Chapter Text
Laura loves the outdoors. It calls to her like a dinner bell. She could spend the rest of forever running through endless green plains, climbing up tall unwinding trees, rolling around in a rainbow of flowers and cozying up each night with the critters and stars of the forest. That would be her paradise. The hum of Earth sings in her blood, travels in her bones, as familiar as a limb even if she hasn’t experienced much of the outside world before this new start.
Their cabin is encapsulated by the Earth like a protective fortress. It's a big unit, three floors in total. It’s even got a well, something Logan mentioned having in his childhood. Located deep in the mountains, safe and sound from any lurking eyes, nuzzled into woodlands, the cabin stands as a safe haven. The perfect place. She doesn’t ask how Logan got ahold of it, vaguely aware that he has connections.
Logan was nervous at first, worried Laura would hate it. She could tell there was a lot rolling around in his mind during the long and very stressful drive up. Scenarios played in his head, ones where Laura quickly became stir crazy. Or that the silence of the night would make her anxious. Or she simply wouldn’t take to living in a cabin.
But it had the opposite effect almost immediately, broke her free from her walls, opened up the cage of her mind. She laughed—actually laughed— gleefully when she saw a little bunny. It’s decidedly Logan’s favorite sound and he’s determined to make it happen as often as possible.
Laura ran and ran and ran on that first day, Logan unable to catch up and barking for her to be good and stay close to home. Home. The word rolled so easily off of his tongue. It still feels like ash on hers so she doesn’t try to repeat it, feeling safe to not have to make herself tread over that line yet. She knows he won’t push for that, won’t try to wrangle her into a role. Not if it’s something she rejects.
But Laura so desperately wants that role, this dynamic, this life free from the burden of being controlled and hated, just seen as a tool for destruction. She was so sick of sterile rooms and unknown faces, of coldness being the only constant in her life. She wanted a cabin with her father. So Laura ran laps outside and inside until her little legs tired out, scarfed down seven waffles Logan made in succession (Canadian bacon included), watched a family of deer from their back porch as Logan sipped on his spiked coffee and slept peaceful dreamless nights for their first week. Nothing has ever been wonderful for Laura and now suddenly everything is.
Then one night a nightmare comes for her. It must’ve been a bad one, must’ve been jarring and scary enough to shake her out of her skin since she wakes up on the hard floor, trembling and whimpering incoherently to no one. Her eyes don’t adjust to the static darkness, not like how her Father’s do, but she manages to navigate her body to the hallway. Flashes of medical equipment blink into her worldview again. She flinches at the memories and phantom pains, failing to keep her heartbeat steady. Finally she reaches his door and nearly rips it off of its hinges.
Logan startles with a loud gasp but is quick with assessing the situation, seeing everything he needs to know in her heartbreaking little face and balled up fists. No child should know this kind of pain. The reality of it makes something sharp and vengeful twist in his stomach, makes him want to go out and hunt for heads but he bites the bile and fury back down. His daughter needs him. So Logan scoops her up and keeps her close, shushing her cries with gentle kisses, wiping at the free falling tears, steadying them both as he tries to calm the world down for her.
“It’s okay, baby. You’re okay.” He says as a mantra, stroking her hair with every one of her sniffles. Her body screams to not believe him, to thrash and fight, but her heart tells her differently, “Just you and me here, sweetpea.”
She lets out a fragile laugh. That’s a new one. “Sweetpea.” She mumbles.
“You like that one? It’s accurate. ‘Cause you’re my little sweet pea.” He says, so sure and calm, his voice a scratchy low rumble, reminding her of a thunderstorm.
Daddy isn’t scary like storms can be though. His job is to scare off the storms it seems. He continues to rub her back, stroke her hair, whisper soft and comforting things he’s probably never been told himself. Laura really wonders sometimes how he does it, how he’s so quick to try to make things better for her. How he was able to still find softness in the surrounding cracks of his heart and soul. Laura doesn’t know much about Logan’s past but she figures it’s a nightmare. It seems like most lives are that way for people like them, loneliness and hurt branded into their fate. Or at least that’s how it seemed for a while.
Now Laura is beginning to understand a different tune. A warmer one, the one her father is using now as he keeps talking. He’s retelling a story he used three nights ago on the porch but that’s okay. She likes his stories, needs them like air, likes that she can tell he’s sometimes exaggerating the truth for creative purposes. Meeting a cowboy called Billy the Kid during the Gold Rush just seems silly, even a young child knows that would just be too on the nose.
Still, she’s enraptured by the tale again, safe and snug in his arms like a bug under its favorite rock. He is her rock she thinks sleepily as she gazes up at him. Logan is the mountain that Laura has decided home to be. Through the darkness she can still trace his wrinkles, the old and deeply worn down lines of his face, thinking vaguely of how they are all unspoken stories of stress and fear that he’s survived through. They look softer now, more relaxed. Heroes deserve rest and relaxation after fighting for so long.
And you see, Laura’s father is the very definition of a hero. He makes the monsters go away. He defeats evil. He turns darkness into light. And Laura thanks the stars above every night that she was found by him. She thinks they knew where to guide him.
Laura falls asleep just like that and has no other dreams. Logan dozes off as he gives her forehead one last kiss.