fic: there aren't any more guns in the valley (oneshot)

[cloudedhues]

title: there aren't any more guns in the valley
fandom: x-men | logan-centric
stats: 2037 | teen | oneshot
prompt/summary: you're very good at dying. so good that you do it more than once. you've done it more times than you can count.
notes: i swear this is my last second pov fic.

The first time it happens, it doesn’t feel like dying at all.

Or so you think. You expected it to feel bigger than you. Not to say it doesn’t hurt. It hurts like a bitch actually.

The bullet hits you too unmistakably center to land anywhere else. The shot is clean but the pain is a messy thing.

It is painful, you’ll give it that, but it doesn’t feel like an end.

The bullet had caught you mid-sentence. You had been shouting something to the soldier beside you, both of you at the tail end of a comma in your lives.

This is your first war. If there’s anything constant about humanity, it’s the promise that this one won’t be your last.

That had been apparent since the beginning.

Death had kept vigil with a boy born to garner pitied looks and inspire little faith that he could last another day. It stood next to his side as he grew older, watched over as he stumbled through childhood, gripped his shoulder when he stuck his newly-formed claws in his father who was not a father at all.

You think about that boy as you open your eyes. The heat and the clamor of battle have long petered into wisps. In its place, cold and smell and decay. The battlefield is a hushed aftermath, like finding the carcass of a boat drowned on the bottom of the ocean. The scarred silence of standing in front of an open casket.

Your body feels very much the same. On top of the smooth skin of your chest you find a bullet stained with dried blood. Death has always stood at your side but you know now what it’s like to carry it inside you. You know what it’s like to let it go. So you pick up your feet and you walk.

You leave the boy with the rest of the corpses because of course even your own birth would need a death.

The time you start to lose count, it feels like you’ll never do it again.

You hack your way through a century, each decade a bloodletting. You’ve lost skin and blood and bone. You lose a heart. But you patch up. New again. Same as always. And you wonder how long you will last. If you can match time and become just as inevitable.

It never does happen. But you wonder if there will ever come a time when even survival instinct is no longer enough. That if you drowned now, your body would settle on the floor of the water without a fight.

You’re wrong of course.

When you drown now, you are already up on your feet, the new metal of your claws pointing upward.

You pick up your feet. You run. New again. Same as always.

You do what you do best. Scrabble forwards, bare your knuckles, sheath your claws and keep on moving no matter how many times they make you stay.

Out of everyone who tries, the one they call Professor with his perpetual calm, who looks at you and probably knows how many steps you’ve taken, is the worst offender.

Every time you turn your back and walk, his farewell is always the same.

No matter how far you go, Logan, you are always welcome. You can always come back.

The fact that it’s true rankles you the most.

The time you start to forget your own, it feels like all you can do is remember everyone else’s.

Perhaps it’s both a miracle and a curse that you have such a shit memory. You’re no stranger to forgetting. Healing factor never accounts for memory. It can’t replace what you’ve lost, what’s been erased and modified, what’s been eroded by time. You have two centuries to preserve. And you’ve always been a bit fucked at that to begin with.

Death is inevitable. Time even more so.

When even Charles succumbs, you ignore the uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu and don’t think much of it.

First, it’s names. He calls you James one afternoon but you shrug it off, thinking it as a one-off. He’s called you that before. The third time he forgets, he doesn’t call you anything at all.

Then it’s little things that add up to something bigger. Where he keeps the library key (in the right drawer on his desk), what the lesson plan is for that afternoon, who those voices belong to that he keeps hearing in his head.

One day, you’re at his office and you’re having that same argument where you don’t bother trying to say anything he already knows. Which is pretty much everything. It’s a useless conversation but it’s expected routine at this point. He still thinks he can prevent you from “your ways”, thinks he knows better than what you know you want.

You’re distracting yourself with his bookshelf, rifling through one book then returning it again, deliberately messing the alphabetized order of things because that’s what you do. You’re about to say as much when you hear a crash.

Charles is on the floor, sprawled inelegantly on that rug you snark had been skinned from an actual wolverine many months ago. And it doesn’t hit you as you help him back to his chair or when you’re watching him blink the fog away in his mind. It doesn’t hit you when you leave his office after his insistence that he had merely slipped.

It’s only when he forgets that it ever happened at dinner that you realize. When he fell, Charles Xavier had forgotten he could no longer walk.

They try to make plans. Scott and Storm take precautions. Jean takes the mantle, keeps the worry out of her smiles for the students and pretends she doesn’t hear his mind unspooling.

You watch it all from the peripheral. You know inevitable and inevitable knows that there’s only so much they can do.

When it arrives, as it always does, you are with Rogue in the breakfast nook of the mansion. She no longer lives here and is only visiting. But just the same, she’s made tea that you’re not going to drink and is laughing at something you’ve said, probably at your grumbling or probably just at you. It’s as if nothing’s changed. As if today is no different from any other day she makes you chamomile and makes fun of your age. You don’t really remember much of it. If at all. Her smile when she tells you that she’s thinking of adopting, the clench in your chest you ignore when she jokes about you being old enough to be a grandpa, the soft leather of her gloves squeezing your right hand with anxiety and excitement.

Those hurt you more than what you do remember. The sudden pitch of it, high and keening, painful as it shrieks your brain into silence. The liquid of the tea in the air mid-spill in your haste along with the chair you toppled to the ground as you stood, all of it vibrating and piercing like a tuning fork. You remember your breath squeezing as you grappled with gravity to move, to take her away, to do something. Her eyes wide and confused, painfully young, painfully too early, too early.

The ending settles on you before it happens.

If there's anything you know about dying more than once, it’s that none of it ever really leaves you no matter how many times you forget. You carry each one everywhere you go.

But when the shaking does stop, when you open your eyes and hear nothing but funeral silence in the mansion, find that Anna Marie’s hand, Anna Marie, is no longer there, you can’t help but feel as if this time has taken something from you that you’ll never get back.

The time it counts the most, it feels as if you’ve already started.

You bleed metal. It should make sense that what kept you alive would kill you in the end.

Caliban knows it, looks at you the same way Charles used to whenever you were being “stubborn”. But Caliban has known you for a lot less and he can’t pull off that all-knowing crap as well when he looks seconds away from toppling into the ground.

You think you can make a life out there. A boat. A body of water. No one to harm you for miles. No one else to hurt who hasn’t been already. It’s so very simple. Perhaps not a life, but something very close. It’s all you three have to go by.

You almost fool yourself into believing in it - that an almost life could be your ending.

When the girl comes barreling into your grasp, you still stubbornly hold on to that almost. Almost there. Almost close to something.

But this girl has a way of making you let go. And she does, prying your fingers off one by one. Five of them so far.

First Caliban.

Then three.

Charles.

Death is so very easy to understand. Its existence is its only one rule.

You’re not exactly cheating death if you’ve been made an exception. If anything, you’ve played it just as faithfully as it’s played you.

And you’ve never felt it more in your rattling chest as you stare at the surface of the water, blurry and wet, how badly you want to let go of your other hand.

The girl curls hers around yours, all of her five fingers grasping and holding on.

The hurt flares but with it burns something else. The same feeling you felt when you thought about that boat and that water.

You wrench your hand away but you can still feel her in your palm.

When it happens this time, you wonder what it feels like.

You’re very good at dying. So good that you do it more than once. You’ve done it more times than you can count. You’ve collected your deaths within you and you know how each of them feels. You’ve never had to wonder. Two centuries, and you will never have to wonder.

You’re very close and you wish you had time to think it out. But there’s not enough time right now. Those kids need you. She needs you.

So you do what you do best.

You pick up your feet. You run. New enough. Same enough.

You fight not like it’s your last but your first.

Charles had known what you thought you wanted. He's always known better. You realize it a little late – at the very end when it’s finally within your grasp. Not surprising since your timing’s always been the worst.

There is pain but that's nothing new. That's been as much a constant as this moment. Besides, it's the farthest thing from your mind.

Her fingers are shaking now but they are thrumming with the steady march of her pulse, a promise and a memory close enough that you can mistake it for your own.

She squeezes your hand and her tiny voice is pleading with you to stay with her. And you let yourself smile a little for this girl. This girl who is everything and nothing like you. Your little life, your daughter who thinks you’re leaving her.

Your sight is dimming but you imprint her face into your mind, Laura in every remaining breath. You want her to be the one whom you keep in the end. One day she will understand many things, a lot of it painful. Things she already knows but things that she will have to relearn. But she can be more than you. More than the pain, the suffering.

More than death.

One day she will believe much earlier on what Charles has always told you. That you can come back no matter how far you go. No matter how many times you’ve gone. That there’s nowhere she’ll go that you won’t be right there with her.

You’ve had more than enough moments. More than enough time. Two centuries of it.

But you have just enough for this.

 

So you do.

The last time it happens, it doesn’t feel like dying at all.