Marie moved as if through water, her limbs heavy and weighted, her mind numbed with the dread of the event to come. There it was on the table in the lab - the last VHS cassette. For two months now she had studied the videos from that lab…studied him; his image flitted across her brain like a warped movie that never ended. She had promised herself this would be the last time she would see him. She wouldn’t look through the tapes again. She couldn’t. She didn’t even want to view this one for she knew with certainty his death was probably on it.
A chair appeared at the edge of her vision so she sat and picked up the black VHS tape cassette with loving hands. He was in there. She knew it. She dreaded it. They had captured him and then captured him on film as they worked on him. Thirty years of abuse had been chronicled on the films she had seen, the ones she had rescued from the fire. The earliest sessions had been on clumsy reels. As technology had improved, so had they and their ability to catalogue the improved experiments they wreaked on him.
They had no right to touch him, she thought protectively. Jean’s lab was empty at this hour and Marie was glad for the privacy. She had developed feelings for him; fantasized about rescuing him from those scientists on a daily basis. She would have saved him, Marie thought. She nodded slowly as her fingertips caressed the plastic case subconsciously. She would have saved him. She had put all the tapes with his subject name on them in a chronological order months ago when they had retrieved them from that hell hole. Those murderers had tried to burn the evidence — the corpses, the tapes, the records — but the X-Men had found them before the fire destroyed everything. Scott and the others had buried the dead and logged the records. She had taken on watching the tapes and she had dutifully recorded all the mutants and their deaths in a scientific manner, just as Jean had taught her. It wasn’t until she had started viewing his tapes that she lost her detached objectivity.
Slowly, painfully, she fitted the cassette into the machine near the monitor. The glow of the screen beckoned her attention as yet another ‘session’ unfolded. Not every experiment tape on him had been found, for there had been huge gaps in the sequences due to the fire, but the ones she had seen chronicled years of torture. He had a healing factor they took advantage of mercilessly. He was exposed to every godforsaken disease they could get their hands on and he lived. They had broken every bone in his body and he healed. They had exposed him to fire, ice, gases, and toxins, yet still he survived. They had decided to make him a weapon then and cut him open to alter his skeleton with metal sheathing, coating natural bone claws in his forearms with more of the metal to form wicked knives he could use to kill their enemies. The scientists had just one problem: he couldn’t be broken. Years had been spent on testing him, making him the perfect weapon, and they couldn’t train him to kill so much as a flea on command. Their frustration was mounting, she knew. They had isolated him from the other ‘experiments’ long ago to increase their chances of brainwashing him. As far as he knew he was alone in the world. How did she know this? She knew him.
She knew every inch of him - every perfect inch they had marred with their instruments only to have it return to an unblemished state She knew every nuance of his eyes, for that was the only way he spoke to them, not caring to give them the satisfaction of hearing him beg or scream for mercy. Even every muscle in his face was carefully controlled to show nothing more than indifference. Yes, she knew him. Her hands touched the screen in front of her, wanting to touch him, the man she had fallen in love with over these past weeks, even if he was just a shadow on film.
She watched the shaky picture of him come into focus. For once the camera was hand held instead of resting on a tripod. She knew the scene well. It was the room he had been housed in for many, many years, according to the records. It had a circular design with instruments and equipment stored on the shelves surrounding his cage in the middle. After they had embedded the metal in him, they found they had to cage him in the same hardened material to keep him locked up, for he could now slice his way out of any ordinary steel cage. Adamantium, they called the substance on his bones and in the bars. It was indestructible. A cage that would never break held a man that would never break. To her surprise, the usually filled shelves were empty and no scientists appeared on the screen. Only a single light from above lit the scene instead of the usual array of florescent tubes. There was a low voice muttering something and she turned up the volume.
"It’s down to you and me now, Wolverine," the familiar voice of the main scientist said. "You’ve proven how stubborn you are, how unbreakable, so there will be no more tests, no more surgeries, no more mind probes. You’re free of that. You see I’m going to take a vacation away from you. You’ve bested me at every turn so I need a break. I’ve reassigned everyone who worked on you to other test cases. As far as they’re concerned, I’m terminating you. Only it’s not termination; we’re just taking a vacation, you and I."
The camera was put down on some sort of table so the picture finally became still but at an extremely odd angle.
"While I’m away, I want to you to reflect on how much better your life can be if you would just obey orders. So you won’t be lonely in your musings, I’ve arranged to have some company for you." Something appeared in the picture — legs, then the back of a white lab coat. The scientist was carrying something under a cloth but Marie couldn’t tell what it was. "You have a ventilation shaft already and rainwater dripping down from the filters above but I needed to come up with an unending food supply for you while I’m gone." There was a chuckle. "Sometimes I even impress myself. Here’s all the nourishment you’ll need." The cloth was removed to show two rats in a cage.
"I’m leaving you some fellow lab rats for company: a male and a pregnant female. It’s a simple cycle, Wolverine. One lab rat gnaws on another so both can survive. Of course, you should probably let them feed on you in the beginning so more of them can be born before you start eating them. I imagine, in time, you’ll learn how to cultivate them. And if you’re thinking about killing all of them so you can die, too, well, we’ve already proven that would take a long, long time…such needless agony. No, your will to survive is strong enough to rule out suicide. Use the time wisely, Wolverine. In a year, I’ll be back to see if you feel differently about taking orders."
Marie watched in horror as the scientist put the cage down on the floor in front of the bigger cage, then flipped the latch to let the small rats loose in the room. He then returned to the camera, his bearded face contorted with amusement before he disappeared out of sight behind it. The man in the center of the arena moved to the edge of the cage and actually gripped the bars, his face a heartbreaking mixture of distrust and disbelief.
The image backed through a door and, for the first time, Marie had hope of catching a glimpse of where the room was located. "I hope you enjoy your vacation, Wolverine," the scientist’s voice said with venom as the light in the room suddenly went out, plunging everything into darkness. "I know I’ll enjoy mine."
She watched a hand close and lock the door with a finality that held her on the edge of her seat. Then the camera turned and filmed as the man walked up a long spiral staircase that seemed to go on forever. Finally a door loomed at the top and a hand flicked the light switch off here, too, before going through the door and locking it. Now Marie knew where he was: the basement of the building they had pulled all the records from, the basement of that lab.
He set the camera down and moved two bookcases in front of the door, filling a gap left between several more shelving units. The wall looked solid now. No one would know there was a door there. She hadn’t. The camera filmed him as he filled the bookcases with the tapes she now recognized as the ones she had been watching these past couple of months. A feeling of dread clutched at her heart. She had emptied those shelves herself with flames dancing all around her but had never looked behind them. When the camera was finally cut off and the monitor went blank, the image of Wolverine standing at the bars of the cage came back to haunt her.
No!
Quickly she ejected the tape and read the date. It had been filmed two years ago. The scientist had lied, then. He had never meant to rescue Wolverine from the ‘vacation’ he had inflicted on him. It had been a cruel means of giving Wolverine some small hope so he would try and survive.
Shaking now, she ran down the hall and into the huge dark interior of the hanger. Scott was there. Not really remembering what she said, she must have said something right for the next thing she knew they were flying through the night sky toward the building that had lain in ruins for months. For two years the Wolverine had been buried alive under the building, living in a nightmare. Was she too late?
After they had landed at the deserted site, she and Scott managed to move some of the rubble around to find the buried basement that hid the door, she with her strength and he with optic blasts. Finally they found the twisted remains of the shelves and the door concealed behind them. With a mighty shove, Marie broke the steel door down. Darkness and spider webs assaulted her immediately and she nearly fell before she switched on the flashlight that appeared in her hand. Her feet flew down the dusty steps, arms and flashlight flailing to bat the webbing out of her way, but she never seemed to get to the end. Her heart was beating so wildly she found it hard to breathe.
Finally she came to the door at the bottom and her hand gripped the knob. It wouldn’t budge. Even her strength couldn’t turn it. Scott fired a beam over her shoulder and the lock shattered under the blast. Frantic now, she pushed against the door. At first it wouldn’t move then it gave suddenly with the wrenching sound of protesting steel. Immediately something knocked her to the ground, a huge, warm, living wave of fur, claws, and tails. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t breathe - they were everywhere, crawling all over her. She opened her mouth to scream and was suddenly choked by something fuzzy.
(Okay, author’s note here: This is where the original story ended. For two years I did not write this down because I thought the final image was too horrible, even for a Halloween fic. But, like a Pandora’s box, this tale has circled in my head for a long time, demanding to be written down. When I explained it to another author yesterday, she said I couldn’t end it here either so I took her advice and didn’t. So on with the rest of this grisly story…)
Marie sat bolt upright in bed as she shoved the pillow off of her face. Ignoring the fact that she was dressed only in a nightshirt, she threw the bedcovers aside and raced down the hall and around the corner. The door ahead was open and she skidded to a halt at the entrance of Logan’s room only to find it completely empty and the bed neatly made. It was as if he never existed.
No!
Frantically she ghosted the mansion, searching for some evidence that Logan was here and that the dream hadn’t been real. The kitchen was her last hope but she found it empty, too. Tears streaming down her face, Marie sobbed as she opened the door and stepped outside.
The moonlight welcomed her but its embrace was cold and distant; everything felt cold and distant. She shivered and ran her bare hands up and down her arms to try and feel something, anything. Then she froze. Something or someone was lying in the hammock under the trees; she could just make out its dark form.
Logan!
Too scared to shout and too confused to think straight, she ran across the lawn, injuring her bare feet with every terrified step. Sure enough, it was Logan. Sprawled out on the white woven cords of the hammock, he was fast asleep, listening to the peaceful outdoors around him. Or was he? Surely he would have heard her ragged breath and footfalls. Heart in her throat, Marie reached out and touched his cheek. It was warm. To her delight, he was alive. She closed her eyes in relief. He must be deeply asleep for once, dreaming something pleasant maybe. She began to smile as a powerful relief spread through her, giving her a wonderful euphoric feeling. Even her bruised feet felt better by the second. She opened her eyes in surprise. They were healing! That’s when she realized her bare hand was still against his skin.
And she screamed.
(Author’s note: Aarrgh! See? I knew I never should have written this monster down. Every time I try to give it a happy ending it becomes twisted and macabre. Consider this a one shot only Halloween tale of deception, then, for I would never let this into my usual little universe of Logan and Marie. Happy Halloween, guys.)
End
Back to the library.