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The rubble was still smoking, and dust was everywhere. It burned their eyes, scratched their throats and clung to the blood and sweat like a second skin. The X-Men advanced among the carcasses of gutted buildings, breathing heavily: castaways spat out by a storm that had almost swallowed them.
Scott ran a hand over his visor, hoping to clear it of soot, but it only smeared it more. The crimson light of his eyes pulsed menacingly behind the ruby quartz, like a heart too strong to be contained. Around him, pieces of concrete twisted like broken bones, shards of incandescent steel, and tongues of flame devouring what remained of one of the most protected anti-mutant laboratories in the country. But it wasn't over, not yet.
“Come on, move…” he muttered, more to keep himself upright than an order to the others.
Not too far away, he saw Rogue helping Colossus shake off a beam that seemed welded to his metal skin. Storm nearly stumbled from exhaustion. Henk, badly wounded in one arm, staggered to his feet a few steps away from her. They began to lean on each other, as always.
Scott's gaze instinctively searched for Jean, and saw her on her knees, her face pale, her red hair matted with dust and sweat. She was breathing as if the air had become too thick to fit into her lungs. In an instant, Scott was there.
“Jean, look at me.” He took her face in his hands. Their mental bond vibrated strongly, a taut thread soaked in affection and pain. “The mission is accomplished. We must go.”
But she didn't look at him. She was staring into the distance, into the darkness of the ruins. Suddenly, a shiver ran through her, and Scott felt that panic invade his mind like an icy breath. Her voice reached him as a mere whisper amidst his thoughts:
“Scott… I don't feel Logan anymore.”
Five words. A cold fear made the sweat freeze on his body.
For a moment, Scott was convinced that exhaustion had started to play tricks on him. Fear for Logan's safety? But in the end, it was not surprising: there was a constant thread between his thoughts and Jean's, and Logan had long since become entangled in it in his own way. Because Jean loved him. And Scott, though he would never admit it out loud, couldn't bear the thought of losing him.
He clenched his jaw, trying to force a smile.
“He has nine lives, you know. He’s probably already on his way to the Blackbird, ready to make one of his idiotic jokes.”
Jean shook her head, hands shaking. The sweat on her forehead wasn't just exertion, it was fever: the price of keeping an entire team telepathically linked during a battle in a mutant-proof bunker.
“No… I lost him.”
Her mind offered him a jagged image: a corridor of shiny, cold gray metal, capable of silencing every thought. Logan had entered there, and then nothing. A telepathic blackout.
Scott gritted his teeth, a knot forming in his stomach, clutching at his heart like claws. He looked at Jean, looked at the Blackbird in the distance, looked at the smoking rubble, and within him boiled anger and love, poison and medicine in the same vial.
Storm intervened, placing a hand on her shoulder.
“Jean, you have to get up,” she murmured, her voice soft and protective. “You’re about to pass out.”
“I’m not leaving without Logan!” Jean exploded, her voice cracking.
Scott jumped to his feet, his visor covering not only his eyes, but part of his emotions: the commander's stiffness strained his features, but underneath burned anger, exhaustion, and fear. Too much fear.
"Damn it, Jean!" he snarled, but then quickly bit the inside of his cheek in repentance. "I… I'll go." His breath came out harshly. "No one gets left behind."
She looked at him, and there was a wave of relief and pain in their mental connection, as if she wanted to thank him and at the same time stop him from leaving.
Scott stroked her forehead. “Go back to the jet with the others,” he whispered. “The main mission is accomplished, but we still have the other explosive to finally destroy what remains of the Sentinel experiments.” They had ten minutes left, maybe less.
He added silently, just for her, just in their minds: “Protect yourself… for me.”
Jean nodded faintly, her lips moving voicelessly: “Bring him back… for me.”
Scott didn't answer. In that situation, he couldn't pretend that going to look for Logan was an effort made solely for her. Logan was more than a teammate, he was definitely a rival, often an annoying housemate. But above all, he was a part of home Scott didn't want to lose.
He tried to reassure himself. Logan was getting to the jet. Logan had to get to the jet.
So he turned and started running.
The team disappeared into the smoke and the winds whipped up by Storm. The ground shook slightly beneath him, like a warning. The second bomb ticked away in the darkness, hidden.
Each step he took was like a sharp blow against the arid earth. His visor vibrated with energy, ready to open and destroy whatever prevented him from moving forward. The air was hot like the breath of a wild animal, and the smoke blurred the distances and shadows. In Scott's head, there was only one name that resonated louder than anything else.
Logan.
At that thought, irritation rose like fever. What the hell was he still doing in there? Why could he never keep his place and follow orders? Why did he have to worry Jean? Why did he have to worry him?
Logan lay under a massive pile of rubble. There was barely enough room around him to breathe, but enough to realize how screwed he was. Every breath he took was a strangled growl. His head was throbbing, he could feel the vibrations of the ground giving way around him. He knew that the second device they had placed on the lower levels was about to explode. He felt the urgency, and it was one of the few times he also felt death coming.
He let out a deeper growl, it wasn't fear. It was anger.
A long steel rod pierced his chest, sinking just a breath away from his heart and embedding itself in the debris ceiling above him. He was immobilized, an insect waiting to be crushed completely.
The rest of his wounds had already healed, or were trying to, but that bar wouldn't budge. His body was trying to take back what the steel had eaten away, but it was like trying to close a door with a car parked in the middle. Even that, however, wouldn't be enough to free him. Ironic, he thought. To end his days right in the ruins of a laboratory built to exterminate people like him.
A tired, incredulous laugh escaped his throat. An absurd end, but perhaps deserved.
“I hope everyone’s safe”, he muttered through gritted teeth, almost praying. He closed his eyes and began to prepare for the idea of staying there.
And it was in that very moment of silence that he heard it. A sob, soft, too close.
Logan's eyes opened in less than a second, his heart skipped a beat, and the world no longer made any sense.
In front of him, crouched, was a child. Small, brown hair, huge and cloudy hazel eyes, his breathing coming in gasps. And tears, so many tears. His nose was red and his fists were clenched.
Logan hadn't seen him coming in there. He couldn't have made his way through that concrete tomb. Yet he was there, fragile and desperate.
“Hey… who-” Logan began, but the child’s voice fell on him, desperate:
“Please don’t die! I swear- I swear I’ll get you out of here!” The words drowned out in another strangled sob.
He continued to mumble disjointed promises through tears and snot.
Logan stared at him for a moment. His rational self wanted to laugh at that absurd vision. But his human, emotional self, the one that often pretended not to exist, made his chest tighten.
“Hey, calm down…” he whispered, trying to find a gentle tone, one he hadn’t used in years. “Don’t cry, kid. It’s okay. I’m fine, see?”
The child shook his head, furious, that lie hurt him more than anything else.
On the surface, Scott continued to dig. He pushed away boulders with the sheer force of adrenaline, every breath in that dust-filled air was a scratch on the lungs.
“Logan!”
The echo bounced off the ruins and came back empty.
Anger gnawed at him, anger at the man he was searching for, anger at himself for what he was feeling. If Logan hadn't been acting like a lone hero like usual, they'd all be safe on the damn jet by now. If he hadn't been so stubborn. If he hadn't been so… important that he couldn't leave him out there.
His hands began to bleed as he moved blocks of rubble, searching for signs, screaming Logan's name into unanswering chasms, the dust entering his wounds, his breath, his thoughts.
Dripping with sweat, breathing furiously, he tried to get up after peering into a cavern of rubble, but his legs gave out, and he fell right back to his knees. He was tired, from the hours-long battle, from that merciless fear that was gnawing at his heart.
The smoke in front of him cleared for an instant, and as he looked up faintly to continue his search, he saw something.
At the top of a mountain of ruins, crouched, a child watched him.
He was wrapped from head to toe in a cloth that moved in the wind. Part of his face was obscured by his thin arms clasped around his bent knees, but his big, clear eyes were more than visible, intense, shining with unshed tears.
Scott was mesmerized for a moment by that gaze. Those eyes were marked by an anguish that seemed adult, ancient. There was a quiet anger that shouldn't have belonged to a child.
“Who…?” Scott barely managed to whisper, breathless.
The boy stood up, hugging himself in the blanket as if he were cold despite the burning debris. He looked down at him, and his voice was a sharp whisper:
"Don't you dare abandon me."
A command and a plea at the same time.
Then he began to slowly descend the mountain of rubble, and Scott followed him, silently.
Logan couldn't calm the child down, who continued to despair because he wanted to help him. He was crying and thrashing frantically, and suddenly, he grabbed the piece of metal in Logan's sternum and began trying to pull it away with his small, shaking hands.
“Hey! No!” Logan growled, more scared than angry. “You’ll hurt yourself! Leave it alone!”
The boy didn't listen, he pulled with all his might, trying to pull the steel out with desperate force. Blood began to drip from his fingers and palms. He didn't even notice, he seemed delirious.
Logan stopped him gently, grabbed his hands, holding them in his own, in a strangely protective gesture.
“Enough…” he murmured, and looked into the child's eyes. In that instant, something clicked, an intrinsic awareness, like remembering something you’d forgotten. “...Scott.”
The boy looked up. Those brown eyes darkened, deepened.
“I won't leave you…” he managed, between sobs. “I won't leave you here.”
Logan swallowed. Maybe he was already dying, maybe this was one of those delusional visions people talk about so much, that comes when you're about to kick the bucket. Yet he could actually feel those small hands in his. A part of him wanted to scream at the child to leave, doubting whether he had actually been there with him or not.
But the words that came out were different.
“Don’t worry, Scott,” he whispered. “You did what you could.”
The child sniffed for the umpteenth time, still trembling. Then he snuggled against Logan, a gesture somewhere between seeking protection like a puppy and wanting to defend him with his own body.
Scott was following that child as if he were the only water in a barren desert. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he'd sensed it was some kind of telepathic remnant of Jean, but he couldn't find the strength to figure out whether it was a fragment of himself, her, or someone else entirely.
That little boy, in that big cloak, was like a flame lashing the darkness. Every meter they walked seemed accompanied by a pang of pain. Each step was faster than the last.
The kid stopped in front of a massive and extremely unstable pile. He turned to wait for Scott, staring at him.
In those clear eyes there was the terror of losing and the terror of being lost.
And in that second, Scott understood, like a déjà vu from a dream. But before he could speak, the boy pointed to the pile of rubble.
“I’m down there.”
Scott's hand reached the button on his visor in an instant. No hesitation, no pause.
A crack appeared in the concrete. Logan felt a change in the air before he saw anything. It was a breath, and then a distant roar that grew like a hungry dragon. He knew that sound well, he'd heard it a thousand times.
Scott stared at the debris below him, the dust rising in little puffs. The pile seemed endless, as if each of his optical blasts made it multiply instead of diminish. He was exhausted, dirty, his throat burning with dust, but none of that mattered. He had figured out where to aim. He knew where Logan was. The entire world seemed to have narrowed down to a red line, stretching out to connect him to the man below.
Logan closed his eyes. "Look at him... stubborn, as always", he thought, almost amused. He wanted to shout at him to stop, to go back, that it wasn't worth the risk. But another part of him, the one that hated feeling left behind, listened to that roar that was getting closer and closer, and stopped thinking about death. He felt the vibrations travel down from the ceiling, through the steel in his chest, and into his back, vibrating through his ribs, shaking him out of his torpor.
At that moment, with yet another roar, a crimson flash tore through the darkness.
The ground shook, the concrete cracked like an eggshell, and a column of dust rose. Rocks, scrap metal, and debris were blasted away, spattering the sides of the pit where Logan was.
The prison of debris opened in a blinding light. Logan breathed a sigh of relief as he felt the metal piece release from the weight above him. The red beam cut off, and natural light took its place, gray and flickering.
Scott leaned forward without waiting. His face twisted between relief and anger. The dust made him cough, but he kept watching.
For a moment, Logan's eyes couldn't stand the sudden light, first red, then white. Then Scott's silhouette loomed against the sky. One more second, and Logan wouldn't be alone anymore. And that was the thing, wasn't it? That got him every time.
When their eyes met, he ran a hand over his face, and let out a crooked half-smile, more tired than ironic.
Scott inhaled, and for a moment a laugh threatened to escape, but he was still too close to panic. The world, however, slowly began to spin again.
His voice, when it arrived, was hoarse but confident.
"Found him."