xp_logs | Logan and Maverick: Death and all his friends

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After managing not to cross paths for weeks, the two former Weapon X teammates run into each other.

Logan sighed as he knocked one last time on Sarah's door. Girl either wasn't home or wasn't answering her door. Guess he'd have to try another day to get a hold of her, talk things out. He didn't think she was avoiding him - it wasn't really her style. If she was pissed-off or whatever at her, the first sign he'd have of it is a bone-knife buried to the hilt somewhere in his guts. Or something a touch south, he thought with a mental squirm. But as he took a few steps away from her door he smelled something that nigged at the edge of his conscious. Moreso than the usual "Hey, this is vaguely familiar." scents he ran into from day-to-day.

This one was ... dangerous.

When it came to visitors in the brownstone, North had become accustomed to recognizing the occasional brimstone cloud that presaged Kurt stopping by to see his sister, or occasionally Amanda's boyfriend coming down the stairs early in the morning. But the figure by Sarah's door was frighteningly well-known to him, and his hand instinctively brushed against the small of his back, feeling the familiar grip of his pistol brush his knuckles.

Well shit, he probably smelled you the instant you walked in from the cold, David thought, relaxing his arms to his sides and fishing his keys out of his pockets. "Long time, Jim," he said casually, making a conscious effort not to look at the other mutant. It's been fifteen years, God only knows what he remembers...

Logan blinked and looked at the stranger who spoke. Nobody else here but him so that "Jim" must have been addressed to him. He did get a tickle of gun oil to his nose so either this guy was armed or he'd been working with a gun recently. "Excuse me?" he said politely.

David stepped forward into the better light, letting Logan get a better look at him. Even after weeks to prepare himself, actually seeing the man in the flesh was like looking at a ghost. Then again, it was something of a relief to put eyes on a former teammate that wasn't trying to kill him.

"Sarah's running post-op for Remy," he explained, nodding towards the locked door. "LeBeau and Braddock are almost as anal about after-action debriefs as Stryker was."

There, the name was out in the open. Either Logan would react, or it was really like they said - he didn't remember a thing.

"How do you know William Stryker?" he asked, his entire body tensing. Something was all fucked up here. He was on the defensive, lost, confused. Not good.

"Not as well as you did," North responded, looking Logan over. "You... really don't remember. The program, Weapon X, the team. Mein Gott, they fucked your head over deep. I'm still trying to piece some of it together myself, frankly - but... it's me, Logan. Maverick. You're telling me..." He paused, cocking his head at Logan, watching the shorter man closely. "Nothing rings a bell?"

Logan just bared his teeth in what might charitably might be called a smile. "My name is Logan." he said, fishing out his dog-tags from under his shirt. "First memory I have is bein' naked in the snow with nothing but these." he said, displaying them for Maverick's consideration. "You want to talk, that's fine, but not here." he said, looking around briefly. He didn't dare let himself hope. Not now, not like this. This could be a mindfuck. He was standing in the House That Mindfuck Built, after all. Masters and their apprentices.

"Bill Stryker is dead." he said, in case Maverick was somehow unaware. "The project shut down."

"We should talk," North replied, returning the mirthless grin. "And yes, I heard about your payback to Stryker up at Alkali. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. As for Weapon X being shut down..." He sighed, thinking of the black hat sitting on a coffee table inside his apartment, next to the bottle of tequila that had been Carol's poison of choice.

Pocketing his keys, he shrugged at Logan. "Bar a couple blocks from here, Finnegan's. Twenty minutes."

Logan adjusted his own Stetson, so like the one that Wraith had favored. "I know it." he acknowledged. "Oh, and Maverick? You'd better show. And you'd better be straight with me." he said before he headed back for the stairs and to the outside. So close. Someone who _finally_ knew something.

***

As promised, twenty minutes later, North walked into the bar. Logan wasn't hard to notice, having picked a corner booth with a view of the entire floor. Tactically smart - the man hadn't lost his edge, North thought, only his memory.

Picking up a bottle at the bar, North walked over to Logan's booth and sat across from him. "Fifteen years, Logan. What in the hell happened to you? We got the call fifteen years ago, Stryker brought us all in. Me, John, Carol, and the rest. Everyone but you. Said we had to go under deep cover, that we'd be reactivated when the coast was clear. And ever since I got my head clear, these past three years I've been trying to find out why. I wake up after over a decade as someone else, the program's gone, Stryker's dead, and you... well," he shrugged, leaning back in the chair and taking a drink of his beer. "Here we are."

"Fifteen years." Logan said. "That's as far back as my memory goes. Got pulled in out of the snow, given some humanity back." he growled around his cigar, lit in blatant defiance of New York State's no-smoking laws. "Spent a lot of time looking for something. Anything. Never did find it." he said with a bark of a laugh. "Hooked up with Xavier and his crew a couple of years back. Been in and out ever since." he said.

"I'd wondered about that," David admitted, cautiously looking Logan over. "When I ran into Arkady, and began remembering who I really was. The one thing that kept bouncing through my brain was that when things go bad, find Logan. Finding you linked to Charles Xavier, the great peacemaker... you have to admit, it's a bit shocking."

He looked into his beer for a moment before taking another long drink. "Xavier hasn't been able to do anything to restore your memory?"

"He's the one who unlocked Alkali Lake." he admitted. "Apparently whoever put this shit in my brain did a real good job. Too good. Like to find him - or her. Shake 'em warmly by the throat." he said with the hint of a growl. "But Stryker's dead, Alkali's underwater, and nobody's talking." he said.

"That much I can give you," North said. He let the words hang in the air for a moment before continuing, almost casually. "His name is Aldo Ferro. He was the psionic coordinator for the Weapon X project. Some kind of empath, he could go in..." North pointed to his temple, gesturing randomly. "Change how your brain worked. When we went into London, and they were worried about telepaths? Ferro put in shields. Hurt like hell deprogramming that. Not to mention that it was like a constant hangover."

Drawing a line with his finger through the ring of condensation left on the tabletop from his beer, David sighed. It almost felt like a confession, speaking about his past with one of the men who knew exactly what he'd been through - but at the same time, didn't.

"And before you ask, no, I have no idea where Ferro is. He's been a priority for me ever since Betsy unlocked my head from his conditioning. I have no idea if he's even still alive."

"Fuck." he said with feeling. "I left Stryker tied up and alive. Fucking Magneto killed him." he swore. "Can't question a dead man." he grumbled. To give himself time to calm down, he slammed his beer down in a series of titanic swallows. "You're Snow Valley now. Get Remy and Pete on it." he suggested. "I got no idea where to even start looking. Name's, what, Italian? But names don't mean shit, do they?" he growled.

David looked away for a moment, as if gauging his next words carefully. "I'm not certain how much you should want to know, Jim," he said quietly. "A lot of the stuff we did under Stryker... a lot of it was the good fight, no doubt about that. Baghdad, Tierra Verde, even that fucking incident in Bogota..."

He glanced over at Logan quickly. "Please tell me you don't remember Bogota. Allow yourself that luxury."

Shaking his head, he turned his attention back to his beer. "But a lot of it... we weren't heroes, not like Xavier and his X-Men. Most of us, we trusted Stryker. That what we were doing was just, that it was necessary." He lifted his beer and drank the rest of the bottle in one long swallow. "And then... and then there was you."

"What the fuck's that supposed to mean?" he asked, eyes narrowing. Not that he didn't have a good idea - his dreams were invariably violent when they weren't about being vivisected and his bones coated in adamantium. "And don't call me Jim. My name is Logan." he insisted. "Jim's the tall nutjob at the Institute."

David put his hands flat on the table, mostly to keep them from shaking as he forced himself to look Logan square in the face. "I worked with you for six years," he stated, his harsh accent clipping the words. "Wraith, maybe six months longer than that. George and Carol, less. All we knew about you was that you and Colonel Stryker were tight, you were the linchpin of the whole project. And after the first op together, I learned two things about you."

He paused as another bottle of beer was placed on the table, and the waitress left quickly, obviously not wanting to interrupt the tension that had suddenly increased. Without shifting his gaze, North picked up the beer and raised it slightly. "One," he said before taking a drink, "that you could heal from shit that would have sent any of us home in a body bag. And two--" another drink "-- that you were the absolute best goddamn killer I'd ever seen."

"Yeah." Logan said, his face stone. "Figured that one out all by myself. Tell me, the name Silver Fox mean anything to you?" he asked. Maybe Maverick knew about the cabin, about Fox. He shouldn't hope, but he did it anyway.

David's face went chalk-white for a second, and he looked down at the table, almost ashamed. "You don't know me from Adam these days, Logan. But I'm going to ask you to trust me on this: you don't want to remember everything. What you've got with Xavier's now, you're making a new life. I didn't understand why you'd do that until I saw what you've got going on there. It's... some things you just don't want to dig too deeply on, Logan."

"So either you don't know or you do know and you don't want to tell me." he said. "Fine." he said, tossing back his beer like it was water. He thought for a moment, then opened his mouth again. "Betts was able to bust open your head, right? Give you back the life you had before Stryker?" he asked to confirm.

David laughed at the question. "Life before Stryker, hah. Before Weapon X, I was a Stasi functionary in East Germany. Colonel Stryker helped me defect to the West before the Wall fell. Gave me a new life. If I'd still have been Stasi when Reunification happened... well, there wouldn't exactly have been an amnesty for men like me. But yes, Betsy broke the conditioning that Ferro put in my head." He rubbed his temples, remembering the searing pain of Elisabeth's psychic knife stabbing through his brain, blasting open locks with a mental shotgun instead of picking them cleanly.

"Eleven years I lived under that cover," he explained. "An average man, white-collar drone, forgettable. That's part of me now. After so long, you can't un-live it."

He reached into his pocket and dropped a twenty on the table, standing up. "If Snow Valley comes across anything related to Stryker, Ferro, or Weapon X... I'll keep you in the loop. After all this time, it's the very least I can do. And Logan?" Maverick paused before leaving the booth. "Whoever you decide you are now, it doesn't have to depend on who you were then. Make sure you really know why you want to remember."

Logan just stared at Maverick with a flat stare that the German mutant would have known well. He watched him all the way through the bar and out the door, never breaking it for a second.