Moonlight and Adamantium

Chapter 3: Bound by Blood

New York State, Summer 1970: Justice League HQ

“…and, we have some good news, today. Bruce has finally located our AWOL trainee. Where was she again, Bruce? The Yukon?”

Batman stood up.

“British Columbia, actually. I got a phone call from…from a highly placed member of the X-Men. They’ve teamed up on a mission to ferret out a dangerous drug dealer and murderer. He’s based in Toronto, but they’ve been tracking him across Canada. Liv should be finished with that mission and home by September.”

Batman’s words were met with an uneasy silence before Superman spoke again, first clearing his throat.

Clark knew that Bruce was gilding the lily, but he wanted to give the Harlequin some semblance of dignity, and the benefit of the doubt.

“So she is safe, then, and one of the X-Men is assisting her?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, as Bruce well knows, the Joker has been out of Arkham for quite some time now and he’s been unusually quiet…”

Dick Grayson kept his thoughts to himself until he and Bruce Wayne were in the Batmobile.

“Bruce, why did you lie like that? Everyone knew you were lying. You and I both know word on the street travels fast. I mean, you can’t even call that stretching the truth.”

“What the hell do you want me to say, Dick?” Batman snapped.

Robin was surprised at his vehemence.

“Gee Bruce…I…I…”

“You what? You want me to stand in front of the Justice League, of which I am a co-founder, of whom your sister is a trainee, soon to be a member and tell them that she left New York in a state of almost complete mental derangement on a drunken whim to go to Canada and shack up with a draft-dodging junkie named Slim and that he blew a large hole in her, robbed her and left her by the side of the road to die? And when Clark asks me when she’ll be back, perhaps I can explain to everyone she’ll be home as soon as she hunts the dog down in Toronto and kills him, but she’s taking her time because she ran into Wolverine in a bar and they’ve both been swimming around in the same jug of whiskey for a month or so, and they’ll get around a little revenge as soon as he gets up from between her legs long enough for both of them to sober up and get back in the car?”

“No, I guess you couldn’t.”

They were both silent.

Bruce sighed, regretfully.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have said that. It was unkind.”

“At least she’ll be with one man all summer. And a decent man. That’s an improvement.”

“That’s true. I’m glad she ran into Logan. Because he’s a good man, and he’s a skilled mask, and he’ll take care of her. He’s one of the few people on God’s Green Earth who can take care of her.”

“So, why don’t you give her to Wolverine instead of to Eddie Blake?”

“I am not giving Liv to anyone. I’m going to try to apprentice her to the Comedian to complete her training. It’s a crazy thing, the mission she’s taken on, but it’s a noble one. But she can’t do it on her own, and she certainly can’t just keep bluffing her way through the way she does. Your sister swims in the dirty end of the pool, Dick. She needs a shark who knows the waters well to show her how not to drown. Besides, she trusts him. She's known him since she was just a kid. Longer than she's known either of us. Maybe she'll listen to him.”

“And you think he’s a good man at heart? Eddie Blake?”

“Some people think he is. I think he can do it.”

“And Logan can’t? He’s got some rough edges, but Logan is a decent, moral human being. I think he’d be a hell of a lot better.”

“He thinks he can. I could tell from his tone on the phone. But Logan’s a troubled man. Between our military and intelligence and the Canadians, the man’s memories are more full of holes than a Swiss Cheese. I wouldn’t presume to throw Liv’s problems onto his plate. Besides, he hasn’t met the Heart of Darkness that beats in your sister’s chest. When he does, he’ll be glad to see she’s coming home with us.”

“For one thing, Bruce, I think you’re selling Logan short. Not to mention Liv. She’s her father’s daughter, not her father. And a Heart of Darkness? That’s kind of corny, isn’t it? Would this be the same Heart of Darkness that beats in Eddie Blake? So we have to destroy Liv in order to save her? Don’t you think that’s melodramatic and unnecessary, Bruce?”

“Dick, the affectionate nickname that her friends bestowed on your sister is Napalm. No, I don’t.”

Saigon, Summer 1970

Several American GI’s wished they had a camera on them, anyone who had a camera on them took pictures.

It wasn’t every day you saw Captain America and the Comedian together, especially sitting at a bar having a few beers like regular guys.

Steve Rogers was paying a visit to boost troop morale, and he had stopped to have a drink with the only member of the original Invaders active in Vietnam.

“Bring us another one, okay, toots?” Eddie Blake barked at a Vietnamese woman who jumped at his every request.

“Thanks.” He said, giving her a quick smile and a smack on the ass before he dismissed her with a wave of his hand.

“Sure not like home. You do that to an American girl, she’ll slap your face off and call you a fuckin’ asshole. At least they got spirit. And something for a man to hang his hands on. Flat as a fuckin’ surfboard. Still, I guess none of these gooks are taller than about five foot nothing and they all prob’ly got a dick like a stack of dimes, so she knows what side of the bread the butter’s on. ”

Eddie sighed, and had a drink.

“Still, I’d do just about anything to get my hands on a nice redhead or blonde with tits out to here.”

“You never change, Eddie.”

“Why should I? The world hasn’t. So, did Logan turn up yet? I hear he’s been AWOL for about a month, now.”

Steve Rogers took a drink of his beer.

“Yeah, he did. He went to the Yukon, with some Institute student he’s been fooling around with who sold him a story about visiting her sick grandmother. She left him flat, and he made it to BC on foot. Where he hooked up with Trouble. With a capital T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”

“Trouble, huh? What’s her name?”

“Harlequin.”

"What? The kid? Jimmy's runnin' with the kid!"

The Comedian had a good laugh.

"He doesn't know what the fuck he's gettin' into, does he? I've known the kid all her life. She's my kid and my nephew's best friend. She's a good amsk and she does good work, but she's fuckin' nuts."

"Yeah, I know, Eddie. I know all about Napalm. I hear about her all the time from Bruce and Clark. And I've seen some of her work. They should have sent her in with you and Jon. This war would be over, already."

"So, what the fuck is she doing in Canada? Did she kill or run off every last scumbag in New York while I was here?”

“No. She went off on an errand of mercy to help out some friend of hers who was a draft dodger. The dirty SOB put shot her at point-blank range through the window while she was sleeping in her car, and left her to die.”

“What?! Son of a bitch! So, how’d she make it?”

“Unfortunately for him, it was only one bullet. Now they’re both coming for him. Logan and the Harlequin.”

Eddie laughed, heartily.

“I’d hate to be that sorry motherfucker! He shoulda taken his chances here in ‘Nam. And if he died he woulda had a lot easier death. What the fuck is it about Jimmy? He can always find ‘em. The crazy ones.”

“I think he looks for them. If there’s a crazy redheaded girl within a twenty-mile radius, he’ll sniff her out. And a crazy red-haired superhero whose favourite things are fast cars, bad men, big guns, and bar fights? He probably thinks he’s died and gone to heaven.”

“That’s the kinda heaven I wanna fuckin’ well go to! Jesus, the kid, she's Laurie's age, so she's all grown up now. Maybe when I get back to the States I should look the kid up. Give her a reason to quit callin' me Mr. Blake. She sounds like a lotta fun.”

“You would think so, Eddie. And you'd be the man for the job.”

"What job? What, gettin' the kid to straighten up an' fly right! Fuck no! Let Logan try it. No matter what she does to him, it won't kill him. Not me. No thanks. Hey, y’wanna ‘nother beer? Hey, Toots? Two more beers!”

“Do you know her real name?”

“Yeah. But I can’t pronounce it. So I just call her Toots. She don’t mind, so long as my wallet stays fat and my dick don’t go down for long.”

Captain America, still working on the first beer the Vietnamese girl brought him, had to wonder if Eddie was ever going to figure out why it was that women didn’t stick with him for too long.

He began to see the advantages of Bruce’s plan, not for the Harlequin, but for the Comedian.

Maybe she could smack some sense into him, before some girl got tired of Eddie’s attitude, and stuck a knife in him while he was sleeping.

That was no way for a great American hero to die, not even a great American hero the likes of Eddie Blake.

II: Liv

I gotta say, I don’t understand some people and their problem with Logan.

Them and “Oh, he’s an animal, and he’s a savage and he’s anti-social and he’s got a bad attitude,” and everything else I heard them saying at Grossmann’s.

I been on the road with the guy for a month, and I don’t see where he’s so goddamn unpleasant to be around.

Hell, I really like the man.

He’s my friend.

Maybe it’s just me. I gotta admit, when I go lookin’ for a man, I mean really lookin’ for a man, I look right past fake freaks with a joint in their pocket next to their dick who are only in it for dope and pussy, and I’m goin right for the big bastard in an old bomber jacket with an anchor tattooed on his arm and visible bullet scars on his body.

I never saw a lot in guys my own age unless they’re genuine freaks like I am, and genuine freaks are hard to come by. That said, I’m not much for some fat old hardhat with a combover who goes to see “Joe” and jacks off in the back of the theatre, but you show me some hard-bitten, hard-living lone wolf of a tough guy whose been doing things his way or the highway since 1933, and you got me, pal.

And Logan’s been on that beat for a few decades longer, so, yeah, I might be biased in that he’s my type.

But, seriously I think what people got confused about Logan is that he’s a real old-fashioned guy. I mean, the man was born in the late 1880’s. He’s not an animal, he’s a man who learned what it was to be a man so long ago that the only thing most people know about the days when he was growing up they’ve learned from watching Westerns.

Now, unlike most of the people who are crawling around on this big rock hurtling through space, I don’t think the world began the day I was born; I have a degree in history, and I know a little bit about such things that they don’t put in the movies.

The prairies of Canada were every bit as wild as the American West, and let me tell you, things were a helluva lot closer to Clint Eastwood than to Randolph Scott.
If you were an ordinary man, you had to be about ten times tougher than anybody walking around to say just to survive. Now, if you add in being a mutant, in times when mutants were about ten times as reviled as they are today, you had to be one hard-ass son of a bitch.

The other thing about Logan that gets him every time is his attitude towards women. Now, when he was a little boy, women, whether they were or not, were expected to be delicate flowers whom a breath would have withered. You can imagine some were and some weren’t, and knocking around brawling saloons during the Gold Rush in the 1890’s and 1900’s, it’s safe to say Logan probably met more of those who weren’t, but that was the idea they put in his mind.

So, even though that kind of thinking is on it’s way out the door, if it ever had any real basis in fact, anyway, but here’s Logan, an old-fashioned guy from a time when men were men and when the lights were out and the corset was off, women were grateful for it, and here he is in this crazy shitstorm of lunacy as we sail into the final decades of the 20th century, surrounded by tractor trailers and bank computers and telephones in cars and A-bombs and drive-through donut shops and 24 hour porno peep shows and somebody he can’t quite remember stuck a whole bunch of metal on his ass at the skeletal level and he’s expected to put on a spandex costume and a funny hat and answer to the name of a small angry mammal and save the world.

The same world that hates and fears him, has always hated and feared him in the past, and will probably hate and fear him in the near future.

Wouldn’t that make you a teensy bit anti-social?

I feel for the guy.

Me, I’m a freak, I was born a freak and an outcast and I never wanted to be or pretended to be anything else, but Logan, he could have been a regular guy.

He was happy as hell sitting in a bar, having a few beers, watching the goddamn Stanley Cup finals, just like all the other cats in the place, who don’t have to put on a costume and go out and put their asses on the line for people who wish they were dead.

So he’s a tough guy.

A real tough guy.

So he’s a killer?

When and where he learned how to be a man, being a killer was expected.

Jesus, if I wanted sensitive, I’d go fuck a woman, you know?

Anyway, the worst thing about it is he’s got a lousy track record with women. Some of this is because Logan really is the Don’t Worry, Miss, I’ll Save You kind of guy who gets mixed up with your usual damsel in distress who needs about as much help as a rattlesnake, and ends up getting his heart and his balls stomped all over by a parade of vicious castrating bitches who see him as a convenient person to pay their way and move the furniture, to whom they must occasionally submit to have a fuck thrown into them.

The other is that every time he finds a decent woman, his arch-enemy kills her.

I’m not sure what Sabretooth’s beef with Logan is, and I’m not sure he really is, either, Logan’s memory being real spotty, but the fucker has basically killed every woman Logan ever gave a fuck about.

On his birthday.

Yeah, well, the buck stops here.

As the Old Man always says, wait until he gets a load of me.

II: Logan

If there was one day that Wolverine dreaded and hated, it was his birthday, and it wasn’t because he had been born in the 1880’s.

Or somewhere in there.

It had to do with Victor Creed’s idea of a birthday present, which was to show up every year and put a massive hurting on him, and take the opportunity to slaughter or attempt to slaughter any woman who Logan might have been with.

In that he was laying low in the brush with Liv, he was hoping that Sabretooth wouldn’t find him, but the son-of-a-bitch showed up nice and early and Wolverine got his pants on and left the tent in a hurry.

Even though he knew it wasn’t any use pretending he was alone; you could smell Liv a mile away and her scent was literally all over him.

“Whoever she is, runt, she smells good.”

“Quit sniffin’ the goddamn air and let’s get this over with!” Logan snapped.

Sabretooth smiled, crookedly.

“Now, is that any way for you to talk to your old friend who’s come to wish you a happy birthday? Nice car.”

Sabretooth put his hand on the hood and ran his claw slowly from the windshield down to the headlights.

The sound of a huge gash squealing into the polished metal was horrible, but not as horrible as the sound that came from the tent.

“Hrrrrgh…Hrrrgh…Hrrrrgh…HRRRRAUUUUURGHHHHH!”

It was the same kind of roaring sound Liv had made as she took her fighting stance in the bare knuckle fights, but not the same roar at all.

This time, she was going in for the kill.

“What the fuck was that?” Sabretooth asked.

He couldn’t figure out why his arch-enemy was smiling.

“Bub, you are in a world of shit. Victor, meet Napalm.” Logan replied.

He hit the dirt.

Victor Creed had only a moment to wonder what the runt’s problem that he was kissing the ground , and then to see a naked woman roaring and foaming at the mouth tear out of the tent with a gun in either hand before the .45 caliber slugs began to tear through his body.

Logan was impressed at the amount of bullets Liv could fire in such a short time with such accuracy.

“YOU MOTHERFUCKER! THAT’S MY FUCKIN’ CAR! I’M GONNA RIP YOUR FUCKIN HEART OUT!”

Unprepared for the assault of an obscene number of hollow-point .45 calibre bullets with full metal jackets tearing into his body, Victor Creed fell to his knees, or what was left of them after he took quite a few loads of hot lead in each of them.

Liv flexed her arms, roared again, and pulled a very sharp and highly polished machete out of the case she’d slung over her shoulder.

“You ready, baby?” she growled to Logan, who got up after the gunfire ceased.

“Darlin’, I was born ready.”

SNIKT!

They roared, together, and Liv slashed the machete across Sabretooth’s chest at the same time that Logan buried his claws in his enemy’s back, up to his knuckles.

In one fluid motion, Liv tossed the machete aside, and thrust her hand into Victor Creed’s chest.

Her fingers brushed Logan’s knuckles as he retracted his claws, and she put her tattooed fist around Sabretooth’s wildly beating heart, and ripped it out of his chest.

“You…you…you crazy bitch!”

Liv pulled out the gun that still had two bullets left in it, put it to Sabretooth’s head and fired both slugs directly into his brain.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

He fell backward into the dirt, in a spreading pool of blood and gore.

Liv put her gun back in its holster, and looked wonderingly at what she had wrought as her rage left her.

She was covered in blood, Victor Creed was lying on the ground, twitching, a fairly unrecognizable sack of meat, and in her bloody hand she held his still weakly pulsing heart.

Liv held out her hand to Logan.

“Here youse go, Logan. Happy birthday!” she said, suddenly grinning.

The last thing Victor Creed saw before unconsciousness overtook him was Wolverine throwing his heart onto the ground and squashing it to a pulp with his bare foot.

“How’s it feel, bub?” he asked.

Then, for Sabretooth, everything went black.

***

Liv looked at herself with disgust.

“Awww shit! Blood I can stand, but I hate it when I get fuckin’ brains all over me! I gotta go take a bath.”

“You go ahead, Liv. I’ll stuff Creed in a few of those Hefty bags you got in the trunk.”

“Think he’s dead?”

“Not likely. But it’ll take awhile for him to come back from that, though. I’ll throw him in the trunk, we can drive a few miles down to that canyon we passed on the way here, chuck him in and move on down the road.” Logan suggested.

“What if he follows us?”

“I’ll pour gas on the road as we go. That’ll confound his sniffer. Do you think you can drive across that like creek? Water will do the trick, too.”

“Sure.”

***

Wolverine packed Sabretooth packed into three garbage bags, locked him up in the trunk and started walking down to the creek.

He needed a bath, too.

The other unpleasant thing about his birthday was that Logan had little memory of who the people who gave him said holiday were.

He knew that his real name was Jim Howlett, and he knew he’d always insisted upon being called Logan, which was the name of his real father. Although Wolverine couldn’t remember much else, like anybody named Howlett, and he had no memories of his mother, he remembered Dear Old Dad.

His memories may have been fuzzy but they weren’t warm.

There wasn’t much in the way of warmth in “Black Tom” Logan, a mean-tempered, short, stocky bowlegged Black Irish drunk with greying black hair and angry blue eyes who made wild claims to have been born in the 1760’s.

Black Tom was a poor man, and Logan’s memories were of sitting inside or outside a small, unkempt cabin with the shabby groundskeeper and his rotgut whiskey, soaking up what grim and bitter wisdom the most likely very old man had to give his son.

He remembered fearing Black Tom, and being forbidden by someone ever to go near him, but he was somehow compelled to return.

A fact that never surprised Thomas Logan.

“It’s blood between us, boy. And bad blood, too. Up there in their bleedin’ mansion, Soft John and the rest o’ them sonsabitches can try to make you weak and soft like they are, but you never will be, because you’re my son, and you’ll be what I am. Blood rules out, in the end.”

That was one pearl of the old man’s wisdom Logan wished he could have forgotten.

He’d been curious enough to look up the Howlett family a few years back and found a crumbling old mansion on the edge of the wilds of British Columbia that triggered no memories in him. The locals dwon at the bar had some half-forgotten stories about crazy missus Howlett who was fooling around on her sainted husband with her devilish groundskeeper, and how God punished her by making their son a monster just like his father.

He walked around the grounds until he found what was left of the groundskeeper’s cabin, and he knew then his memories of the place were real and not something they had implanted in his brains at Weapon X.

There were some old pictures in the big house, of which Logan had no memories, and the only one that looked familiar was the one of a cleaned up Black Tom, that was in a woman’s bedroom.

His mother’s bedroom, probably.

It was a small picture, but the groundskeeper looked big as life and twice as mean, staring out at the son who’d grown up to look just like him with his usual drunken malice.

Logan kept that picture, he left the others, not sure which were of his mother or of the Mr. Howlett who had given him the name that even when he remembered who he was he’d never felt like it was his.

He remembered standing there with his father’s picture, looking around the room, at the dusty old bed where one of the young aristocratic ladies in the pictures he had seen had made him with the wily old Devil in the picture he held in his hands, and he felt a great and terrible sadness, an agony that made him not want to stay in that room anymore so he wouldn’t remember anything else about it.

Wolverine was glad that Mel hadn’t taken him for a sucker and that she had sent his knapsack home.

Black Tom’s picture was in there.

Old Black Tom with his rotgut whiskey and his low evil chuckle, filled with a world-weary hate for everyone and everything in the world that had mistreated and abused and completely fucked over him and beat him down for about a hundred years.

You’re my son, and you’ll be what I am.

Blood rules out, in the end.

Loping through the brush, Logan tried to shake those thoughts from his mind.

As he got closer to the creek he stopped in the brush where he could just see Napalm kicking and splashing in the water.

She was laughing and singing to herself, having a grand old time.

He wasn’t close enough that she could see him; Napalm had the eyesight of a half-blind mole, which was probably why she’d started listening up and sniffing the air to begin with.

Sure enough, she got quiet and stuck her head up out of the water and start twitching her nose.

“Logan?”

“Well, it ain’t Sabretooth.”

Wolverine sat down by the bank with the cake of soap Liv left there and scrubbed the bloodstains out of his new Levis, then he got into the water with the cake of soap to wash the blood and gore off himself.

Liv continued to splash around, and he swam over to her after he deposited the soap on the bank.

“How the hell did you shoot so well without your contacts in?” he wanted to know.

He was about eight inches from her nose before she could see him clearly.

That was plenty close enough for a certain part of him that was more interested than others to touch her.

Liv shrugged.

“I taught myself to shoot blind before I learned with my glasses on.” She replied.

He was about to reach for her when she splashed off and stumbled up the bank.

“You can’t catch me! I’m gone like a coooool breeze.” she sang as she ran headlong into the brush.

“Hey! It’s my birthday, darlin’! You can’t run away from me!”

“You want it? You gotta catch it!”

Logan splashed out of the water with a grunt and took off after her.

Fresh from the creek, her scent was weak and the girl could run like a rabbit, but he caught up to her, anyway, and she was wet and breathless and laughing, squinting at him in the sunlight, smiling her thousand watt grin.

The sunlight came dappled through the heavy trees and the air was heavy with the rich smell of the fertile black earth; it almost overpowered everything.

Almost.

“Okay. You got me. You win.”

Logan snarled at her before he kissed her, he had been in a weird state of animal lust since her fingers brushed almost tenderly between his claws against his knuckles inside his mortal enemy’s chest cavity, and watching her splash naked in the creek and then chasing her through the woods had gotten his blood up even more.

His bad blood.

Maybe Ma and Pa didn’t meet in that old bed, maybe they met out in the woods and made me on the ground, in the grass, beneath the trees, maybe that’s why I’m the way I am.

“Feelin kinda Wild Kingdom this mornin’, Logan? Fine with me.”

Liv dropped to all fours in the grass, arching her back and lowering her chest to the ground, sticking her ass in the air.

She turned her head towards him and growled back, her wet red hair falling all around her, inviting him to rut her with laughing lustful eyes.

Wolverine didn’t need any further encouragement.

He knelt behind her and she pushed her legs open further, easing back against him, wet and ready, reaching and spreading her hands across the grass.

It released the rich, dark scent of the black earth beneath, which mixed with the equally wild, earthy smell of her arousal, completely filling his senses and crowding out any thoughts other than desire and instinct and lust.

He took her hard and fast in deep thrusts, with his hands on her hips, occasionally smacking her on the ass as she pushed back hard against him, crying out wordlessly, lashing both of them with her flying hair.

By the end she was bucking and grinding against him as he thrust into her wildly, both of them grunting and keening and tearing up the ground around them.

They fell together on their backs in a sweaty heap of tangled limbs on the grass, to catch their breath and soak up the sunshine.

They both felt a great sense of peace and quiet, having mated in the dirt and the grass and the mud, marking each other and their territory after spilling the blood of another predator who dared to infringe upon it.

“You know we’re goin to Hell for this, you Wildcat.” Logan commented.

“So what? If I went to the other place, I’d never see my father again, for all eternity. You think Creed will keep in the trunk for awahile? I’m sleepy.”

“I’m sleepy, too. Sure, darlin’, we got time for a little snooze.” Logan answered.

While they slept, some of the other animals came cautiously out of their holes and burrows after being interrupted by these large, noisy creatures, sniffing the air at the familiar scent of some of the local apex predators.

The smaller animals gave a wide berth to where the two bigger animals lay, as they too went about their morning business.

***

After walking back to and breaking camp and dressing, Wolverine and the Harlequin got underway.

Liv kept looking at the map the Mountie had given them and suddenly pulled over, announcing, “Here we are!”

She and Logan were careful not to dirty their clothes as they lifted their bloody package out of out of the trunk.

“Cocksucker weighs a metric fucking ton.” Liv complained.

“Swing him. Let’s get a good head of steam goin’. One…two…Three!”

After Logan counted down, they tossed their cargo down the canyon and leaned over the wooden guard rail to watch his progress down.

The bags split open as Victor Creed bounced and rolled and crunched to the bottom where and he came to a rest, with his neck and at least two of his limbs at odd angles denoting breakage.

The hole in his chest was closing, and part of his skull had grown back, but the fall had given his body some new injuries to work on.

They looked down the canyon for awhile.

“Was it good for you too, Victor? No? Oh well. At least I had a good time.” Liv jeered.

Wolverine lit a cigar.

“Yunno, darlin’, a nice girl like you, I just don’t know why you say you scare off all the men.”

They went back to the car.

“You drive, Logan. It’s your birthday. I’ll cover the tracks. You’re gonna keep going down this road for about ten miles, then hang a left, and pull into the first campground on the right. We got a spot reserved. It’s a real nice place. Semi-private campsites, each with its own grill and electric hookups and water, three sets of showers, a pool, a snack-bar and a drive-in. Seems like a nice place for youse to have your birthday.” She said, sunnily

She had her hair in those pigtails again, and her little toe was sticking out of one of the Keds on her feet she put up on the seat, and she didn’t look the least bit lethal, at all.

Logan drove down the road for awhile, smoking and thinking.

He tried his very best to be horrified at Liv’s brutality and unable to even entertain enjoying thoughts of a happy birthday, but, honestly, it did his heart good to stomp on Creed’s and knowing that son of a bitch would be in agony at the bottom of a canyon for most of the day and likely laid up for a week while he was unscathed and Liv was alive and well and he was going to have the chance to have first happy birthday in half a century made Logan feel pretty damn good.

“You know, I only remember one birthday from when I was a kid. I remember I was sick as a dog. Hay fever or somethin’, an’ I was s’posed to stay in bed, but I got up and snuck out to go see my father. Ol’ Black Tom. He was sittin’ outside his cabin, drunk in the middle of the day, with his jug on one side and a bag of rocks on the other side of him to throw at the rabbits that tried to invade his sorry patch of vegetables. I was coughin’ and sneezin’ somethin’ awful, and I went and sat beside him, and he looked at me and said “You’re ten, today, ain’t you, Jimmy?” And I told him I was, and he let me have a few drinks of his cheap dirty home-made whiskey. Said it would stop me sneezin’. It did, because I passed right out. When I woke up I was in the cabin and he gave me a cup of the worst coffee I ever tasted and a cheap pocketknife and sent me on my way. I still got the pocketknife. Ol’ Black Tom. Meanest man in the whole fuckin’ world.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I can’t remember my mother, either. Still, why do you think you remember your father, and not your mother?”

“I can’t forget Black Tom. Every time I look in the mirror, there he is. You ever worry that someday you’ll turn into the same kind of evil son-of-a-bitch your father is?”

“Just about every day. But my Dad, he’s never been bad to me. You remember if your father was good to you?”

“Black Tom was no good to anybody, especially not himself. You know, Victor tries to tell me Black Tom was his father, too, but unless his mother was a passing six foot tall German or Swede Amazon whose idea of heaven was a short, mean, bowlegged drunken Irishman, I think he’s fulla shit.”

“Well, he won’t be layin’ that trip on you this year.” Liv commented.

“Did you plan this, Wildcat? All of it?”

“You got me there. I figured Creed would come skulking around. And I figured you and me together could make mincemeat outa him. And I found this campsite close to a canyon we could toss Sabretooth down on the Mounties’ map. I didn’t plan on getting quite that goddamn mad, though. I mean, that was some kinds fuckin’ overkill. And I didn’t do it just because he scratched my car. After what that asshole’s done to you, fuck him. He deserved it, the cocksucker. Shit, I know you always get a raw deal on your birthday, so’s I just wanted to make sure you had a good one, for once.” Liv admitted.

“Wildcat, that’s the best birthday present I’ve had in fifty years.”

“Aw, hell, Logan, what are friends for? You’re the first man I’ve ever had who’s stuck around long enough and given enough of a flying fuck at a rolling donut about me to really be my friend, and treat me, well, decently, even though I am a drunk and a killer and a little Irish mutt from Brooklyn. Besides, I want you to know that I’m in this for the long haul, that when I’m your friend I’m your goddamn friend and even after every motherfucker on God’s Green Earth has turned their back on you, I’ll still walk ten miles barefoot over broken glass to come to your side. Anybody who fucks with you, anybody who hurts you, anybody who crosses you, Logan, I’ll do to them what I did to Victor Creed, or I’ll die trying.”

Sometimes a little kindness and a little tenderness goes a long way.

“Wildcat, if anybody ever tries to kill you when I’m around I’ll make what you did to Sabretooth look like a kiss.” Logan declared.

“Thanks, Logan.”

“What are friends for?”

“Hey, you got somethin’ on your mind?”

“Same thing I had all day. My father.”

“You wanna tell me about it?”

“I can’t.”

“I won’t tell a soul. I’ll prove it to ya. We’ll swear ourselves in blood. Cut me.”

Liv held out her arm, and Logan pulled over.

“Wuddya mean, swear in blood?”

“C’mon, you know how this works. You cut me, I cut you, we rub our arms together and we swear by our blood. Our friendship begins with our blood, and if one of us ever betrays the other, then it ends the same way.”

Logan looked at her for a long minute.

He popped one claw and cut Liv’s arm a little, then his own.

They hurriedly sealed their pact before his arm could heal.

“I swear, by my blood, and on my honour as long as I live, I will never deceive you. I will never betray you. I will be loyal and true and always your friend.” Liv said, simply.

That was a pretty good oath.

Logan wondered where she learned it.

“I swear, by my blood, and on my honour as long as I live, I will never deceive you. I will never betray you. I will be loyal and true and always your friend.” he responded.

Logan pulled back out onto the road.

“Jesus, I ain’t done that since I was a little kid. How about you, Napalm?”

“I was eight. So was Joe Mac. We’ve held to it. Blood or no blood, you can trust me, Logan.”

“Okay. You know how I made it sound like I just went cold turkey on whatever Mel was doing to my mind with her powers and it didn’t bother me?”

“You lied?”

“Yeah. Big time. I went completely fuckin’ nuts. You have no idea.”

“I might. I went cold turkey on jacks a coupla times.”

“What?”

“Pharmaceutical heroin. I been hurt bad, Logan. When they think you ain’t gonna make it, they give youse the good stuff.”

“Maybe ya do, then. Kinda. I tried ta kill myself. I couldn’t help it. I can’t explain it. That’s’ just what Mel does to ya. She don’t mean too, but when she leaves a man, holy shit. I walked in front of a car, I jumped offa roof, I ripped my own guts out. I tried ta saw my head off but I passed out before I could do it. And, in that I couldn’t kill myself, I just went crazy. I don’t know what the fuck I did, but somewhere in my brains, something told me to go home. I ended up at the Howlett place, drunk, naked and raving like a lunatic. Waiting it out for whatever it was to wear off of me. I had enough presence of mind to get booze, which kept my mind kinda at ease, but I didn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep. I don’t know what woulda happened to me if it wasn’t for him.”

“Who?”

“You remember you said a guy like me might live a thousand years? Black Tom didn’t have no trouble making it to about two hundred.”

“Jesus, Logan!”

“Not exactly. He still lives in the cabin. Does odd jobs, sometimes goes up to the logging camp, sometimes he lives off the land. But he’s still there. I’m telling ya, he don’t look much different. Just a little greyer than I remember. I thought I was dyin’, seeing things, lyin’ there on the floor, out of my head like I was. I went out and when I got up I was in the cabin. And there was Ol’ Black Tom. With more of his horrible coffee and his rotgut whiskey and some kinda creature cooked in a stew, but that was what I needed. Somebody to kook after me until whatever Mel did to my head wore off. I got better and went on my way. I can’t believe he’s still there. He tells me the last time I saw him was right after the first World War. And he’s still there. Tough old sunnuvabitch will be there in another hundred years. I dunno, Wildcat. When you got noplace else to go…”

“…ya gotta go home. My Dad lives in a bunker complex under the docks in New York. Real nice place he’s got. There’s a soundproof room way at the end of it where I suppose he’s killed more people than cancer. But at the other end there’s the bedroom I grew up in, and the kitchen where the Old Man taught me how to cook, and the living room where we watched TV and all the rest of it. There were times I was so low-down and beat up or just completely screwed that I was ashamed to go to Bruce. So if I knew Dad was on the outside, I went home. I knew I could count on the Old Man, not just to look after me, but to really understand. He’s my father. I love him. Fuck anybody who wants me to feel otherwise.”

Logan took the turnoff to the campsite.

“You’re a helluva broad, you know that, Liv?”

She just shrugged.

“Hey, enough of this heavy family shit. Let’s you and me have a good time. Alright?”

Smiling that thousand watt grin, again.

“I been havin’ a good time, Wildcat.”