Whatever (Firing Pin) It's getting colder again. Time passes Logan by, most of the time, but the changing of the seasons gives him something almost-tangible to hang on to. He himself remains much the same, but when the leaves turn red and gold and the wind gets that autumn sting to it, he can look around and say 'Another year has passed.' His earliest clear memories are of high, cold skies and violently colourful mountainsides, so his New Year's comes in late September. He doesn't count the years, not consciously - he doesn't want to know - but somewhere inside, there's a little calendar racking up a count. He just never looks at it.
He stands by his truck with his hands in his pockets. The wind has been picking up speed all day and by now it comes whistling down the empty street in icy gusts, carrying dead leaves and candy wrappers that collect in the gutters and around Logan's feet. Dusk is creeping in, and one by one, the windows of the apartment buildings across the street light, dusty-golden.
Logan turns away from the light and back to his truck. He digs through his pockets, sifting through the assorted debris. He has thirty dollars. It's time to move out of this town, and all he has is thirty dollars. And one last cigar. This calls for a choice: get gas and food and get out in time, or let the promise of warmth and strong Canadian beer take him to Don's Bar. Maybe there'll be trouble, maybe not, but Don's is a certainty. Logan leaves the truck where it is and walks the four blocks to the bar.
It's his hangout of choice - the stereotypical working man's joint: low-lit, smoky, filled with loud, heavily drinking men and the smell of their heavy, meat-eating bodies and their sweat and their greasy mullets. Logan doesn't look out of place here in his brown leather jacket and worn jeans and unshaven face. He doesn't need to talk to anyone. They respect a man who drinks alone.
He sits by the bar and is well into his second Molson when the door is flung open with the determined clang of an entré. Heads turn. Logan isn't going to look - out of contrariness, mostly - but then he catches the scent of the newcomer, smells something other than man and sweat and greasy hair, and has to look after all.
The man - tall, maybe thirty, far too clean and stylish for this place - walks up to the bar, right past Logan, with the air of a movie star slumming it. His smell, which is sharp and somehow electric, crackling like a contained thunderstorm around him, tickles Logan's nose and pokes little needles of adrenaline into his muscles.
Logan turns back to his beer, fighting down the fight-or-flight reflex that zaps through him. His mouth has gone dry and the beer tastes flat. The guy in the long coat orders a scotch. Logan abandons his strangely tasteless beer and leaves.
He's heard whispers, every once in a while, about other freaks like him, but he's never seen one before. This guy, with the electricity he wore like a second coat, sure hadn't been human, and part of Logan - the part that's lonely - had wanted to ask him what he was. The rest of Logan - the part that's angry - had just itched to rip out his throat, to lash out and tear the nameless threat into bloody pieces.
* He awakes to cold, bright moonlight. For a few minutes, the only sound he hears is the rapid thundering of his own heart, and the harsh rasping of his breath. The world filters back gradually. The usual sounds: the coughing rumble of a car a few streets down; the whisper of the wind in frozen leaves; a dog barking. But something has startled him out of sleep, and he casts about for the strangeness, the sound that doesn't belong.
He leaves the truck and walks down the street in a completely random direction, pushing his hands deep into his pockets and hunching his back against the wind. He finds the abandoned stump of his last cigar in his jacket pocket and lights it with a certain amount of gratitude. He walks down an alley and up another street, this one starkly forbidding under broken streetlights. The moonlight here seems sharper and colder without the mild yellow of the sodium lights to soften it. Logan keeps to the tar-black shade cast by the buildings. The dark doesn't bother him, and it isn't like he has to be afraid of getting mugged, so he ambles on, his thoughts circling his brain like vultures over a dying buffalo. There are so many things a man doesn't want to think about when he wakes up in the dead of night.
He spots a white pebble, just barely visible as a reflection of the moonlight, and kicks it along the pavement for half a block until a flash of memory (I haven't done this since I was a kid) unsettles him and makes him long for a beer. Or something stronger than a beer. He doesn't particularly want to, but he can't help prodding the odd bit of memory - gingerly, like someone else might pick at a scab. Logan can't remember ever having a scab.
And there it is again: the smell of lightning. Sounds of metal striking metal coming from up ahead. He's been hearing it for a while, but has somehow failed to register the sound. Now it seems obscenely loud. The ozone scent makes his head hurt. Logan thinks, I don't need this, but he goes anyway, his hackles up and his muscles so tight they're almost twanging as he walks.
There's a vacant lot a block down the street, and that's where the sound's coming from. Logan can walk very quietly when he wants to, and with the clamor they're making, the men on the lot don't notice him when he stops and stares.
It's the guy from the bar. Him, and someone else in a long coat. They're swinging at each other with long, heavy swords, and Logan actually has to close his eyes and shake his head and try again before he believes what he's seeing. Fighting - yeah, that's something that happens around him. But with swords? So far, the closest he's come to a sword in a fight is an eight-inch hunting knife. And that over there isn't a couple of ninnies prancing around with padded rapiers, either - these guys mean business. They move in a quick, deadly dance that goes round and round on the empty lot, the swords catching the bright moonlight and the dim streetlight in a hypnotic flicker - flashing alternately bleached-bone white, and almost candle-light-soft, dull yellow. The guy he saw last night does move like a dancer; elegant and fluid, with apparent ease. Nurejev with a broadsword. The other man is bigger, but seems clumsier and slower, and as Logan watches, Nurejev gracefully sidesteps a too-forceful lunge from him and brings his sword around and into Clumsy Guy's side.
He drops to his knees with a groan, his sword dropping from his hand and clattering loudly on the asphalt. Logan smells blood mixed with that strange electricity.
"Goodbye," Nurejev says cheerfully, raising his sword. Logan lunges.
He hits the sword-wielding maniac in a low running tackle, and the jarring impact almost drowns out the familiar pain of the claws releasing. They go down together, a tangle of arms and legs and sword and Nurejev's long coat. Nurejev goes completely still underneath Logan, so still that Logan, for a second, thinks he's broken his neck in the fall. He hears the scrape of metal and scrabble of feet as Clumsy Guy picks up his sword and takes off at a run. Nurejev stays still, pinned under Logan, his eyes closed, his face slack.
Logan eases back an inch or two, just to take a look, and Nurejev explodes into action. It's like trying to hold a fighting dog down - live wire force unleashed - and Logan can't get a good grip. He doesn't want to kill the guy.
He changes his mind when Nurejev twists loose and rolls easily to his feet - and comes up holding his sword again. He's grinning.
Logan stands up slowly, holding his hands low and outstretched. Nurejev's grin freezes for a second when he notices the claws. He blinks once, deliberately. Then the grin widens.
"Hey, doggy, doggy, doggy," he chants softly, circling Logan with the sword in an easy, natural grip. Logan holds onto his temper for three whole seconds before he simply rushes the guy and stabs the nine-inch claws on his right hand into his chest. He barely registers the sting as the sword bites into his side.
Nurejev makes a muted gargling sound. When Logan withdraws his claws and lets him slip, he sees that the lunatic is still smiling. The smile stays on even as his eyes glaze over and his lungs stop trying to pull in air through the new holes in his ribcage.
Logan stands over the body for a while, trying to get his bearings. There's a strange static crackle in his ears and the hairs on his neck stand on end. The smell of ozone stings in his nose and makes his eyes water.
He's going to have to get rid of the body. "Stupid, stupid, stupid," he mutters, feeling rudely awakened and pissed at the fact that he'll have to put it in his truck. Who knows how long that weird smell will linger in the upholstery? It isn't precisely unpleasant, but it's so alien that Logan's mind keeps jerking back to it. Every other second, another wave of adrenaline courses through his body, and he has to forcibly relax his muscles. His hands are aching, and he realises he's been holding them clenched into fists. The smell isn't dissipating any, either, even though our guy Nurejev has expired. Instead, it seems to be growing stronger - almost tangible...
A crackle of electricity runs bright blue over Nurejev's body, and Logan springs back with a growl, his claws releasing reflexively. Oh, Christ ... he can hear it all the time now; tiny, sharp snaps of discharge all over the lifeless body.
"Hmph. And they say I'm a freak," Logan tells the corpse.
* Bringing the truck takes fifteen minutes, and Logan is almost expecting the body to have exploded in a shower of blue fire by the time he gets back. But no, there it still is, lying in an untidy heap on the cracked asphalt, cooling blood in the matted blonde of its hair, its eyes at an unfocused half-mast. A subtle glow of blue stands around it like a halo. Logan shies from touching it: there aren't many things that can kill him, or even hurt him permanently, but this is something outside of his experience, and who the hell knows what it could do?
Nothing at all, it turns out, and he rolls his eyes and coughs out an embarrassed chuckle at himself as he scoops up the limp corpse and puts it in the shotgun seat of his truck. As an afterthought, he goes back for the sword. It's heavy and long and razor-sharp; worn and polished in a way that suggests long and careful use. A warrior's blade, Logan thinks, not some hobby stick to show off when the nephews are visiting.
He's driven twenty minutes out of town when the corpse shudders and convulses and comes back to life with a huge, choking breath and a last, bright blue spark, and Logan jerks in surprise and drives off the road. He bangs his head on the steering wheel when the truck hits a young maple in a shower of artfully red leaves.
He shakes his head to clear it, and feels cold steel on his throat.
"Keep those talons on the wheel, JoJo," the man formerly known as the corpse of Nurejev with a broadsword whispers in Logan's ear. "Where do you keep them? Inside your skin? Tsk. The things you see these days."
Logan says nothing, just sits quietly. He could kill this clown with a flick of his wrist, but it looks like getting him to stay dead might be a problem.
Cool fingers - but warming along with the no-longer-dead body - feather over the skin of Logan's throat and his muscles twitch with the effort of keeping still and not just - what? - turning around and ripping the guy's head off? Taking off at a dead run into the deep woods? Something entirely different? The touch of fingertips on his flesh leaves a subtle tingling and Logan forcibly stills his breathing.
Nurejev has found his dogtags, and lifts them carefully, still keeping that huge razor of his pressed unwaveringly against Logan's Adam's apple. Logan waits.
"Wolverine?" There's faint amusement in the soft word. Logan can hear the smile. "Wolverines kill for fun." A beat, then, "hmm. So do I. But I don't usually piss on the corpse afterwards. You wanted to piss on me? That would have really ticked me off."
"I can kill you again," Logan says softly.
"Yeah. And again, and again. And again again. But what's the point? You seem kinda hard to kill, too, though I'd really like to try. I want to see where your weak spots are. Do you have any weak spots? You can tell me."
Logan schools his face into a faintly superior sneer. "We can talk," he says. "You wanna get your butter knife out of my face?"
"By all means. Just keep your claws where they are, like a good boy." The sword whispers across Logan's skin with the promise of razorblade sharpness, but never bites down hard enough to draw blood. Then it's gone, and Logan turns to face the freak in his passenger seat. His hands itch dully, right between the knuckles where the claws are waiting to break through skin and muscle.
"Hey, hey!" Nurejev says, a little annoyed. "Down, boy. Peace, okay? I don't like dying twice in one day. It upsets my stomach."
"Tough," Logan mutters, but stays motionless.
"So ... what exactly are you? I don't remember JoJo the Dog-faced Boy having steel claws. Although that would have been such fun. Don't you think?"
"What are you?"
"Not much of a conversationalist, are you?" Nurejev says with a quick, easy grin. He seems completely comfortable, leaning back in the seat with the sword resting across his knees. Crazy bastard, Logan thinks. Nurejev raises a sardonic eyebrow, as if he can see the thought printed on Logan's face. "I'm Tyler King," he says amiably.
"That really explains things, Sparky."
"Well, it's kind of a secret, JoJo," Tyler King says in a stage whisper. "But I'll show you mine if you show me yours."
"What makes you think I want to see yours?" He nods in the general direction of the road. "Hit the road."
Tyler King snickers. He doesn't move. "Touchy touchy ..."
Logan feels as if he should be having a headache. Tyler King is watching him intently, unwaveringly. Dawn's first anemic light falls over his face, and Logan sees that his eyes are pale blue, both spaced-out and intense. His scent is everywhere in the truck.
"What are you still doing here?" Logan asks. Not a headache, just pressure. That smell... His body seems to have trouble interpreting its impulses. Run, fight, kill, fuck--
"I think your truck's toast, JoJo."
"I don't need your opinion."
"You know you what? You owe me."
"I owe you."
"Yeah. I had his head, man. You owe me a head." He grins lasciviously, and Logan's body flips through the impulses again - run, fight, kill, fuck, run fightkillfuckrunfightkillfuckru-- "I'll accept payment in trade. A good blowjo--"
Logan twists sharply in his seat, and his left hand shoots out almost independently of his mind; shoots out pistonlike, and Logan isn't sure who is giving the orders, but the claws come out - slowly this time, slow enough for someone to follow the way they push through the skin. Tyler King breaks off, but even as three dully gleaming spikes creep towards his face, he shows no fear. His eyes are on Logan's face again, unblinking and glittering.
"I'm not your playmate," Logan says. He's holding the claws back with some effort; they want, want, want ...
"No? But we're playing." And Tyler King leans forward a fraction. The middle claw touches the skin on his forehead. He pushes against it, and a tiny, bright crimson drop swells and breaks and trickles down his forehead and into his eye socket. Logan's hand isn't itching anymore, it's aching with the conflicting efforts: the claws and their want, Logan himself and his resistance.
I'm honestly thinking about them like they have a mind of their own, he thinks, but the concern is half-hearted and fleeting.
More blood runs down Tyler King's face, over his cheekbone, over his mouth. He licks his lips, licks off the blood. A small spark of blue dances over the small wound, and it closes around the tip of the claw. Logan doesn't jerk back, but it's close.
"Aren't you having fun?" Tyler King asks. There's more blood on his mouth; it's wet and crimson and seems almost obscene. "I think this is fun."
Logan tilts his head to one side and looks at him. Thinks about just pushing his hand forward. It would feel good to shut the maniac up. It would feel really, really good ...
"Getting ready to embrace your inner psychopath, Wolverine?" Tyler King's eyes sparkle with mirth.
Logan pulls back his claws a fraction of an inch and trails them down Tyler King's face. Wherever they break the skin, tiny sparks flicker. Every hair on Logan's body trembles and stands up. Shivers race down his spine. The charge makes his blood run hot and somehow, at some point, the pent-up adrenaline rush has flowed downwards. His jeans feel suddenly tight and uncomfortable.
"Want some?" Tyler asks. His voice is maybe two shades louder than a whisper, but the mocking tone is still there. "Looking a little hot and bothered, there."
Logan doesn't want to run anymore, that's for sure. He can't decide whether he still wants to tear Tyler King's throat out or just throw him over the hood of the busted truck and fuck him stupid.
Tyler King grins a wide and sunny grin when Logan grabs him by the collar, hard enough to choke, the claws disappearing with a muted metallic chime just the moment before they'd reach Tyler's throat.
"Come on, come on--"
"Shut up," Logan growls and pulls Tyler across the seat towards him, not caring about the sword between them, not caring about his busted truck or much of anything except the sizzling of his blood in overheated veins and the dull throb of his dick.
He has Tyler close now, close enough that he can lean over and lick his bloody mouth. Just to taste it; the blood does taste different. It's hot - scorching. Underneath the distracting thunderstorm smell, Tyler has a scent that makes Logan think about orchards in the fall, both earthy and tangy.
He has one hand around Tyler's throat, pressing the thumb and forefinger down on the pulse points, feeling the heat and flutter under the skin. Tyler is still, the way a cat will be still if you have it in a good enough grip: the second you let your attention wander, it will explode into a whirring ball of claws and teeth. Logan doesn't trust Tyler King for a second, but he wants - wants badly. He cups the back of Tyler's head with his other hand, feeling the hardness of skull and the soft hair and living tissue between it and his own skin, and presses forward, pushing Tyler forward, closer; says into his ear, softly, "Why don't you suck my dick, Sparky?"
Tyler stays impassive for two trembling seconds. Then he jerks backward, fighting Logan's hands; the one around his throat, the one on his neck.
"Make me," he says. The grin is back.
Logan simply starts closing his hand around Tyler's throat, slowly but relentlessly. Tyler chokes and gags, snaps for air, and finally holds up his hands in completely fake beta-dog submission. Logan eases the pressure a little.
Tyler twists bonelessly in his grip and slithers loose. With a quick movement, he has the door open and pushes backwards through it, rolling to his feet in the roadside mud. Somehow, he has managed to get hold of his sword, and there it is in his hands again, lazily pointed at Logan.
Logan gets out of the truck. Walks around it. Tyler stands where he stands, keeping the sword level. His coat is rumpled and bloody, and he doesn't look like a movie star anymore.
"It's a pretty dance, isn't it?" he says, cocking his head at Logan. Logan wants nothing to do with him anymore, but for some reason, Logan's body has decided it's going to get some right now, and every move Tyler makes, every word he speaks in that soft, husky voice goes arrow-straight to Logan's overheated groin and makes everything worse. How much trouble is a guy prepared to go through for a piece of ass? he asks himself morosely.
He's faster than Tyler, faster and stronger, and not afraid of the sword. It's a moment's work to catch him, throw him against the side of the truck, disarm him, kick him to his knees, and yeah - there it is ... that rush of taking by force, of holding someone down and--
--and he knows he's been played from the word go. Tyler's on his knees because he wants to; he's opening his mouth wide for Logan's quickly freed dick because he wants to. Whatever. Logan leans forward, supporting himself with one hand against the truck's door, one hand tight in Tyler's hair. It doesn't really matter who plays who, does it? Not when it feels this - damn - good to push into tight, wet heat.
As blowjobs go, it's good. Really good. Tyler slips a hand into Logan's jeans, cups his balls, presses a finger just hard enough on that spot behind them, and Logan bites his tongue when he comes. The metallic taste of his own blood mixes with the smell of come and Tyler's blood drying on his coat, on Tyler's coat.
Tyler shakes off Logan's hand and rises with a smooth, fluid movement. He stays in the space between Logan and the truck, so close that Logan can smell his own come on his breath. It's a good smell. It makes him feel like he's left a stamp all over Tyler King's face - Logan was here, it says.
"Feel better now?" Tyler asks.
"Yeah," Logan says. "You're a better cocksucker than swordfighter."
Tyler snorts, and knees Logan in the nuts.
The tussle that ensues is, all things considered, pretty good-natured. Logan tends to dislike people who hit below the belt, but at some point - probably during that blitzkrieg blowjob - he's decided not to take anything Tyler King does too personally. The guy's a loon, but he does give good head.
He has Tyler pinned underneath him for the second time, but this time, Tyler just grins and says, "I like you. Let's fuck."
"Right here?" Dawn is breaking for real now - the sun has painted the Eastern sky with psychedelic brush strokes of purple, violet, orange, pink - and they're lying in a pile of dead leaves right by the empty road. Tyler squirms beneath him.
"No, no - I have a place...in town."
"We're twenty minutes out of town and the truck's busted."
"Up for a brisk morning walk?"
* They walk for an hour or so before Tyler finally flags down a semi by simply standing in the middle of the road and glaring at it. The driver isn't too impressed, but he lets them in after they put on their friendly faces and convince him they aren't psychopaths.
Yeah, good bluff, Sparky, Logan thinks. Tyler talks to the driver, a big, burly guy who looks like a lumberjack, about hockey and hunting. Logan suspects Tyler knows next to nothing about any of that, but he's a smooth talker, letting Mr. Lumberjack set the pace of the conversation and then just riffing on whatever he says.
Logan just sits quietly and watches, wondering what makes this crazy freak so damn appealing. Fuck him or kill him - and since he has proved so damn hard to keep dead, sex is probably a more viable option. The blowjob has taken the edge off his adrenaline rush, but watching Tyler's sharp, angular face, his quick, brilliant grins, the way he slouches bonelessly in the seat, smelling like sex and lightning, makes Logan's blood thrum in his head. Apparently, it's been way too long.
* By the time they make it to Tyler's place - a stylishly-bare studio with a gleaming hardwood floor - Logan has started having second thoughts. Second, third and fourth. The set-up is wrong. He can do sex, sure, sex with men, women, and probably barnyard animals - but if it's just sex, it's fast, unpremeditated, sloppy. Like that blowjob. Now that he's actually following Tyler up to his goddamned room, Logan feels a strange obligation to woo the guy. Be polite. Be gentle. Not just trip him and throw him onto the large bed under the skylight and rip his clothes off and push his face into the green silk of the sheets and just - take.
This sure is the perfect time to develop a chivalrous streak, he thinks sourly.
Tyler King stands quietly - for once - in the middle of the room. This beautiful, airy room so different from the skanky pads Logan has been staying in for as long as he can remember. Which isn't very long, when all is said and done.
Logan stands by the door, somehow both horny and annoyed once again. The urge to just get the hell out is climbing up his spine. And his truck is busted.
He settles for glaring at Tyler, who just grins widely and slips out of his torn, blood-stained coat. It lands on the floor with a heavy clunk.
"Come on," Tyler says, backing towards the bed. He doesn't sound particularly impatient, just amused. But then everything seems to be fun and games for him.
Logan walks through the room, his boots leaving muddy tracks on the polished floor.
Tyler comes to meet him, crowds up close, his not-quite-sane eyes holding Logan's.
"You interest me," Tyler says.
"You annoy me," Logan shoots back.
"But still you can't - quite - bring yourself to leave. Isn't that just a bitch?" and he leans in and licks Logan's neck, just softly, wetly, warmly. Logan shivers and grabs Tyler's arms, hard, and pulls him closer, grinds his hips against his.
Tyler turns his head and kisses Logan. For a second, Logan is so surprised he doesn't do anything - kissing is somehow not something he associates with sex. It's part of that other thing; courting, wooing, relationships. The thing Logan doesn't do.
But kissing isn't bad. Getting a good taste, feeling the promising slickness of tongue and lips and the sharpness of teeth, holding Tyler close, harder than necessary, sliding his hands over Tyler's back and neck and ass, pushing at his shirt.
"You gonna do it hard?" Tyler whispers, and his voice is smoky and serious; none of the mocking, none of the craziness. Logan grabs him by the arms and pulls him along, turning 180 degrees, shuffling backwards across the five-or-so feet of beautifully finished hardwood floor between them and the bed.
"Shut up," he mutters, and the backs of his knees hit the edge of the bed and they fall together, controlled but letting gravity pull them onto cool, soft silk, Tyler's body muscle-hard and bony-angular against Logan - heavier than he looks, pressing Logan down until he is half-buried in the lush embrace of the featherbed and all that emerald-green silk.
More kissing, aggressive, ungiving, their groins bumping together in arrhythmic enthusiasm. Right there - Logan holds Tyler by the ass until he finds and controls the rhythm: someone has to be in charge, and it isn't going to be the nut with the sword.
After a while it isn't enough with the dry-humping, and Logan pushes Tyler off, fumbling for his own belt buckle. Tyler, sitting haloed in a sudden flare of pale-yellow morning sunlight, shows his teeth in a new kind of grin - not the wild, challenging grin and not the sharp, mocking one either, but some sort of submissive, begging grimace; he's all but letting his tongue hang out, and it punches dull spikes of new fire into Logan's groin.
Then Tyler moves out of the light, leans over the bed, digs through a nightstand drawer seemingly bursting with various sex toys (do this a lot, do you? Logan thinks with detached amusement), coming back up with a good-sized bottle of lube and that grin still on his face.
Logan unbuckles his jeans, leaves them open and gets up to shrug out of his jacket and pull his t-shirt over his head - they fall on the floor next to the bed. Tyler's getting out of his clothes with a minimum of show - they don't need the teasing.
Logan pushes his jeans and shorts down and then Tyler's naked next to him - naked both, tumbling back onto the bed, Logan's furry, broad chest rubbing against Tyler's smooth one. Tyler isn't precisely skinny, but he's not built - he's flat, sparse flesh over knobbly bones, jutting angles under smooth, pale-honey skin. He's not grinning now - instead, he frowns a little, concentration turning inwards: eyes glazing over, face relaxing except for a small wrinkle in his forehead. Skin slides over skin, their dicks meet and greet and find places to rub against. It still isn't enough.
Logan does what he's been wanting to do: flips Tyler over and pushes him face down into the billowing silk, watches the play of muscle and sinew in his back, strokes the length of it from neck to ass. There - his for the taking.
Grease up (one-handed; still holding Tyler down with the other, despite his submission), line up, slide home - the first thrust brings him all the way in, to the root in slick heat, and Tyler rumbles a groan under him, and Logan just grunts sharply and pulls back for another thrust. He's not dying-hot-horny, so he can take his time, make Tyler struggle in his grip, whimper and squirm, looking for friction on those unhelpfully smooth-slick sheets, biting his lips and bunching green silk in his fists.
Finally, Logan relents and lets Tyler back up enough to get a hand under him - Tyler's hand bumps into his, and they share a grip on Tyler's slick, wet dick. So much for the clean sheets - Tyler jerks and twists under Logan and comes with a muffled groan. Logan thrusts into him, covering his shivering back, keeping his hand where it is, come-dripping and still twined with Tyler's.
Logan strokes into Tyler, one hand on Tyler's arm, one squeezed between his belly and the wet sheets, and wonders why he's gone so long without taking the time to get laid in a real bed. With a real person - or whatever Tyler is; he's real enough, anyway - who is more substantial than a hand or a mouth or an ass.
Thinking why, and not knowing the answer, he comes.
* Logan awakes, this one time, not with a start and a shout, but gradually, coming back to his boneless and warm body without the courtesy of a nightmare. The world burns red behind his eyelids, and he blinks, squints, frowns when he tries to open his eyes: he's on his back, and the sun is glaring its greeting from above.
He's lying on silk sheets, right in the wet spot, and Tyler is a soft breath in his ear, a hard head on his shoulder, a long arm snaked over his chest, long legs tangled with his own. In short, asleep and using Logan as a security blanket.
Right. He has to be a cuddler.
Movement, now, and Tyler yawns and rolls over, stretches languidly. Turns to Logan, blinking in the afternoon light. Grins - sunlight there, too. "That was fun. Wanna do it again?"
*<
It's getting warmer again. Time passes Logan by, most of the time, but the changing of the seasons gives him something almost-tangible to hang on to. He himself remains much the same, but when the buds swell on the trees and the wind gets that promise of warmth to it, he can look around and say 'Another year has passed.'
He hasn't seen Tyler in months, not since Christmas--
--wake with a start, reach out - cold, clammy flesh, a sticky pool of blood. Tyler's still and cold, his eyes cloudy, like dirty blue marbles. There's a trickle of crimson on his chin. Logan's claws are still buried in his chest. The smell of lightning is a faint, fading presence in the room.
Logan pulls back the claws and waits silently.
It takes more than an hour, but finally Tyler shudders awake, cold and sore and pissed off - "You're more trouble than you're worth, JoJo. I'm gone." Whirlwind search around the room for clothes and sword, and Tyler marches out in full diva-mode, slamming the door. Logan scratches his head and gets out of bed to change the sheets--
--but he'll be back. It's not a romantic relationship - Logan's not even sure he wants to call it a relationship - but it's consistent: Tyler comes back. He walks out - because he's angry or hungry for 'hunting' or just for no reason - but he comes back. Logan moves on, Tyler finds him. It works, no strings attached but those they can move freely in.
* Tyler's hunting trips get more frequent. Logan has seen the movies: the habit is accelerating.
"You'll get killed," he says to Tyler's back, feeling like a soldier's wife. Tyler waves and ignores him.
* When it's been a year since the last time he turned to find Tyler waiting by his truck, Logan goes back to the studio apartment with the skylight and the hardwood floor. He has a key - how domestic. He doesn't like to stay there alone, but he uses it when he gets sick of the truck and motels and rooms above bars.
There's dust on the dresser and an unused, desolate smell in the air. Logan stays.
It's two weeks later, and someone knocks on the door. Unaccountable exitement is explained when he opens and smells electricity around the man standing there.
He's tall and nondescript and doesn't meet Logan's eyes, just hands over a long, heavy package wrapped in a dark green cloth.
It's Tyler's sword, of course. Logan sits for an hour in the darkening apartment with the blade resting on his knees. Then he gets up and leaves, and the next time he allows himself to feel at home, he only turns to women: Jean Grey - cold, aristocratic beauty; Marie - awkward, untouchable, steel under an exterior of teenage angst. They will never be playmates. Tyler King becomes another face blinking by in his dreams. |
