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It’s a knife edge stretch going in, unexpectedly sharp, so glass-edged that it dulls the pain in his left side where the ribs are probably cracked, and Scott gasps, pouring pain-sweat and a shocky tremble. It’s not that the pain is terrible – he’s known pain a hundred times worse – it’s just that he’s never associated sex with any sort of discomfort before, and this makes him breathe in hard and then ration his exhalations into careful puffs.
And, of course, Logan can smell everything so for all his growls and blusters and shows of ragged male indifference he’s keeping absolutely still, like there are tripwires everywhere rigged to rake them with shrapnel if he so much as moves an inch. His voice is harsh: “Do you need a minute or do you want me to pull out?”
Scott can’t really make words happen right now because he’s overwhelmed with these alien sensations. And it was dumb of him, of course, to somehow associate sex with Logan as feeling like sex with Jean or Emma, but he had been thinking of Logan’s warm fingers stroking his shaft and his longer fingers stroking Logan’s thicker shaft. He had been trying to decide if he thought an erect penis was an ugly or a beautiful thing and had come to the conclusion that it was both, and that it made sense that it should be so, when it was a delivery system for both love and life and hate and anger.
So far, their romantic interaction has been mostly…brisk. Foreplay for the kind of sex men have in the aftermath of a battle that left them both bruised and aching and heady with adrenaline and tipsy with beer in the kind of hotel bedroom Logan is paying for by the hour. That was what he had set out to achieve and he’d achieved it, he thought, rather well. Not so much impersonal but more warmly businesslike – like an ancient marriage treaty they were both signing to signal that hostilities were now at an end. He had not really envisaged himself as a sacrifice.
“Scott…?”
Idiotically, he says, “It hurts.”
“You tensed up.”
And Logan’s easing back now, very carefully, straight as a ruler; as he slips out, Scott feels a strange combination of relief at the cessation of pain and regret for the feeling of loss.
There’s a hint of reproach in Logan’s voice as he says, “What happened?”
“I’ve never done this before.”
“What?”
“I thought you knew.”
He waits to be told once again that he’s a clueless dick – trying to find some resignation but feeling acutely and embarrassingly vulnerable in front of Logan. What Logan does instead is get them both a drink from the minibar. He looks a little shaken up himself.
There’s a note of concern in his voice that wasn’t there earlier as he says, “Are you concussed?”
“I don’t think so.”
Scott turns over carefully so he’s sitting on his stretched, lubed-up ass and is grateful for the glass Logan puts in his hand. He has to steel himself to raise his eyes because he’s been hit by too much recently and it’s left him oversensitive to the irritation and dislike and disappointment of others. He keeps waiting to have it out with Charles. A big ill-tempered disagreement about what would have been the right thing to do in those circumstances and all the reasons why Scott wasn’t necessarily wrong, until the air is cleared again and they can remember that they will always love each other, the way fathers and sons do. The realization – the wrongness – of Charles’ continuing absence scythes him sideways, the ways it always does, a spiteful sneak attack that leaves him reeling. Sometimes he would give anything to remember killing the man who raised him; sometimes he wonders how lucky he is that he doesn’t.
Because he’s expecting the inevitable glower and growl and eye roll, it’s a shock to see the concern in Logan’s steady eyes. Out of nowhere, Logan says, “Rachel tried to read your mind last time you came to the school.”
Scott tenses himself for some more barbed words; bad enough to be told that the daughter he loves is working against him, but he’s grown used to that, everyone he loves has been working against him since the phoenix burned its way under his skin. Sometimes the sense of injustice overwhelms the sense of guilt and sometimes the regret drowns out everything. He blames them and they blame him and the only constant is the pain of being hated and the loss of Charles Xavier.
Logan’s still speaking and he sounds less angry than usual: “She says your mind is a mess – that it got fragmented by the Phoenix, like a kaleidoscope that got shaken up. Not all the pieces have settled back into the old patterns yet.”
Scott says, “I don’t think that’s true.”
“I didn’t either. I thought she was trying to make me feel sorry for you but now I see…. Scott, you have done this before. We’ve done this before. You just don’t remember.”
And there is something there, now that Logan mentions it; pleasantly beer-fugged as he stumbles back to a hotel bedroom with Logan’s hand on his elbow, and a conversation flowing outside the hotel window that he can’t make sense of however long he listens and waits for his brain to translate, because he doesn’t actually speak Japanese. He’s a little drunk and Logan might be too and he’s kneeling on a hotel towel on the end of a hotel bed and wondering what the maid is going to make of that towel in the morning if they get too many stains on it and Logan, very unexpectedly, is kissing the back of his neck while his fingers stroke Scott’s cock like he’s willing him to want this, willing it to be true and not just a penance Scott is putting himself through to make amends for Kurt. He can feel the coarse dark hair on Logan’s thighs tickling the back of his smooth legs and the memory lights a fire that makes him gasp.
“Japan.” Scott almost drops the glass in the shock of it. “We had sex in Japan.”
Logan sits on the bed next to him. “Xavier told me once that you couldn’t help all the mind blocks and the lost memory fragments. He said he and Frost had both been ‘as guilty on occasion as Sinister was’ about fucking with your head, but he said the repressions were all your own work. You chose to forget the things you didn’t want to remember. Did you choose to forget about you and me?”
Scott examines the evidence logically and says, “Probably. Bad enough you hating me enough to kill me when we’d once been friends – maybe too much to cope with if I remembered that we’d been lovers too. I’m sorry. Either the Phoenix messed my memory up worse than I thought or I got a little too good at repressing. I don’t remember much about it.”
“I would never have just… We got pretty good at it, you and me. I figured it was like riding a bicycle, that it would all come back to you at the…right moment.”
Scott takes a healing gulp of whiskey. “Sorry.” He thinks, back then, Logan did kiss him on the mouth. He thinks he was unexpectedly gentle about it even as Scott had been bracing himself for pain.
There’s a silence before Logan says, “I don’t…hate you. Not really. I don’t know if the word even exists for how I feel about you. You’ve been so many different fucked up things to me over the years. Somedays it just feels like life’s intolerable with you in it and fucking unthinkable without.”
Scott tries to make sense of their relationship: of being rivals for Jean and brothers in arms and lovers who never got the balance right of what they thought they were to each other, and enemies who could never even get that right. It’s only now, belatedly, that he realizes how much he hurt Logan back then. They had been at such cross-purposes, both imagining this was a treaty that could be negotiated without any need for actual words. He had thought he would give Logan something to make amends for getting Kurt killed, some proof of loyalty or affection or respect, and Logan thought they were lovers now, when Scott was still committed to Emma. They’d never discussed it. Scott hadn’t even known they had a difference of perception, but for some reason he can see it now: Logan waiting for Scott to tell him that he had told Emma about them and that conversation never taking place while Scott went on heedlessly thinking something had been healed between them when Logan was feeling used again.
He offers in overdue apology: “I’m not very good at relationships.”
“You suck at relationships, Summers,” Logan says. “But so do I.”
“I find it’s easier if people just read my mind and take what they need to know from it.”
“Makes you kind of a shitty date for non-telepaths, Scott.”
It feels significant that Logan just called him ‘Scott’ but it probably isn’t.
Logan speaks in an unexpected rush: “I know I have punched you and choked you and stabbed you and smacked you around and…all those things, but I would never, not ever…not in the bedroom. Not on purpose.”
Scott tries to make sense of that sentence and essays, “Hurt me…?”
“Not like that. Never like that.”
“I know.” And Scott realizes that the thought had never crossed his mind. He believes that Logan would hit him with a metal-weighted fist hard enough to take his head off if the berserker fury got to him; that he would impale Scott on his claws in a vicious snikt of rage – he can, after all, remember how it feels to have Logan’s claws pierce his flesh or press a needy warning to his throat. What he cannot believe in is any incarnation of Logan who would ever be deliberately cruel to him in bed. “I wish I remembered Japan better.” He’s too wistful at the thought of past tenderness between them – something so precious now it’s gone for good – to be able to keep the longing from his voice.
The kiss is out of nowhere. He doesn’t remember them kissing before but it may have been like this. And it’s tender and a little tentative as if Logan expects Scott to push him off. Logan’s unshaven chin feels coarse against his own clean-shaven jaw, a prickling burn. He’s probably allergic to Logan’s stubble. It will probably bring him out in a rash. He wonders if, after all the angry words between them, they might not have a full body reaction to one another if they touch skin-to-skin and come out in a betrayal of hives. He imagines trying to make up a plausible lie to explain angry red swellings across his own skin and then decides that anything would probably seem more plausible than him and Logan fighting S.H.I.E.L.D. sentinels together, taking refuge as they bled stickily from multiple wounds in beer and bandages before segueing to inevitable sex. It seems wrong and yet right that they have gone from raising a beer bottle to Jean to ending up naked in a hotel bedroom, aching with need.
“Was it always like this? Were we always like this? Did she know? Did she mind?”
“Slim, stop thinking.” Logan says, fingers easing back the hood of Scott’s costume so he can touch his hair. “Nothing good ever came outta thinking in the bedroom.”
“If we come out in hives what excuse are you planning to make to Storm?”
“Cyke, are you still drunk? Because I don’t have my healing factor any more and I’m stone cold sober.”
“It’s a serious strategic question.”
“I’m gonna tell her you and me had angry hate-sex.”
“Is that what this is?”
“No, Slim, it ain’t, but seeing as how everyone already thinks you and I have angry hate-sex after every fight, it’ll just save time and boring explanations.”
“They do…? Why? Why would they think that…?”
“Will you shut up for five frickin’ minutes and let me kiss you…?”
Somehow Scott’s on his back on a hotel bed trying not to spill his drink and he and Logan are kissing; it feels strange and familiar and he likes it very much. He likes the way Logan’s mouth presses against his and the way Logan’s tongue fits into his mouth and he likes sucking on that tongue like he owns it.
He holds up the glass and the lamplight shines through it, turning everything amber. It’s beautiful. The world is still beautiful and he aches for it because it had almost been perfect, he had almost made it perfect. All those things that tore at him as a teenager watching the news: war and famine and death and pestilence and, briefly, he could banish them. He could save all those women in huts with starving children that they showed on the appeals. He could make the guerrilla armies and the arms dealers and the landmine makers and the corrupt dictators give up their money and lay down their arms, and the sleek, complacent first world rulers who could save her and ensure her children didn’t become child soldiers or go blind from trachoma or die from contaminated water that she had to carry miles every day…but didn’t save her, even though they could. He could make them help her. Even though when he looks back on it, he knows it for a kind of madness, for that fairy tale a child would believe in, that the world could be made a more just and better place, he still thinks about that woman in the hut, who had probably never existed, but whose face he had imagined when he was remaking the world with phoenix fire, and how perhaps there is no one helping her now.
Scott sighs because there is no one left alive in the world who might understand what he was trying to do, not Jean, and not Charles. They would have thought he was wrong to set about it that way, but they might have understood. They might have even sympathized a little even if everyone else had just seen him acting like a petulant child who couldn’t accept that the world was a flawed and unjust and uncaring place.
“Is it though…?” he said. “Logan, you’re older than dirt, so you should know – is it?”
Logan says, “I’m not fucking you if you’re drunk, Slim – or if you’re concussed. And the world is a cesspool and a miracle and you can’t make something perfect that’s supposed to be flawed. Now get up and walk a straight line and touch your finger with your nose, oh, and how many fingers am I holding up?”
Scott passes a basic test for concussion by naming presidents and counting fingers and walks a straight line and touches his finger with his nose, wincing because he’s sore all over and he really hates Sentinels. Logan takes the glass from his hand and puts it down on a white painted bedside table without using a coaster. They kiss some more and then wince some more right after because every time their bodies touch it hurts, which seems fitting after all the damage they have done each other over the years.
On his back on the bed, Scott lets Logan lick the places that didn’t get bandages, the cuts and the bruises not bad enough to bind and he squirms and shivers and likes it so much he nearly sobs. There’s nothing even erotic about it, it’s just caring, and it’s someone touching him again. It’s Logan touching him again.
Logan says in a voice that sounds choked up with…something, “I don’t hate you, Scott. I just need you not to be this. I need you to be what you were.” And the need is ragged and strained in his voice; how much he needs it frightens them both a little.
“I don’t know what I am. I don’t know what you are. I don’t know what this is.”
Because Scott is the two-eyed Cyclops, the savior and destroyer of the world, and the good son and the parricide, and the leader of the x-men and the exile the x-men all hate. And Logan? What the fuck is Logan? He’s the human Wolverine, and the reluctant assassin and the reformed bully and the headmaster and the berserker and the mentor and the murderer, the one who puts children first who murdered all his children. Easy then. What they are is a mess. And the world is a mess again and they are a part of it and it will never again be his to command and it can’t be saved that way; which he’s already accepted; that there are no shortcuts to utopia, after all. You can’t raise an island and call it a place where injustice and cruelty don’t exist, and you can’t use the phoenix to make the whole world the way you want it to be. All that’s left then is the slow way that Erik finds too maddening to deal with and always did. And Scott realizes, in that moment, as Logan’s tongue delicately follows the line of a bleeding cut and soothes the throb of an aching bruise that Erik left Charles for taking too long to change the world and he will leave Scott for the same reason and then Scott truly will be fatherless.
He feels unutterably bereft at the prospect but Logan is still licking him and he yearns up to meet him, even though it hurts when their bodies touch, they fray the edges of scratches and press on the ache of bruises, and their bandages rub together with an odd rasp. And he remembers that this was why he had ended up on his hands and knees before, not because they were trying to have sex without touching because they were negotiating the last stage of a peace treaty with a stoic and manly indifference, but because touching really fucking hurts. He rolls up onto his knees and Logan says, “Are you sure?”
Scott says, “Yes.”
And this time when Logan breaches him, as he stretches and gasps at the shock of it, he closes his eyes and relaxes into it. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, and he wants it. It frightens him how much he wants it. He doesn’t understand why he hadn’t missed it last time when they came back on the plane where Logan was planning their future together and Scott was wondering if Emma had missed him and both of them were trying to pretend that Kurt wasn’t dead and would forgive them one day for X-Force.
He gives a shivering sigh of letting go to the inevitable, like Logan is a force of nature that Scott has decided to let overwhelm him just for a couple of hours. Logan is so much gentler and more considerate than he expected that he wonders if they were different in Japan or if he really has just forgotten everything that matters. The pressure-stretch makes him moan but it’s a comforting sort of discomfort; it comes attached to a warm body who claims not to hate him instead of being dealt out by a metal robot that most assuredly does.
Logan’s fingers have curled around his hipbones to steady him and his thumbs are rubbing a quiet tattoo against his skin; it’s to soothe him through the stretching and it works even better than the clamor from his cracked ribs. He’s aware of the rustle of Logan’s bandages and he wonders if this many band-aids have ever had sex before. Logan eases out and presses in, too careful a business as yet to count as thrusting, and Scott wonders if this is making Logan feel better, to be the one on top, to be briefly reconciled with Scott, to feel the pulse of connection between them, to make Scott wince a little, to remind them both that Logan has the bigger cock, to wonder if Jean is watching from the White Hot Room and is seeing for herself that the husband she chose over Logan thinks Logan is a desirable mate. Or if Logan is smarter than Scott is at switching his brain off and just going with this sensation in this moment, Logan’s slick, tender cock in Scott’s slick, tender ass.
Scott gives a shivering sigh that is half defeat and half relief and Logan says in a voice that Scott barely recognizes, “Just let it go for now.”
Scott says, “I don’t think I can.”
The rhythm doesn’t falter. Logan eases back, eases in, and Scott’s body yields to accommodate him like the prairie lying down before the railway, ready to be conquered by the relentless fiery pulse of progress. This is definitely progress. Logan hasn’t tried to kill him once today. Scott closes his eyes as the phoenix fire swirls in confusion and there is Jean and Emma and Paris burning and everything is grief and rage and the blackness can’t take him soon enough.
“I was wrong, wasn’t I?” Logan says, using deft nudging pushes as he tries to find Scott’s prostate and make him feel something that isn’t pain. “You hate yourself plenty. I guess I should have seen that before.”
“It’ll never be over,” Scott says aloud. Because he doesn’t want to hurt Logan, who is, for all his quiet anger at him, trying to be kind, he keeps the other half of that thought to himself: And we will never win.
“We signed up to fix the unfixable, Slim, when we signed up to defend a world that hates and fears us. But crazy enough as that was, we never said we had to get them all to stop hatin’ or fearin’. All we had to supply was the defense. Stop trying to do everything at once.”
The Phoenix Force had stolen Jean from him, and his father from him, which was cruel enough, but it had also mugged him for the glinting pocket change of his past certainties. Shiny dimes and quarters of knowing that a plan was a plan for the right reason. Now he’s unsure if he wants to defeat S.H.I.E.L.D. because they need to be defeated for the good of mutants or because it is going to take a grandiloquent gesture to keep Magneto from leaving. Erik carries a shard of Charles Xavier in his soul just as Scott carries one in his. He cannot do without that reminder of the father he has lost – and given the unsatisfactory nature of their relationship in recent years it shouldn’t hurt this much to have lost him, but somehow the many things unresolved between them make the grief loss worse – and he is afraid that Magneto is stronger than he is and will be able to walk away from Scott and bear his Xavier grief alone.
Logan speeds up a little and it finally feels nothing but good, slick, loving thrusts, opening Scott up and demanding that he enjoys this and gives it his undivided focus; good sensations shivering up his spine, courtesy of Logan’s careful cock. They’re joined now, and it’s not like telepathy because their minds are still strangers, but their bodies are remembering that they used to be friends, so Scott winces for the flame lick of pain that is clawing at Logan’s guts with every thrust and Logan is adjusting Scott’s angle so that Scott’s hip absorbs the impact before the aftershocks can jolt his cracked ribs. They both wince and groan a little because this is still exercise, and their bodies are aching resentfully and have no idea why now, of all times, they got it into their stupid heads to fuck.
It’s sex with winces and constant minute adjustments to allow for Sentinel damage; hard to hold any position for longer than a few minutes, so they try it different ways – Scott on Logan’s lap, and, briefly, braced against the bed head. They are sympathetic to each other’s wounds in ways they have not been sympathetic to each other’s feelings in a very long time. They both really want to get off, but their hurts are fighting them, and have to be outflanked.
Logan shoves Scott down on his back on the bed in frustration and sucks his cock and that makes Scott arch and whimper – the unexpected heat and the adrenaline fear rush of those angry teeth right there and the inevitable drag on his aching ribs, and then Logan shoves back in a little roughly, Scott’s legs hooked over his bandaged, band-aid starred arms, and Scott is shocked by how good that feels. A run of ass-smacking thrusts finally sneaks past the rib pain and sets up a sensation bypass to his pleasure center.
Logan grunts and says, “Should have known you’d like it rough, Slim.”
But they both know the sex needs to be at full volume to overwhelm the cuts and bruises and all the throbbing aches. Scott relaxes into Logan’s rhythm, concentrates on blocking out everything else, every thought and every feeling that doesn’t come from Logan, and there is no anger and no hate in these thrusts, hard as they are; Logan isn’t just selfishly thrusting to get himself off because this is all Scott is fit for, just something to be fucked; he’s trying to make it good for Scott, not to jolt his ribs while still finding his prostate hard enough to make Scott moan. Scott closes his eyes and feels Logan’s big hands on his hips, holding him steady, and his thick cock pumping into him both roughly and tenderly, the way Logan used to be with him on missions, competitor and protector at once; and then even those thoughts are falling away from him because Logan has sped up and the air is filled with the sounds of flesh on flesh and the pleasure pulse is no longer a series of bright, sharp spikes, but is running together like a melody, and his balls are tightening and his spine is hurting, and he’s curling into a climax that makes him gasp and his ribs hurt like hell because that was way too much movement and he’s dimly aware that his belly is hot and warm through the bandages which are probably now sticky and stained.
The hot gush inside him is unexpected and he squirms because it’s Logan who just did that; got unmistakable satisfaction from their bruised, wincing coupling. It’s surprising how good that feels.
Logan pulls out clumsily and apologizes for the clumsiness, kneeling awkwardly over Scott’s supine panting body, and then his fingers close on Scott’s chin and they’re kissing – clumsier still and panting hard – sharing beer and minibar whiskey breath, and Scott breathes in Logan’s sweat and beer and blood and ointment scent so he can remember it later when this will seem like just another strange dream.
Logan kisses him roughly, kisses him like he’s punishing him, and scolding him, and reassuring him at once and says: “Don’t think this doesn’t mean nothin’, Slim. The trouble with you and me has always been that everything we do to each other always means too fuckin’ much.”
Scott says, “It felt good and it stopped my ribs from hurting and it doesn’t have to mean more than that if you don’t want it to, Logan.”
“Got comfortable with me hatin’ you, did ya?”
“No. But I thought you might.”
“It doesn’t feel right, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s not something I enjoy.” Logan gazes hard into the place where he knows Scott’s eyes must be watching him from behind the visor and says, “This – this felt right. This was something I enjoyed.”
Scott nods. “Me too.”
Later they will go their separate ways and be frustrated by the way their ways are now separate. It will feel wrong, as it has been feeling for all these past months, and they will blame the other one, for the wrongness, for the separation, for the way the world isn’t how they want it to be, and they will miss each other. They will also miss this. Scott will have too much control to miss it openly but Logan will miss it in the shower when no one else is watching, and sometimes, when he should know better, he will miss it with Ororo. Knowing all that, dimly, they kiss, at first resentfully because of the coming separation and the inevitable pain, and then, because that connection between them always takes them both by surprise, with deep, lingering regret.
They break apart reluctantly and Logan touches his thumb to Scott’s mouth just before Scott impulsively brushes his fingers across that place on Logan’s elbow that looks as if it hurts, as if he hates the fact that Logan needs bandages now, as if bothers him more than he can say that Logan is vulnerable and slow to heal.
“Do you have a shower where you live?” Logan presses gruffly. “Or do you want to use the one here?”
Scott appreciates that money comes easily to Logan but still it’s a kind thought to offer to pay out for another hour’s rental of a hotel room just so that Scott can wash away Logan’s scent.
He says, “It’s okay.”
They dress in their soiled, ragged uniforms, breaths weighted because bending, stretching, tugging, and lacing are all things that hurt. Scott says, “You need to get your healing factor back,” like Logan carelessly left it in his other coat and Logan glowers at him and says, “Like you don’t need to get your beams working right, Mr. Distress Flare.”
They are at once so used to wearing costumes for missions that they don’t think anything of their own but are vaguely aware that the other one looks as if he has returned from a fancy dress party, and that the bandages, now that they have a post-coital glow, may possibly make them look like S&M lycra fetishists. Scott thinks of that only in passing and even then only due to so many months of dating Emma Frost. Logan looks the possibility head on and is reluctantly inclined to accept that some assumptions are inevitable.
Logan, who has his bike outside, says, “Can I drop you somewhere?”
Scott says, “No, thank you. Are you sure you’re sober enough to drive?”
Logan says, “Slim, you’re gonna make some lucky guy a really nagging wife someday.”
Scott holds out a hand abruptly and Logan shakes it and their fingers cling a little, like they don’t want to let go and then they both step back and Logan says, “See you around,” and Scott says, “Thank you, Logan,” quiet and heartfelt and Logan feels a hum of triumph and a pang of pain and pretends he doesn’t wish that Scott was coming with him.
On his bike, with the motor running, and the adrenaline worn off enough to let the pain begin to throb again, he looks up and sees Scott at the hotel window, getting ready to leave, and he holds up a hand to say farewell. It means more to him than he would ever admit that Scott waves back, like he means it, like he’s sorry to see Logan go and will think of him after he’s gone. Logan wonders if perhaps all he ever really wanted from Scott was some intimation that the man ever thought of him when he was gone.
He remembers the catch in Scott’s voice as he said ‘Why do you hate me so much?’ and it moves him now as he wouldn’t let it move him then that Scott minded so much that Logan hated him. He wishes he’d told him that he didn’t, even though he kinda does, because Scott has just trusted him to the utmost, even though it’s not that long since Logan nearly killed him on the dusty floor of a prison interview room, Scott just got naked for Logan and trusted Logan not to use that against him.
Logan says, “I would never use that against you.”
He says it where the engine noise has armored him and no one could possibly hear, but the knowledge that Scott knew that, without even knowing he knew it, and followed Logan to that hotel room and peeled off his sticky, blood-spattered clothes when Scott’s beams were broken but Logan still had his claws, it’s washed something clean in Logan. He realizes it was guilt he didn’t even know he had, for inciting others to kill Scott and nearly killing him himself, because what mattered was that Scott knew he never really meant it, and Scott must have known all the time.
And it’s nothing, what they did today. Enemies do that all the time – fight against a common enemy for their own self-preservation because they have a better chance together than apart. Even the sex could have just been a release of natural tension after an adrenaline spike. There was no time in his life, however mad he was at Scott, when Logan wouldn’t have admitted that the guy was easy on the eye. So, he has his armor ready, in case he needs it, if the next time they meet, Scott acts like nothing happened, withholds the emotional alimony the way he used to, Logan has his plausible deniability all in place. But he can feel the place on his arm that Scott touched with those regretful fingers because he hates seeing Logan needing bandages, hates seeing Logan dragged down to the level of ordinary mortals. And Logan realizes that’s what he hates seeing with Scott, too; that he was invested in Scott being the man who made the good choices and always knew the scalpel-blade difference between absolute right and absolute wrong, and if Scott isn’t that guy any more then Logan might be required to be him and he isn’t, he just isn’t, that guy, and surely it’s easier and cleaner and better for the world for Scott to remember how to be a Boy Scout than for Logan to have to wash the blood off his claws and start trying to win merit badges?
He snorts at the irony of Scott being pissy with him for not being out there kicking the shit out of mutant killers every night while he’s pissy at Scott for not following the rulebook. Given all the years he spent telling Scott to throw the goddamn rulebook out the window and Scott spent wearily telling him why they couldn’t just terrorize ignorant thugs into not beating up mutants, they had to educate them by showing them that mutants were people who followed the rules, it’s pretty damn funny that this is where they’ve ended up.
He licks his lips and he can still taste him – Scott Summers is still something he can savor like a good Bordeaux. Wherever he is now, no doubt whisked there by Magik, Scott will still be able to taste Logan on his tongue. He’ll be able to feel the soothing places where Logan licked his wounds and he’ll be able to feel that pleasant ache inside him where Logan made him come. Which means, whether he wants to or not, that Scott will be thinking of Logan for a few days yet. He might even begin to remember Japan. And Logan smiles as he drives back along the drive of the school he founded in a dead woman’s name and wonders if Jean’s been watching all the while from the White Hot Room.
It’s just his imagination, that’s for damned sure, that exasperated echo of her voice in his head saying: My God, you two are maddening, but at least this was a start.
He whispers so not even the bamfs can hear him: ‘Jeannie, does Scott think about me when I’m not there…?’
Of course he does, all the time. He always did. Almost as often as you think about him.
It wasn’t true, of course. That wasn’t Jean’s voice in his head, and he didn’t think about Scott all the time. But somehow he found that he was smiling, all the same.