X-Trees| Volume One: Welcome Home

Chapter Seven

He would be given to the dirt and made to rot, over and over again, until he grew too mangled, too incapable of being put back together. Until his mutant powers no longer mattered. Until he was dust, blown away, scattered, and forgotten.

As it should be.

He takes another inhale, before dragging the body behind a dumpster for one of the cops to stumble upon come morning. Then he turns, and glances up at the marquee.

Dazzler tonight!

Ali-cat, he thinks, and his fingers curl in on themselves until his nails are digging into his palms. The wounds heal instantaneously.

She was about to take the stage, and enchant hundreds of thousands, and here he was lumbering in the shadows, a monster sent to make all the other monsters cower. He breathes out, takes a few heavy steps toward the main street, then hunches over to pick up a bouquet of flowers. White lilies.

Ali's favorite.

Their petals litter the alley, the stems squashed and oozing. He tosses the trampled bouquet into the dumpster, beside the corpse, and heads toward the Venetian.

He tried to be good. Tried to give Ororo and Ali what they wanted, what they saw in him. But he was so scarred and split, and all the healing in the world wasn't enough to make him whole.

He loved them, he truly did. But they belonged in the spotlight; and he the shadows.

His walk to the Venetian is laborious, and the few shots of whiskey he had after a brief stop at a nearby dive bar, are slowly fading. In front of him is Ali's room, a bright, gold star painted on the door. Roadies flitter past like annoying moths, lugging equipment to the stage. An hour to go, and there wouldn't be a corner of the world that didn't know Alison Blaire's name. She would stun them all; he knew it.

She'd certainly stunned him, all the good that did for her. Sometimes, he thinks he does more harm than good, though Ali would be the first to dismiss that kind of 'stupid' talk. But she hadn't known him for long, hadn't joined the X-trees until after Jean Redwood had—

Log-an stops pacing, his hands flexing into fists. Teeth grind down upon teeth and he can hear the sound, so loud, it echoes in his head.

Jean. He remembers her last moments alive. How the breathing apparatus rose slowly up and down, up and down, how it imbued the room with a low, haunting buzz – it reminded him of a dance he'd learned in Okinawa. And then, he remembers most vividly, how it all stopped. Suddenly, there was no up and down, no soft buzzing. Just a second of silence before the screaming and crying suffocated them all.

Having the ability to recall every moment of one's life, rendered in such relentless detail, and being cursed to live longer than most, was hell. That's why he was sure, none awaited him when he did die; it would be nothingness. That moment of silence when everything stops, stretched a thousand-fold, until it echoed inside him, it gnawed away at him, it begged him for everything he had left, and he only too eagerly acquiesced.

Because what did it matter if he fed the abyss? There'd be nothing left for him then.

"Dark thoughts again, Log-an?"

Ororo's voice is just as soothing as her presence. Log-an had sniffed her scent -- that of fresh rain on an early spring day in the air-- long before she glided toward him down the corridor, her bright white canopy swaying to a continual wind. Even though he'd known her for years; she never stopped being breathtaking. No wonder back in Africa she'd been worshipped as a goddess; they certainly would have been stupid otherwise.

Log-an shakes his head and grunts, "You developing Charles's mind-reading powers too?"

She gives him a slight smile, and then gives him one brief glance, and in the moment, he knows she has seen beneath his bark and glimpsed his ugliness. Her gaze had always been the most penetrative. "Dark thoughts cloud the expression."