he said, for the third time, as if sealing a pact: “Get me out an’ I’ll do anythin’ you want.” His lip curled in a sneer, exposing the gold tooth. “I’m done with this fuckin’ place.”
“Seems more like they’re done with you,” Logan growled back. Pierce’s face went utterly blank. Logan ignored it. He pressed the plunger back down until only about a quarter of the dose remained in the syringe. He tucked the vial back into his pack, winced in anticipation, and stabbed the syringe into his neck.
The serum ran like cold heat through his body. Tingling overtook his throat, scalp, arms and chest, legs and feet. The room pulled into crystalline focus, the blur in his near vision gone. Logan huffed a few rapid breaths, his body anticipating the berserker rage which had followed his last dose, but it never came. He felt alert and strong, able to take down a battalion of Reavers, but his mind was clear.
“Told ya,” Pierce said softly. His expression was unreadable. Guarded.
Logan didn’t respond. He shrugged the backpack on and secured it, then went up to Pierce, grabbed his wrist, and extended a single claw between the delicate veins of his inner wrist and the manacle around it. Pierce hissed through his teeth as the manacle popped open, taking torn skin with it; his wrist was bloody and raw from evident struggling. Pierce pulled his hand to his chest, cradling it, his eyes slipping closed as a soft breath escaped him. He looked unbearably relieved and Logan wondered, for a moment, how much the man must have feared to lose his only remaining hand. Maybe that had been a planned part of the torture.
He shook his head, dispelling the unwelcome moment of empathy. He grabbed Pierce’s lower jaw and tilted his head up, baring the bruised column of his throat. Near panic flashed through those blue eyes as they snapped back open. Logan could feel the man’s pulse jump and race beneath his fingertips. Without bothering to soothe Pierce’s fear, glaring directly into his eyes, Logan extended the same claw and pressed the back of it against his throat, just under the collar. Pierce held still except for a spasm as he clenched his teeth. Logan pushed the back of the claw harder than necessary into Pierce’s throat as he slipped it between throat and collar. The metal collar snapped like it was made of string. Pierce’s shoulders jerked inward as if at a gunshot and he let out a stifled grunt. He lifted his right arm toward his throat, as though to check for blood, then seemed to remember there was no hand at the end of it. He swallowed. There was a ring of blackened skin and raw, blood-dotted pink flesh where the collar had been. Some kind of heat or electricity had been used, burning the flesh beneath.
“Come on,” Logan grunted, again angry with himself for feeling pity for this monster. Pierce had probably put that same collar on the throats of captive mutant children without thinking twice about it.
Enough. They were losing time. The fact they’d had this long only spoke once more to A-T’s short-staffed security detail, and probably disarray in management with Rice dead. Logan pulled Pierce up by his maimed arm with surprising ease. Not only did Pierce feel lighter—probably 20 pounds lost since they’d last met—but Logan’s body felt strong, easily able to carry his own heavy skeleton and this battered mercenary.
He tried to ignore the aborted gasps and grunts of pain, just as Pierce tried to stifle them. Pierce’s left hand came up to grab Logan’s shirt, trying to ease the pull on his right arm. He tried to get his legs underneath him, but they shook and buckled, again and again. Logan ground out a curse and put an arm under Pierce’s, looping his shortened right arm over his own shoulders. Pierce bent his elbow against the back of Logan’s neck, fighting to hold himself up.
This close, the stink of semen was overwhelming. Logan’s nose wrinkled and he tilted his face away from Pierce’s. They’d used him like a cum dumpster and hadn’t bothered to clean him up much, other than keeping his face shaven. He pushed unwelcome visions out of his head and gripped Pierce’s waist securely, helping to hold his weight as the man’s head lolled forward. Turning back to look at him, Logan saw that his eyes had half-closed, insensible. His face had blanched grayish-white.
“Hey!” Logan shook him. “Wake the fuck up! Where do I go to get out?”
Pierce’s golden eyelashes fluttered. “Pl’z…no more…”
Logan slapped Pierce’s cheek with his free hand. Those lashes fluttered again and Pierce’s eyes rolled forward from the back of his head. He coughed, looking around in disorientation. Bloody mucus dribbled from one nostril.
“Which way?” Logan asked again. “Focus!” He knew the sudden change of position had caused the faint, but they didn’t have time for Pierce to recover. He raised his hand as if to deliver a harder slap. Pierce saw it and flinched, took a shallow breath, and seemed to get his bearings.
“Go t’the right,” he breathed, uncurling his index finger from Logan’s shirt to point out the door of the cell.
His head fell against Logan’s shoulder as Logan dragged him along. Pierce’s clenched hand hung heavy in the front of Logan’s shirt, stretching the fabric. Pierce tried to walk along, but the shuffling of his legs was more hindrance than help. Logan cursed under his breath.
“Up ahead. Turn left.”
“That’s the way I came from.”
“Stairs,” Pierce said. “Up one level.”
The unmarked staircase. Of course—it made sense. This could be a basement level; he’d had no way of knowing. He quickened his steps, practically carrying Pierce along.
The stairs were a miserable slog with Pierce in tow. Without that serum, Logan doubted he could’ve managed it. At long last he reached the next landing and used his key card to open the door.
A burly Reaver with a rifle stood twenty paces from the stairwell. The man swung toward him, one finger of his mechanical right hand held ready across his rifle’s trigger guard. He didn’t hesitate, but aimed and fired even as Logan shoved Pierce out of the line of fire and darted forward. The bullets hit like hammer blows, staggering but not stopping him. Within a few seconds, the Reaver’s skull was spitted on his claws. Logan scanned the hallway where they stood, but no one else was near.
He turned at a shuffling sound and realized Pierce had crawled up behind him on elbows and knees. His face was contorted in furious determination, his eyes locked on the dead Reaver. Pierce tugged the Reaver’s pistol from his leg holster.
“Motha’fucker,” he snarled. He pressed the barrel of the gun to the man’s right elbow, just above where the prosthesis was banded to his forearm. Two gunshots rang loud through the hallway, vibrating the walls, before Logan grabbed Pierce’s wrist, hard, and snatched the gun from his hand.
“Stop that, idiot! Keep up that fuckin’ noise, they’ll all come running!”
Pierce snarled through his teeth, an animal sound. He wrenched his wrist from Logan’s grip and grabbed the Reaver’s prosthesis, trying to tug it off him. The wounds in the dead man’s elbow had shattered some bone, but it still held fast to the rest of him.
“Godfuckingdammit,” Logan growled. He discarded the handgun, shoved Pierce out of the way, and raked his claws across the dead man’s arm, shearing it from his body. Pierce snatched up the severed prosthetic and its grisly remains like it was the last bottle of water in an empty desert, clutching it tight to himself as if Logan might try to take it from him.
“Keep the fucking hand,” Logan snapped. “Come on! You and this dipshit just let every Reaver in the fucking building know where to find us.”
None too gently, he tugged Pierce’s right arm back around his shoulders and wrapped an arm around his waist to lift him back to his feet. Pierce screamed through his teeth. His feet shuffled for purchase on the floor, leaving red footprints. Looking down, Logan realized fresh blood had painted Pierce’s inner thighs since leaving the cell. It had drizzled all the way down his legs to the floor.
“Fuck, fuck,” he whispered. Pierce was in no shape at all to walk, even with Logan holding him up. “Gonna put you over my shoulders so I can run.”
Pierce’s head snapped up. A hard expression crossed his face, but he quickly got hold of whatever protest he wanted to make. “Shit,” he said in acknowledgement. He adjusted his grip on the prosthetic hand as Logan bent to put his shoulder into Pierce’s hip. Pierce let Logan maneuver him into place until he was wrapped like an unwieldy shawl around Logan’s shoulders. Gripping the prosthesis like a lifeline, he wrapped his left arm around his own left leg to secure himself in the fireman’s carry. Logan wrinkled his nose at the scents battering him, the cum, blood, and unwashed flesh, the rank stink of despair and terror that had settled through every pore in Pierce’s body. He started at a walk, quickly gaining momentum as Pierce grunted out directions. Within a few minutes they reached the open atrium Logan had first come through when he’d entered the facility. He heard shouts off to the right, muffled through a wall, but no one stood inside the atrium. The two guards stationed outside the door died quickly by his claws.
He didn’t let himself feel relief until he was outside the perimeter fence, driving a stolen merc humvee with Pierce sprawled, totally insensible, across the back seats. Even unconscious, his grip never slackened on that prosthetic.