Work Text:
Go.
But—
Don’t be an idiot! If one of us gets out, we all do. I can buy you time. GO!
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..
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INITIALISING [KRAKOA:HATCHERY]
ACCESSING BACKUPS:
[et_SYNCH]
[lk_WOLVERINE]
[am_DARWIN]
UPLOAD SEQUENCE INITIATED
SNIKT.
Her claws were the first thing to break free, thrusting out through the membrane and the shell and tearing a hole that brought the cold to her skin, a rush of air that was fresh and full of pollen, and… Krakoa. Not the air of the Vault, thick with electricity and regulated by machines, but the living and breathing of Krakoa filling her lungs.
The shell fell away, and it was as unpleasant a feeling as Logan had described, hatching slick and cold into the world. She felt exposed, and sluggish, and somewhere in her head there was a blaring red siren going off in her mind, the alarms of the Facility telling her to run, get moving, you are not safe, you are vulnerable here.
“Logan, I told you—”
“Get out of the way, that’s my fucking daughter.”
She’d never been more relieved to hear a man’s raised voice. It made her want to laugh, the security that that sound afforded for her when it came from him. It wasn’t a guarantee of safety – with a Wolverine? there was no such thing – but it was a guarantee that anything that tried to hurt her would suffer, and that was sometimes close enough. A shadow fell over her, quieting the alarms a little, and she realised that Logan was holding out his jacket, shielding her from view.
“Hey, darlin’,” he said softly.
“Just help me up, old man,” she grumbled. He draped the jacket around her shoulders and tugged on her arms as she rose to her feet. She held onto his arms in return, anchoring herself on his weight.
“What are you looking at?” he snapped over his shoulder.
Laura let herself see Synch – Everett – finally, and the rest of the Hatchery. Cyclops was helping Darwin to his feet on her right and to her left, Everett was staring at her. He was young again, dripping with foul-smelling orange goop and fragments of shell, and it didn’t look like he’d registered what Logan said at all. When they were in the Vault, he would sometimes tell her how long they had been there. 200 years, he said. She had never seen the point in counting. Time was a measure for the world, a measure for change, and Krakoa hadn’t changed at the same rate as the Vault. The Vault hadn’t really changed, either. Just cycled.
But Everett. Everett had changed. She could see it in his eyes all the more clearly now that he was wearing the face he’d entered the Vault with, and not the one he left with. He was trying to compute the difference, work out how to move forward. She was surprised by how well she could read him – but then, it had been 200 years, by his count.
“Leave him,” she told Logan, and he stopped his scowling.
Her movement seemed to turn naturally into falling into him, resting her head on his shoulder, and he put his arms around her back and held her close without comment. She took a deep breath of his scent, beer and pine and sweat and the other thing that she had only ever been able to identify as Logan. She let it out and then inhaled again, feeling the familiarity of it be carried into her lungs and deployed beneath her skin.
“That bad, huh?” She felt it thrum in his chest when he said it into her hair.
“Tch. Shut up.”
He held the back of her head and smoothed his hand down to her neck as they pulled apart. “Come on,” he said, “you got people waiting on you.”
Gabby was playing with her nunchucks when Laura walked, towelling her hair dry, into the front room of the bathhouse. Daken was giving her pointers, and Logan was dozing in a chair with his legs extended in front of him and arms crossed tight over his chest.
“You’ve moved your feet out of stance again.”
“Shut up, I’m trying to—Laura!” Practice forgotten, Gabby launched herself, and Laura just had time to brace herself before she collided with her, her little sister wrapping her arms and legs around her like a spider monkey. Gabby squeezed tightly, and then drew back so she could practically shout in her face, “I fought the Shadow King!”
“You did?”
“Well, sorta. And I’ve been training hard like you told me, even though I was trained to work in a team from birth and it’s everyone else who doesn’t seem disciplined enough to collaborate properly and I tried telling the instructors but they wouldn’t listen—”
“There’s been a lot of this,” said Daken.
“And Logan and Daken won’t let me play Knives Out with them which I just don’t think is fair, cause I can heal just like them and I don’t even feel it—”
“That’s why we don’t let you play,” grumbled Logan, rubbing his eye.
After a tug, Gabby released her claw-like grip on Laura’s torso and she could pull her off to place her back on her feet. “What’s Knives Out?”
“The only way we can stand to be in the same room without you here,” Daken answered, indicating himself and Logan.
“So, a lot of alcohol and violence,” she guessed.
“Yeah, that more or less sums it up,” he shrugged. Well, at least they had been making an effort to actually stay in the same room without starting a fight, for Gabby’s sake. There was some room for improvement, though. Daken stuck his thumb towards the door and said, “Hey, it’s good to see you, we should hang out later, but I’ve got a thing.”
She blinked. “You’re still with X-Factor?” The jacket printed with their logo wasn’t a remnant of his vague attempt to act like a team player in Krakoa spirit?
“Don’t sound so surprised,” he smirked.
“Why not? You’ve never stuck with a team for this long before.”
His smirk quickly disappeared, replaced by a furrowed brow. “I guess not. Well, whatever,” he brushed it off, and she was going to grill him about it later. “See ya.”
“Alright.” She turned to Gabby when he left. “Wanna get ice cream?”
“Yes!” she grabbed her arm, bouncing. She added quickly, “But not right now, I have to get back to training. Later though, yes, definitely! And—Do you think they’ll deliver 25 with chicken to Krakoa? I guess the delivery person would have to be a mutant. Uh, or maybe a doorstep delivery. And Princess Starlight 2 came out and we have to watch it together, you won’t believe what they did with Bo, and Logan wasn’t paying attention to the first movie so he didn’t get it. Anyway, I’ll see you later!”
“Yeah,” she said, raising her hand in a wave just before Gabby disappeared through the door. “See you.” She ruffled her hair with her towel once more before tossing it into the used towel bin.
Logan cleared his throat, slapped his knees, and stood up. “I’ll get ice cream with you, kiddo.”
She gave him a withering look, and he grinned. She rolled her eyes, and said, “What, you don’t have three teams and a personal quest of vengeance to get back to?”
He checked his wrist, on which he wasn’t wearing a watch. “I got time.” It was funny how she didn’t quite believe him. He had responsibilities on Krakoa, X-Force to lead, and she was sure any number of things that had cropped up since she left. Vampires, or alien hiveminds, or android Wolverines. But he seemed determined to keep his afternoon free for her, and she did want to get ice cream.
“Laura.”
Everett. He was standing behind them, coming out of the changing rooms with his fresh clothes, looking a lot cleaner, but more troubled than he had in the Hatchery. Logan had his hand on the door to the bathhouse, and his eyes darted to her. Where do you want me?
“Give us a minute?” she said, and he nodded once, stepping outside and closing the door behind him. She stepped closer to Everett, and met him in the middle of the room. “What is it?”
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, why?”
He stared at her, and she thought he was genuinely surprised. Then the tone he adopted indicated he thought she was lying, and he was trying to be gentle, ease her out a shell that didn’t really exist. “Because everything we just went through… How do we even move forward from that? I mean, it’s a lot.”
“The Professor has everything he needs to start planning our next move. Our part’s over,” she said. They were done being self-sufficient, and they could relax for now. It had taken her a long time to being okay with doing that, with not doing the absolute most all of the time. She had burnt herself out more than once, and it had taught her to figure out when to let go, let others take over. This was one of those times. She had a lot to get used to, events to catch up on, before she would be ready to be an X-Man full time again.
“No, I mean sure, but…” Like she suspetced, he had meant more than what he was saying. People made communication so needlessly complicated, placing all these cues so that they could skirt around their real meaning. And for what?
“Look, Everett. I don’t really do relationships. I told you. Whatever we had, it wasn’t that.”
“Right! But that’s okay, cause what we have, it’s not a relationship, you know? It’s something else. Bigger than human definitions, bigger than time. It’s… a bond.” The way he spoke gave the words an endearing quality, and she got the sense that he was trying to shape a beautiful thought into words.
In the Vault, it had been safer to keep their hands linked, or their shoulders touching, than not. He sometimes needed to replicate her powers on short notice, or just passively. That exchange of power, the way they would do it – and eventually most things – wordlessly made them feel closer, like they understood each others’ needs. And they had. For the Vault. “You’re right. We do have a bond. It was built out of survival. It was a product of the Vault. It wasn’t made to last out here, and that’s fine. I don’t want something bigger than definition, or time. I… just want to go get ice cream and drink beer with my dad. I want to have a movie night with my sister, and see my friends.”
“How can you… You’re just going to act like we can go back to normal? Like everything’s not different, that we haven’t… changed?” He spoke very softly, but with feeling. She felt sorry for him, she really did, that he felt this profound change in his sense of self, while she was just feeling hers return to her. It wasn’t that she hadn’t been herself in the Vault – but she’d found herself through her family. They would always be a part of her, and she finally had them back.
“I’m a Wolverine,” she told him, and she tried not to make the words sound unkind. “We bounce back, it’s what we do.”
“Laura…” he reached forward, and she stepped back instinctively. He drew back immediately, and she felt bad, but he had to understand. It was a different context. It didn’t mean the same thing anymore, for him to take her hand. And it didn’t matter that that wasn’t his fault.
“See you around, Everett.”
Logan was leaning against the outside wall of the bathhouse when she left, and he fell into step with her as they headed towards the portals. She was trying to remember which ice cream places she liked.
“You’re not as unaffected as all that,” he said.
“He doesn’t need to know that. And you can talk, Mister Emotional Honesty.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he sighed, and they lapsed into silence for a while.
They were quiet, but Krakoa wasn’t, it was buzzing with activity. She recognised almost no one. They must have drawn in a lot of new mutants since she left. Maybe this place really was working as a safe haven. A gaggle of kids tried to drag Logan into their game and he told them he would join another time with a badly-feigned annoyance attempting to mask his smile. It hit her then how much there was to readjust to, how the Children of the Vault had behaved as something removed from human, caring about no one and speaking in a language of violence. It was like she was coming out of being an assassin all over again, a preteen with no understanding of the world outside of the harm she was trained to inflict on it. Back then, it had threatened to overwhelm her almost constantly. At least now she knew what she was working towards.
“Hey, I’m sorry, Laura,” Logan said.
She frowned at him. “For what?”
“For not putting my foot down with Charles, insisting I go instead. He shouldn’t’ve used you like he did.”
She rolled her eyes. “What, and it’s alright for him to use you?”
“I’m already damaged goods, a few more dents won’t make a difference.”
“Yeah, until you break,” she knocked his shoulder with hers. “They sent me because the I’m less fragile Wolverine.”
“Ouch,” he grunted. “You’ll bruise my ego.”
“You’ll heal.”
“We always do,” he said, and there was a weight behind it that neither of them needed to face directly to understand.
She slid her hand into his, thinking of cut puppetstrings and cages broken out of. Thinking of how she didn’t let herself be bent and contorted by the containers that held her any more. She would heal back into the shape she’d made herself. No one in this universe or outside of it would take that away from her.
“Yeah. We do.”