On Sirius, They Charge You By the Hour

_Author's Note_: This will probably require some explanation. When reading TriplePirouette's fine story "An Understanding", I was going to do a review and decided that, oh, the review would make a better story. And while you should all stop here and go read her story (I don't think it's on , I read it on her homepage) for those foolish few who aren't going to do that, here's a brief (as spoiler-free as I can make it) summary -- feeling that Bobby Drake is cheating on Rogue, Wolverine decides to air his thoughts on the situation to Mr Drake, in his subtle fashion. This story takes place in the wake of that.

Technically it should be film Wolverine but because I'm not that picky about continuity (I come from a comic background) I have the Agent call him by his real name in the comics, because that would be the kind of thing he'd do. Not to get snarky but if that kind of thing bothers you, please don't tell me about it.

_Character Note:_ the unnamed character here is one of mine, an Agent (there's two and the differences aren't going to mean anything to you right now). For your intents and purposes right now, he's not human, made of energy and as far as this story is concerned, can do pretty much whatever he wants. E-mail me for further and hideously detailed explanations.

And that's it. This is my first time posting so if I'm missing anything, by all means, let me know and I'll correct here and in the future. And go read "An Understanding", because it's much better than my terribly vague one line summary.

* * *

"If you're quite done napping, Mr Howlett, I'd like to get started. I had to move a few things around to get you in today, so I'd like to make the most of our time here."

With a jerk, Wolverine opened his eyes to find himself staring at a ceiling. After another moment he realized that he was lying on a flat couch. A strangely comfortable one, as it turned out, very plush. "What the hell . . ." he muttered, turning onto his side. It took him a second to realize that was in a kind of office, the walls wood-paneled and quaint. A single door led out and the walls were adorned with shelves filled with books.

Meanwhile, the voice, clipped and lightly accented, kept speaking. "But I think we have a chance here of making real progress. If you're willing to work with me we can have a very productive session, hm?" The accent sounded familiar but was impossible to place, it kept sliding away just when he thought he knew it.

Directing his attention toward the voice, he saw a nondescript man sitting casually in an armchair, one leg crossed over the other, dressed in plain clothing and a somewhat rumpled sweatjacket. He had a small notepad in one hand and appeared to be jotting down notes diligently, even though Wolverine wasn't speaking.

In a flash of motion Wolverine swung his legs off the couch, although he didn't stand up. He kept waiting for his senses to alert him to danger but it wasn't happening. Strange. "What is this?" he demanded. "Who are you?"

The man only glanced up, an eyebrow raised. "Why, this is your regular evaluation. All the staff have to go through it periodically, make certain everyone is dealing well with the stresses at the school. This was all explained to you when you joined, wasn't it? During orientation?"

"I, ah, skipped orientation," Wolverine admitted after a moment. Was that the day the Brotherhood attacked the local armory, or when the strange meteors were falling from the sky? It all started to blur together after a while.

But the man only smiled beatifically. "Well. There you go, then. That explains it." Flipping the notepad shut, he tucked it into his jacket pocket and leaned forward with both hands clasped together. "This should all go relatively painless, it's more or less a formality. Just earlier I had a delightful conversation with your furry colleague about unified field theory."

"That ain't happening here," Wolverine said, looking around the office. There didn't seem to be any doors, but maybe it was around the corner. "How did I get here anyway?"

"Oh, we kidnapped you," the man said cheerfully. Wolverine gave him a dirty look but his pleasant expression didn't evaporate. "Xavier mentioned a possibility that you might not come willingly so we took it upon ourselves to schedule the session for you. Don't worry, we checked your calendar, you are quite clear for today." Furrowing his brow, the man glanced to the side briefly. "Though you may want to apologize to Mr Wagner later. He got you here with considerable effort on his part. Apparently you are rather heavy." He tilted his head to the side, peering at Wolverine closer. "Don't know where you put it all but I'll take his word for it."

"I drink a lot of milk," Wolverine noted dryly. "And I'll make sure the elf knows later exactly how much I appreciate what he did."

"Wonderful," the man said, clapping his hands together. Leaning back and crossing his legs again, he said, "Why don't we get started, then? Please, please, settle back, make yourself comfortable." He pulled out the notepad again, although Wolverine swore he had put it in his other pocket. "We'll just start with a few basic questions, simply to get your thoughts going."

"Right." He sat back only a few inches, still wary. Something about this didn't feel right. "What did you say your name was, again?"

"I didn't," the man said, rolling right over the question. "Now, how would you describe your childhood?"

"I don't remember any of it."

"Hm, right." He began scribbling onto the pad in very small letters, sounding them out as he went. "Blocking . . . out . . . past."

"Hey, that's not what I said-"

"What about your parents, then? Were they the source of any of your childhood traumas?"

"I have no idea, I told you, I don't remember my parents at-"

"Blames . . . parents," the man muttered, writing furiously. "Would you say that your hatred of your parents stems from their treatment of you during their childhood, or is it simply just a factor of your latent feelings of inadequacy?"

"I don't remember my parents!" Wolverine shouted at him, lifting himself off the couch an inch. Something cold in the man's eyes stopped him from going further, though. In a quieter, but no less intense voice, he added, "I have no idea where I came from, I don't know a _damn_ thing about my past. It's all just a blank to me, okay? Whatever the hell happened back then, I don't know and it doesn't _matter_. All right?"

The man stared at him for what seemed like a very long time. "Fair enough," he said, finally, casually. His movements seemed very deliberate and precise. "We can go with a different line of questioning if this one bothers you. I do my best to keep this very freeform. Okay?"

"Right. Fine," Wolverine said, rubbing at his forehead in an attempt to stave off a sudden headache. "Let's just get this over with."

"Good. Now, can you tell me how often you have dreams of a phallic nature-"

This time Wolverine was across the room before the sentence was even finished. "What the hell is wrong with you?" he raged, grabbing the man by the shirt and almost pulling him out of the chair. "What kinds of questions are these? Is this some kind of a joke?" The man was surprisingly light.

The eyes that stared back at Wolverine were unperturbed and almost too calm. "I assure you, it is not. Why, are my questions bothering you? Do they make you want to rough me up?"

Wolverine's teeth pulled back into a snarl. "This is over. Now. I'm ending this."

"Though I can see why you haven't," the man continued, as if Wolverine hadn't spoken. "After all, I'm not a child, am I?"

Wolverine's eyes widened just slightly and he dropped the man, who flopped back into the chair with a graceful ease. He never took his gaze off Wolverine though, even as the other man took a step back.

"Is that what this is about?" His voice was very quiet.

The man was engaged in smoothing the front of his shirt. "Perhaps. If you can better define what _this_ is, hm? There's just so much to remember these days that I can't keep up-"

"Shut up," Wolverine snarled, pacing around the room agitatedly. "We're done here. I don't know how the hell Xavier found out about that but I am going to have a chat with him about staying out of my personal life . . . where is the damn door?" Following the walls, he came upon a framed degree, something about it catching his attention. "Before I break a window, where is the . . ." he stopped, peering closer at the degree. "This says it's from Mars."

"Fully accredited, I assure you," the man sniffed, folding his hands into his lap.

"Five hundred years from now."

"It's a long wait-list," the man said offhandedly, leaping to his feet. "Now, why don't you sit down so we can get back to our session?"

"Who are you?" Wolverine demanded, coming around the chair and bearing down on the man. "Is this some kind of illusion, what is going on here?"

"I think you'd best sit down." The man's face had gone very still and his voice was carefully controlled. "While I'm still asking pleasantly."

"Not until you tell me-"

"I said _sit down!_" the man suddenly barked and a force grabbed Wolverine roughly by the chest, shoving him and knocking him back onto the couch. He almost lost his balance and fell over the back of it, but regained it at the last second. Swaying lightly, he stared at the man in surprise. "Regardless of what you think your wishes might be, we are going to have this discussion _now_ and if I have to entrap you in a pane of glass and shatter it to make you listen then that is what I will do. I hope I don't have to get more descriptive. I hope that gets the message across."

Wolverine was doing his best to keep his breathing steady. "The professor didn't put you up to this, did he?"

The man laughed quietly. "If the professor knew I existed he would get out of his chair and flee screaming. No, I'm afraid I'm strictly here on my own time." He had clasped his hands behind his back and was walking slowly around his own chair. "So why don't we make the most of it? Who knows, perhaps we'll both find it very enlightening."

"Why are you doing this?" He hadn't felt his heart beat this quickly in a long time.

The man shrugged. "Whim. Curiosity. Fannish adoration. Or maybe it's all just part of a larger plan. It doesn't really matter. At least not to you. I'm here and you're here and that's all there is to it." He had come around the back of the chair and placed both hands on it. Smiling, he said, "So, please, enlighten me."

"Is this about Drake? About me and him?" Wolverine spoke cautiously.

"If that's what you want to talk about." He bent forward so that his forearms were resting on the back of the chair. "But we could discuss the intricacies of knitting if you'd like."

"I don't need to discuss anything with you. It's between me and him, it's settled."

"Oh, now that's a tremendously poor attitude," the man said sadly, moving away. "Because that leaves so much out. After all, what is really ever _over?_" His fingers lightly danced on the arm on the chair as he walked past it, strolling toward Wolverine.

"This is. I finished it." His voice was steady but his eyes never stopped following the man as he traced a lazy path around the room.

"So you did. Threatening a teenager, that certainly sends a message." The man seemed to be examining a glass cabinet very intently. Some of the objects inside might have been moving but that was surely a trick of the light. "Puberty will never quite be the same when you're done with it."

"Don't you mock me, bub." Wolverine stood up so quickly that his clothes snapped with the motion. One of his hands was balled into fist. "You ain't going to like how it turns out."

"I'm certain," the man said without turning around, his voice sounding bored. "But wouldn't you rather save your energy for more important affairs. After all, there's rumors that third year students Peter and Jenny might be having a bit of a spat, perhaps you'd like to involve yourself in that as well . . ."

"I told you, this was only between me and Drake . . ."

"_Yes!" _the man said, spinning around so swiftly so that Wolverine was taken aback. "You keep saying that but what exactly does it _mean_?" There were glittering lights somewhere in his eyes, and a focus that had all the potency of starlight forced into a laser beam. "Why that boy, why that specific boy? Or . . ." he stopped, holding one hand up in the air. "It's not the boy, is it?"

Wolverine just stared at him, cracking his knuckles and giving nothing away.

"It's not." A slow, slim smile crossed the man's voice. "Oh, it's not. It's between you and him but it's not _about _him. You used a certain word with him, what was the word . . ." He snapped his fingers lightly.

"An agreement." The word seemed forced out of him.

"No." The man's arm came down straight, pointing directly at Wolverine. "That's not what you said. You said . . . under_standing_." He brought his hand down slowly, until he was standing ramrod straight, peering at Wolverine quizzically. "What was the understanding?"

"I don't have to answer that." Wolverine took a step toward him, somehow able to look him right in the eye. But, wait, hadn't he been taller? Or had the room changed? This place made no sense. "You ain't got the right to know."

The man frowned. "Let me tell you, then. There's a boy, and there's a girl. And for one reason or another, they fall for each other. Old story, oldest in the world, maybe. But that's not your story, though, is it? It belongs to someone else. But you thought to insert yourself into it, anyway, to force your way in by any means. And so you told the boy, if the story was not being written the way _you_ wanted it, you would make sure of it. One way, or another."

"That's enough." Wolverine was standing inches from him now. His voice was a soft rumble, the avalanche waiting to fall. "I'm telling you, let this go."

"A boy and a girl. But . . . it's her, though, isn't it?" The man was speaking so quietly that the words barely escaped him. "What is she to you . . ."

"Last time, I-" quivering, a second before drawn.

". . . or you to _her?"_

With a whispersharp noise, the claws were out suddenly, three blades jutting from his hands, poised right against the man's cheek. Slowly, they began to travel down to his neck.

"I told you," Wolverine said, calm and thundering. "I _said_, let it go."

The man never blinked. "Oh, but I'm afraid I can't. And you don't realize that, because you are a man who the world failed to digest, you've been chewed up and spit out and what's left are only the tough parts. You are used to being able to get your way through stubbornness, or force, or intimidation. The world owes you nothing, nor you, it." As he was speaking his hand began to travel up to Wolverine's wrist, even as his foot slid back. "And with most people, that gets you far, because you leave them with no choice but to get out of your way. Others may fight but you don't relent." With a careful, practiced motion the man put his palm right up against the points of the claws. His skin dimpled where they pressed. Wolverine never flinched. "So you start to think that solves everything. But it won't work on everyone and when that day comes . . ."

Without hesitation, the man drove the claws through his hand, plunging it all the way down to Wolverine's knuckles.

". . . why, you'll have to think of something else," the man finished, standing so close that Wolverine realized he wasn't breathing and in fact never had been.

In a quick motion he ripped the claws from the man's hand, not even realizing what he had done until the action was completed. Expecting to see an arc of blood spraying from the wound, he ducked back, nearly falling over the couch. "Crazy," he heard himself mutter. "You're crazy." He fell back anyway, one arm out to brace himself, staring at the man with wide eyes. "You're not human. What are you?"

The man only sniffed, calmly inspecting his hand. From where Wolverine was standing, he couldn't see any wounds at all. "Oh, there's plenty of things I'm _not_. We could be here all night. Besides, we're not really here to talk about me. As far as you know, I'm just a detached commenter on the scene. A passing observer, who felt a need to speak up." He clasped his hands together, holding them somewhere around his belt. "And now, here we are." He gestured and the chair slid in from behind him even as he sat down into it with a smooth motion. "Where were we? Ah, I believe you were about to tell me about the girl."

Rubbing his forehead, Wolverine also sat back down heavily. "She's a friend, that's all. Someone I care about."

"And you show how much you care by threatening her boyfriend? That's very endearing."

"The bastard was asking-" the man's eyebrow started to rise as Wolverine raised his voice and he curbed it, letting it fall back down to a more reasonable level. "All right. Drake's her boyfriend, the two of them have been together for a while now. Long enough for kids to count as a while. And he's stuck it out, even though there's a snag."

"Oh? Do tell."

Wolverine ran his hands through his hair. "Marie, she . . . you can't touch her. She can't let anyone touch her, otherwise . . . bad things happen. She starts to . . . take parts of you. Memories, abilities. Too long and it becomes serious. It can mess you up, it messes her up. I know, I've heard her crying enough nights."

"Ah." The man chewed on the inside of his lip, apparently considering this. "That must create some problems, I imagine."

"It does. But they've been working on it, been finding ways around it. Working real hard at it, at night I hear them talking when they think no one else can hear and I . . . I've got to sort of tune them out. Give them some privacy. But it's still hard, you know? She's trying, she wants this to work so she's putting everything she has into it."

"I see." The man had taken out the notepad again, somehow, and was flipping through the pages. He had slouched back, his free hand idly toying with the edges of his jacket. But even that offhand motion seemed controlled. "And where do you fit into this?"

"I'm just trying to keep her safe."

"By solving all her problems for her?"

Wolverine bristled. "That ain't how it is. She's had to deal with enough garbage in her life, this is one thing she shouldn't have to. Just because her boyfriend ain't got the balls to stick it out and also ain't got the stones to tell her-"

"And here's where the under_stand_ing comes in . . ." the man said it in an almost singsong fashion.

"I _told _him," the words were snarled out into a near unrecognizable mess. "I told the little son of a bitch to treat her right, to be honest with her. That's all I asked for. Is that so friggin' hard? Is it? If he couldn't hack it, if it was too much for him, he could leave and there'd be no shame. If he was straight about it. But, no, the bastard had to try and have it both ways, make time on the side with another girl . . ."

"Mm."

"And Marie, the whole time she's thinking that this guy only got her on his mind, she think she's finally found the one special guy who'll love her even though they can't have a normal relationship." He shook his head, disgusted. "And it turns out that he's just like every other bastard out there. He can't get into her pants, so he'll find someone's he _can_ get into." He pressed his hands together to keep them from shaking. "I should have done it. I should have stabbed the turd when I had the chance."

"I doubt that would have solved anything," the man said dryly. He stood up again, the chair falling apart into base components as soon as he left it. Wolverine wasn't even surprised anymore. "In fact, if I may observe, you seem to be taking this harder than she would be." He stood sideways, eyeing Wolverine. "Why is that?"

"She's in love with him." Wolverine met the man's gaze without blinking. "She thinks the world of him and he don't deserve it. He's got to earn it and he hasn't. And that kind of thing, it drives me crazy."

"But what about her?" the man noted, his voice oddly detached. "She's young, isn't she? I imagine she'll get over it. In time."

"That's not the _point._" Wolverine had to resist the urge to stand up again. Something in the man's stance suggested that might not be a good idea. "Someone like her, she don't fall easily, you know? She's been hurt and she doesn't want to let anyone in, because she doesn't want to get hurt again, or hurt anyone else. But for him, she let her guard down, she let him in close. She fell. I watched her go and that was hard enough." The man was watching him carefully now, all his words paused and poised. "Because her, when she falls she goes all the way. Completely. There ain't no turning back, he's everything to her." He blinked, seeming to notice the man standing there for the first time. "Do you even know? Do you have any idea what it's like?"

"I have some idea."

"Do you? Do you really? I've seen the way you've been looking at me. Like some kind of experiment, I'm just some kind of project to you, aren't I? What I'm saying to you is just words, isn't it?" His arms swept outward, the tips of his claws hissing through the air. "You've got no idea about love. It's not even a concept to you."

"To me?" The man leaned forward and he seemed that much closer, even though he never moved. Like his voice was right up against the wall. "Don't pretend to think you know anything about me." For the first time his voice deviated from its usual calm. "I have seen more angles of love than you can possibly conceive. I've witnessed a love so base that the gravity shied away from it, for fear of anchoring it down. And I've seen love so soaring that light itself slows down just the smallest fraction, so that it might take a second to linger over it." He was right in front of Wolverine and the man found himself sliding back from the intensity of it. "Her love is something, because any love that exists in this Universe is a precious thing, but it is not the only one ever to exist and it is not finite. Once submerged, it comes back. That is not the issue here. She will recover and go on." Suddenly his face was so close, his eyes searching every pore of Wolverine's skin. "But you, what about you?"

"I'll keep on." The words came out easily, uncomfortably.

"You wanted this to work." It wasn't a question and somehow that made it worse. "And it's not going to. I'm so sorry."

The texture of his voice, too tender to contemplate, was violent enough to make Wolverine flinch. "Stop. I don't want your pity."

"But why was this so important?"

"Because she needs someone!" He was shouting and the man was so close and it was still like he was throwing his words across the gap to people who were standing on the other distant side. And they were so small and it looked like they were trying to catch the words but he couldn't tell. There was no way he could be sure. "Because she's been alone for too damn long and it shouldn't be that way." He found that his breathing was quickening, moving too fast. Bodies on the other side, waving, but in what? Warning, greeting? Can you hear me, I can't hear you. "The world's done so much to her, it's made her so fragile that she deserves someone who can keep her up, keep her going, be there when she ain't strong enough to go on anymore. To protect her until she can move again." Not for the first time he had to resist the urge to drive his claws through his own hand, just to see if he could feel the puncture. "I tried to tell him that. I told him and I thought he understood. I thought he did." He bent his head, hands clutching at his hair. "Damn it, kid, why didn't you? I never would have let you otherwise."

"Is being alone such a terrible thing?" The question seemed genuine. But Wolverine refused to look at the man. He was a strange one, this man, his presence a pressure that seethed at his peripheral vision. There was a constant song about him, an inverted symphony that played just out of your range, that only came to you on snatches of errant wind and already crumbling memory. And the _smell_ of him. That was the worst. That was what kept piercing him.

"Not . . . not for everyone," Wolverine finally said, keeping his eyes fixed to the floor. The man had no shadow, or sometimes he had two shadows. Sometimes it appeared out of synch from his posture. "You take . . . take a man like me, I've been alone all my life. Always have been, probably always will be. But that's my lot and I accept that, because what else can you do? The life I lead, it ain't pretty, it ain't for everyone and I can't drag anyone else into that. It's not right. But it's my life. I live it like I can, like I want to and the hell with the rest."

"But her, she shouldn't be alone?" The man was frowning again, Wolverine could _hear_ the slender slur of it in his voice. He might have shifted closer, all his motions were a breeze across the grass that grew between sidewalks, what reminded them in their prisons that there were places that still existed where you could have all the room in the world to grow. Sometimes, that reminder was all you needed. And the scent, again, the scent.

"No." It was said so quickly he expected to see blood dripping from the end of the word, so violently was it torn out of him. "Her whole life, she's had no one and she's survived because she always will. But that isn't how it should be. She deserves to have someone to share the world with, because she's so full of life . . ." he took a breath he felt shaking in his lungs, the way that an old scar could still burn if you probed deeply enough. "This one time . . ." he stopped, staring without seeing. "I shouldn't be telling you this."

"Then pretend I'm not here." He looked up sharply to see the man standing off to his right, leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. His form was both fixed and ephemeral, a dream that wouldn't quite let you go. "After all, you're alone, aren't you? You always are. That's what you said."

Biting off a taut response, he forced himself to find some center of calm. "This one time, all of us, the whole team, we were on a mission in the city. Some zealots or crooks, it don't matter. The fight went down and somehow, me and her got separated from the rest, we were on the run from a group of them. They were on our tails but I managed to get us away. I could have killed them all, but I didn't want her to see that. So we ran and we wound up on the waterfront. It was dark out, so we were keeping low, I was using the wind off the ocean to mask our scents and blending in with the twilight.

"I could hear them in the distance, clanking around and hunting for us. Their shouts sounded like warped bird-calls. It seemed like we were the only ones in the whole damn city, racing around the maze trying to stay away from each other. Stupid rats, with our heads low. That's what we were.

"I had her arm, I was tugging her along because I didn't want to lose her. She would have been fine, a bunch of thugs with delusions weren't anything to her. But I couldn't let her go. Suddenly, I felt her stop. She pulled at me and stopped and I turned to her, I wanted to say, _what the hell are you doing? We have to get out of here._

"But she wasn't even looking at me. She was staring out across the water. It seemed like a long time, I don't know. Finally, she looked at me and said, _Logan, I've never seen it like that before_.

"The way she said it, I finally looked. And it was all different, the nuts, the idiots we were fighting, they had been trying to release a gas into the city. But we defused it, Hank did something to it that I still don't understand that made it inert. But it still got released and it . . . it caught all the lights of the city across the water and . . . you ever see a prism, how it makes things look? It split the light and the city was drenched in colors, purples and blues and greens, every streetlight and office building lamp, each one glittered as the gas came down.

"She was still grabbing my hand and I heard her say, _Look at that, isn't that beautiful?_ The two of us, just standing there. That was it." Wolverine was tracing the lines in his palm, as if trying to see if he could alter the course, or maybe bring back sensation. "_It's just like jewels, like someone just threw them out there for anyone to see._" The man was witnessing him, his eyes shot with uncommon focus, all his stillness encouraging. In the face of it, Wolverine had to stop for a second. When he did speak again, his voice didn't fully recover. "The whole city, shimmering. I don't know how long we stood out there for. I wanted to keep telling her we had to leave, but I knew she would tell me, just one more minute, we have time. We have time."

"But we don't have time." Pronounced as fact, the shape of the arc of the world constantly bearing down.

"No," he said, for once in acute agreement. "We never do. They found us, then, and we had to run. We left, to finish it. But . . . it always sticks with me, how that's her. The number of times I've passed that way and never even noticed the damn city and even in all the hustle of trying to get away, she took the time to see it. And she could have kept it to herself but she showed me. She thought it was worth seeing and that I was worth seeing it with." He got up in a soft rustle of motion, rubbing the lower portion of his face and crossing the room away from the man. "That's all I asked for her, all I wanted. Someone who would appreciate her and not stop her from looking away. Who would never let her forget to notice. That don't seem like much to me, that don't seem too hard." His lips curled into a vicious sneer. "But the runt couldn't even handle that much."

The man studied him for a few moments without speaking. Then he stepped away from the wall, scuffed his foot absently against the floor. "Seems to me," he said, his voice almost a drawl, "that you're a combination of every over-protective father that ever lived."

Wolverine snorted. Crossing his arms, he said. "That ain't quite it. I don't want her to disconnect from the world, and cut herself off. I just don't want her to be alone."

"She's not alone." The man said with it with such fevered certainty that Wolverine felt himself stand up that much straighter. "If nothing else, she has you. Doesn't she?"

"Yeah." He was pacing around the room in a lazy half-circle, noticing out of the corner of his eye that the man was almost mimicking his movements, as if it were possible for them to meet in the middle somewhere. "She always will. What I got, if I'm capable of it, it's hers. She's got all the parts of me that are still left to get."

"And yet." The man was watching his own steps, straying his direction toward the back of the room. There was a window toward the rear, pale sunlight filtering in at the wrong angles. "You won't deviate from your path. Not even for her?"

"I made my decisions." It was a hook inside of him, even to say it. "And I know myself, I don't make any apologies for what I am. She's got me, for as long as either of us draw breath, but I won't always be there. The mansion is the closest I ever got to a home but it's not my home. I don't have one, a guy like me, he ain't built to stay in one place."

"She'd go with you, you know that. You wouldn't even have to ask."

"Don't you think I know that?" Across the room he braced himself with one hand against the wall. It was cool and smooth. He swore he felt it exhale. "Every time she catches me staring out the window for more than a minute, I see her face and know what she's thinking. That I'm going to leave. That I'm going to go without her."

"She's right, of course. Every night, your dreams are soaked in departure." How he knew this, he didn't say. But it was part of his scent, the brief brisk smell of the future, when you knew exactly you wanted it to turn out, the kind you'd run headlong into, careening without a care, with your arms thrown out wide. It was the true and the ache of it wouldn't leave him. The man was in the back corner and every word found Wolverine as a dart. "For you, to stay in one place is a kind of death."

"But she's not a wanderer, she's not me. The life I have, it's not the kind she deserves. She needs stability, a place to keep her rooted, someone to make her happy in that place. I'm what she knows, so she thinks that what she needs. And I've been trying to show her, my way isn't the best. There's better. Drake was supposed to be better." He spread his fingers apart on the wall, trying to find the variations between the spaces, trying to decide if that made any kind of difference. It was a murmur that passed through him then. "Someone has to be, to make it easier."

"Easier for her, or for you?"

"I'm going to go, someday." He was maybe answering the wrong question. "And I don't want her to notice."

"But that's impossible, isn't it?" The man was carefully insistent. His shadow touched the window and seemed to veer away from it. "When you walk down the hall, no matter what time and even with her door shut, she knows you. During lectures you stand in the back and watch Summers go on about something you could care less about, and you're a beacon. When they drag you into the baseball games, she sits on the side and plays chess and when she thinks you aren't paying attention, her eyes keep going to you." He put out his hand before the window, watching the absence it created on the floor. "You go, and it will tear a hole that no understanding will plug. Do you realize that?"

"Dammit, _yes." _Wolverine dropped into a crouch, perhaps giving his thoughts less distance to fall.

"And you'll still do it."

"I can't be anything other than what I am." For the first time he might have heard regret in his own voice, laced right into the edges.

"Knowing that, she'd still go with you anyway. You wouldn't even have to ask. Does that frighten you, to know you can ignite that kind of devotion in someone. You who stay so aloof, for all but her." The man's gaze was unreadable, caught in dust and shifting motes. "Even as she reaches, you'll only let her get so close."

Wolverine winced, his fingers tracing out old patterns on the floor. Grains in the wood swirled with his motions, impossibly. "Listen, have you ever lost anything?"

"All the time. Moments, reasons, excuses. Wonder, for a time, because I left the gate open and it got out." His eyes narrowed. "My shadow and my shape, once and when I got it back I swore it wasn't the same. I've lost battles and wars and momentum. And maybe, even though I'm not really certain, my-"

"No." Wolverine cut him off though for some reason he suspected the man had stopped just before he spoke. "Not things. Someone."

"Oh." Spoken so softly, it was more the outline of a sound than the thing itself. "Oh, yes." He turned away, went toward the window, stood before it. "I've lost so many that I could bury your planet in the bodies. I remember all their names and sometimes it's the only sound I hear. And those aren't even the ones I care about. _Those_ . . ." his fingers tapped the glass, staccato mourning. Flowers brushed against the window, fragrant in their disarray. What the glass saw was not what the glass reflected. "Those names I can't even bear."

"Then you've got an idea. You know what it can do to someone." He shifted his weight, staring at the floor without truly seeing it. "I've lost people I don't remember anymore, I'm sure of it. All I got is the sensation of it, and that's bad enough." The scent came to him again, a breath expelled and strafing him. The reek that sank into his brain, the pull of elusive memory, the ache of wounds created by forgotten incidents, of faces creased in recognition that he no longer recalled, of old haunts that only reminded him of routines he may have once possessed. But that wasn't the worst of it. "It's an absence, it never really leaves you."

"So you'd do it to her."

"Let me finish," he growled. "I told you already, the life I lead ain't pretty. I'm a scrapper, always have been. And I don't make any apologies for it. But there's something in me that looks for trouble and it tends to oblige. Near me, she'd always be in danger and I can't do that to her, that's not the life she deserves." With one claw he was scratching out a name on the floor that he no longer used, written in a language he was sure he never learned. "Men like me, we don't die in bed. It's just not the way it is. One day it will catch up to me and I don't want her to have to see that. To have to go through it." His expression darkened. "And if anything happened to her, I wouldn't want to be anyone standing near me when I found out."

"Thus we come to your tactic of beating up potential suitors to get the desired results." The man's voice had its typical dryness but there were nuances, cryptic to the bone.

"I want to make sure they treat her right. If that requires me to get a bit rough to get the message across, I'm okay with that." A certain dangerous glee crossed his face then. "Apparently I've been going too easy. Looks like Drake needed a bit more before it could finally sink in." There was a vibration in his stance that suggested he would be more than willing to administer the treatments right then and there.

"Hm." The man was wandering amidst the backways of his own room, his feet sliding across the floor with loose motions. "Let me ask you this, then. You want someone who's best for her, you're willing to go to all lengths to browbeat them into fitting whatever odd-shaped box you've designed for them-"

"Watch it," Wolverine warned.

The man shot him a look that could have quieted the background roar of creation. "Let _me_ finish." Said so matter-of-factly, Wolverine realized not for the first time that the man could kill him at any second, easily. Too easily. He wanted to be frightened by it but only a steady calm coursed through him. He'd never gotten anywhere by being afraid. Only his scent kept Wolverine at bay, the clinging aura of his tone. What it meant to him.

The man kept walking, swinging his arms in tight circles. "You've got all the traits sewn up, you know her so well that you know exactly what she needs." He ticked off the words on his fingers. "Caring. Loyalty. Courage. Compassion. A certain knowledge of how terrible the world can be and an ability to survive in it. Perhaps a notion of romance, although maybe you're no judge of that. And one other vital thing."

"Nobody's perfect," he offered, if only to stop the man's talking. It didn't help.

"And you'll find someone for her, you'll make sure they stick to that road." Only a few feet away, he paused in his pacings, standing at attention with his feet placed together. "But she knows what she wants, as well, hm? And maybe, more important, she knows what _you_ need."

"A beer, a smoke and the world to explore. Maybe a fight every so often, just to keep the blood pumping. I'm a simple man." But even as he said it, the man was shaking his head. Somehow the action was improbably sad.

"What?" he asked finally, when after a minute the man hadn't said a word. It was unnerving to be stared at in that way, like the man was peeling him right down to the core, reading the patterns of his life in the molecules of the metal that made up his bones. The heaviness he could never quite shake.

"You don't have to lie to me." Then he turned away, striding back toward the other end of the room. The window was gone now, if it had ever been there and was replaced by a painting of escalating escarpments, and a single light that kept moving against the dusk of its setting.

Wolverine was on his feet in an instant. "What does that mean?" He found himself shouting even though the distance wasn't that great. It took maybe ten steps to reach the man, who was regarding the painting intently.

Casting away all caution, he gripped the man's shoulder. It was warm, and chilled, and felt like the first time you saw snow and how you could never bring yourself to believe it was frozen rain no matter how times you were told. How'd you lie on your back and try to see where it all came from. The deep grayness far above, or maybe the back of your house. Nobody would ever say for sure and you became convinced that the world was full of secrets just like that. The real explanation was never quite as exciting.

"Look," the man said, tapping the frame of the painting. "Over at that plateau there." Wolverine peered closer despite himself. Specks might have been moving across it, but it was too dim to tell. Knobs rotated at the edges, a set of eyes that never blinked, and somewhere in the far distance a city could have squatted, folding on itself so that all its corners did not connect.

"What are you trying to tell me?" Wolverine persisted, telling himself that he wasn't begging. "She knows what I need? Hell, she knows me better than anyone else in my life, of course she would. She wants what's best for me, the same thing I want for her. That's why the two of us get along, we understand each other. We accept each other." He was babbling. This was insane. He was standing in a room that shouldn't exist with a man that he was sure could speak the language of stars, in front of a painting that acted more like a window than the window that it replaced had.

"See those figures there?" the man said, bringing his finger close to the canvas without actually touching it. Perhaps if he breached the distance he might bring chaos upon it all. "At the beginning of time we placed them at the one edge of the plateau. They've been trying to get to the other edge ever since but it's so large one generation can't make it. And every time a new generation matures they insist that the first group was going the wrong way and they change direction. They've been doing it for eons, really, going back and forth."

He wouldn't think about this. He didn't _dare_. "This one time, her and Drake got into a spat. I said what I'd do to him if I were her and she told me, she said that any man she ever met would have a hard time living up to my standards. That I was the only man who could live up to them." Wolverine laughed at the memory, how sincere she had been when she said it. Then suddenly the laugh died in his throat as he stared at the man again, as if seeing him for the first time. "Wait, you don't mean . . ."

"But this one pair of them," the man continued, talking softly, as if his speech might cause thunderstorms in the paint, "a man and a . . . well, not really a man and a woman but for your purposes let's pretend. They saw the fight coming, the shift in direction again. They had seen the footprints from their ancestors, crisscrossing the desolation, never reaching any destination. They saw the sky and how it never changed. And one night she said to him, _it has to be different. It has to be better._ The rest used to always shout her down, but he listened, even if he didn't quite understand."

"Her . . . and me?" He wanted to grab the man's face to force him to make eye contact but some instinct told him that was not an intelligent thing to do. "No, that ain't right. That won't ever work."

"And one night, or some pseudo-evening, she couldn't take it anymore. They had decided a new direction again, the opposite of where they had been going. _It'll work this time_, they said, laughing her out of the conclave. _We've got it right now_. She went out and found him, told him that they had to go. Somewhere else, anywhere."

"Are you listening? It can't ever be _me_."

"Sh," the man said delicately. "_But where would we go_, he asked her. _They've been everywhere, we know that._

"But she just smiled at him and said, _You're right._ Held out her hand to him. _But maybe we should try something different_. And he grasped her. And they went up." The man closed his eyes, his forehead almost touching the surface.

Wolverine let the silence linger for as long as he could bear. "I don't understand." It was an ant asking a monkey what a thumb was. The terms just didn't exist.

"Don't you see?" His fingers formed shadows that obscured all details. His body held an irrepressible glee. "They were able to ascend. At some point they evolved flight and didn't even _know_ it. Because nobody ever tried, because they never thought they would need it." His gaze was rising, following the constant line. "It's possible to change, even you've been locked into the same path forever. All you have to do is find the way out."

Despite everything, he found himself trying to find the couple. Was that them, or just dust? No, no. It couldn't be real, it was just a story. Not everything was true. "So they made it, then? They found the way out?"

"I'm afraid not." He sounded resigned to the prospect. "The top is too far away, they'll never reach it. But that's not the point. We're all trapped here to some extent, and the best you can hope for is to discover new degrees of movement. Or stay as you are, and never know."

"It can't happen. She deserves better than me. I keep trying to tell her that."

The man clasped his hands behind his back. "And she doesn't believe you. Now, is that because she won't listen, or because you're not right?"

"We've got lifetimes between us." He breathed in too deeply and the man's odor wafted to him again, too intense to process. He had to back away, into curved corners.

"Do you?" The man tipped his head to the side, considering. "Maybe I just never noticed. The differences between your ages is just the first indrawn breath preceding a sneeze to me." He curved his body slightly, as if trying to see Wolverine from the side and the front simultaneously. "But . . . is that your real reason?"

"I don't know." He folded his arms over his chest, fingers squeezing the skin, telling himself that he could feel the metal rods underlying his structure. Making him rigid, able to survive the gales of the world but keeping him from being anything than what he was. Or was that true? "Me and her, we get along, we're good but . . . I think I've seen too much. I've got spots in me that don't quite work anymore, that are burned out. I've taken punishment over the years, most of it I've earned, and it shows. I can feel it. She deserves someone fresh, without the scars."

The man nodded, chewing thoughtfully on his lip. "I see," he said. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the notepad, flipping through the small pages. "But I said to you, not that long ago . . . where was it . . ." he flicked through a few more, brow furrowed. "You know what she needs, you've got all of it in you. All except one vital aspect."

"A tendency to not throw the first punch," he suggested, hoping the man would agree.

"A sense of wonder." He glanced up from his writing. "The ability to see the world not for what it is, but what it was and could be. You've become so jaded that you're afraid if she stays too long with you that she'll become like you." He turned to another page, erasing something in the margins. "But the others, they perceive only the surface, all they can conceive of are immediate needs and instant pleasures. They are fun, for a time, and they are close and they are real. But they are not you. They cannot be." Said with all the solemnity of a proclamation.

Wolverine wasn't sure he liked the tone. "What I got in me can't touch her. Don't you see? I'm battered and bruised all the way through. She doesn't want that, not in the way you're saying." But why couldn't he wrap his mind around it, confront it fully?

The man said nothing but a few moments. Then with a quick snap of his wrist flipped the notepad shut, folding it into tinier and tinier squares until it vanished from sight entirely. "Perhaps. You may be right, at that. In the end, it won't be up to you, or me." Adjusting his jacket on his body, he added with a sly smile, "But I think you make a grave error in your assumptions." The smell was coming back again, insidious and sad. Every time he flickered.

"And what is that?"

He had gone to the far corner of the room, running his hands along the seams. The room start disassembling itself, bending downwards and tucking into itself. What lay beyond it his eyes refused to register, it was blank and everything and he wouldn't look. "You, like any man, maybe, presume that in any relationship you will be the influence, that you will change _her_." He cast a glance over his shoulder even as he broke the room down. "Why can't it be the other way around?"

Maybe it was the shock of the question, soft and stabbing all at once, or maybe it the impact of the man taking the room apart, but Wolverine found he had no answer. At least nothing that could be put into words.

But the man acted like he had heard regardless. "You think yourself inviolate, a fixed point in a ceaselessly shifting world. You are wrong. You were different once to get to where you are, and you can be different again. You know this, but for whatever reason have convinced yourself otherwise." He tapped the cabinet and it collapsed, the glass spreading across the floor like spilled mercury, quickly fading. "All you have to do is let go of the notion that you are trapped in the same linear line. You can change, but that's up to no one but you." Bending down, he began to roll up the walls, pulling them free from the ceiling and wrapping them into tight rods.

Part of Wolverine wanted to help but he found himself rooted, unable to do anything but watch. It was just as well, he wasn't sure where he would even start. The elegant breakdown was beyond any kind of art he could hope to achieve. "You sound sure about that."

"I do, don't I?" He spoke as if marveling at the concept. The opposite wall wavered, disintegrating into graceful spiraling motes. "Perhaps I just have a lot of experience at this. But, consider this, if you ever find yourself doubting what I say, ask yourself . . . what made you stop and look at the city?"

Wolverine could only stare at him. Answers rang in his head as bells but none of the chimes matched the scale.

The man only grinned back. "See, you're not as far gone as you think." An eyeblink of time passed and his expression became all too serious again. He pulled open his pocket and crammed another shard of wall into it, along with a miniaturized table. "There. That's all I had to say." The couch was the last bit of furniture to go, arching its own back and growing into a smaller circle. "You can go back to your friends now."

"Wait." He had a sudden feeling that he only had seconds to get the words out, to settle a question that had been circling around his brain all blurred, unable to identify itself. Now, in came clear, when no time remained. _You never told me your name_. That wasn't it, no. "Didn't I . . . didn't I meet you once before? And stab you? Not here, another time."

He thought for a second. "Oh. That." The man smiled indulgently. "I'm sorry, that wasn't me. It was probably my brother, it's a common mistake. We don't look anything alike." He chuckled, as if enjoying a private joke and turned away. Already his form was somehow flattened, rippling in all the wrong places. One wall remained, the further one. He grasped a part of it with one hand, watching the wrinkles spread. "Perhaps the next time we see each other, you'll have decided what you want to be." Down and down, cracks on the edges, above, on the sides. The scent caught him like whirling razors, right down to his center and he couldn't move, transfixed.

"In the meantime, go a bit easier on the boys, hm? At least give her a chance to get a shot in first."

In one last, swift jerk it came down and went, and the black behind was all he saw, skewering his vision and becoming everything. All his senses, gone, sight and touch and sense of place and hearing and all the rest. All but one. With all else missing he finally realized what it was he had smelled on the man, what he had never wanted to face. Not the spectres of his bruises left unrecalled, too many nights left alone shivering, exposed and unrelenting, running without fail or recourse. A shudder in his lungs and a burning in his muscles brought on by elements that wouldn't settle into recognizable shapes. He knew all this, it had coiled into his mind and resided there long ago. The parts he had healed away and erased, and thought nothing of since. Those parts he had grown accustomed to in their lacking and refused to miss or belabor. They were him but not all of him and had no bearing on him today.

It was the others that got him.

The missing fragments, the terrible longing of lost time, what he had never wanted to acknowledge. Days spun out as gossamer, where the sunlight poured down on his face, the sensation of running, not from anything but because he could, seeing how far his body could go. The trickling tendrils of laughter that wasn't his, but close and near and honest. Impressions of bodies, on snow, on his skin, the moisture of passing breath, a sigh over mountains, the vastness over water and the certainty that you could go forever and never see it all and that what you did see would just be enough, but barely. The pressure of a hand, constant and there, even when the faces weren't. Clinks of glasses and rounds of boisterous voices and out there in the meadow you found her, where she'd always been. He accepted the memories of the bad times, even if he might never get them back. That had never been a problem. But the perfect days were just as lost, so he just pretended that they had never occurred. The stabbing tears he never let himself fear. All gone and all gone and all gone. But wait, was that a flicker in a feather, cascading lightly on the wind, just out of reach. Remember that day? You had stood on the precipice so far above and shouted, defied the valleys to capture it and hold it, if they could. And your voice came back, again and again, until your own echo was nothing you recognized and she had laughed at you and told you, _shush, shush, you'll bring the mountain down on us_. Laying there and the soil was so soft and you carved impressions into it that maybe were still there if you could find them. _How had he let that go? How long had it been?_ You'd know, if you could only catch the feather, just reach out and get it, then you'll have at least one day, one shimmering day. Stretch for it, clutch it tight and keep it close. Go. Go get it, please.

_You were different once._

His fingers brushed silk, so achingly far.

_And you can be different again._

He couldn't see anymore, did he have it? Did he-

_But how badly do you want it?_

Did he-

Wolverine opened his eyes a second before he slammed into the wall. Pulling at the last moment so he didn't dent it, he twisted his body so that his back went up against it. Flailing briefly, he gained a balance that he barely remembered having, forcing himself into a halt.

Even so, it took him a bit to realize that he was breathing rapidly.

"All right," he said to no one. "Ah . . . all right." Looking around, he saw that he was back at the school, in one of the dormitory hallways. Sheets of velvet seen through one of the windows told him it was night-time. Had it been night when he left? What was time? An agreed upon progression of events? It was hard to say.

"I have to get some air," he told himself, standing up straighter, trying to quiet his heart. A faint noise caught him then, a slippery hiccup and all of a sudden he knew which hallway this was. There was a door directly across from him and he knew whose room that was.

_But how badly_-

"Air." Like a mantra. He went to go, to leave. "That'll help." Maybe it would stop him from talking to himself.

Then he felt the tickle against his palm, slight and soft. Looking down, he realized that his one hand was closed in a tight fist. _How badly_.

He stared at it for what felt like a long time before walking across the hallway, toward the door. His steps were measured and silent but he still felt the body tense inside. Of course. He never opened his hand to see what he had, if he had anything.

The door opened with a creak he felt through his spine. Inside it was dark, different shades of shadows casually draped on each other, all the gradients no one ever noticed. She was sitting up in bed, as he had expected, curled up on one end. She was staring directly at him, and even without seeing her eyes he could tell she'd been crying. Like the scent of misted rain, up where the air got thin and saturated. That smell and another? He couldn't tell.

Placing one hand on the doorframe, he leaned just slightly into the room, his fist still resting at his side. His shadow painted the floor starkly, an arrow pointed out. There was a lightness to it and he knew. One of them was waiting for the other to start. Maybe that would always be the problem.

But they had to begin somewhere. _How badly do you_.

And he opened his fist and let it go, without looking he let it fall. _But you could have_. He barely felt it leave, if it had been there in the first place. Ahead were nothing but further days. He had to understand that, finally. How it would fit the only way it could, eventually.

"Babe," he said, surprised at how hoarse his voice sounded, "I think we've got to talk."

- MB

8/2-8/5/08

RP


End file.
