munebox | OPEN POST

"The drought's long over. We splashed through a few puddles half a mile back."

It was no drought that did this. Though it was hard to see from this height, he couldn't even make out a trickle of a stream that had survived the river's demise. She tugged him along and he obliged her being equally curious and concerned at what this finding might mean. For the past hour, they had been moving south with the explicit hope that the city's interior might offer them more clues than the exterior had. So far, it had been much the same. This was different.

He turned to look at the far end of the bridge. Where the road began again, there was an incline that worked its way down to the river. In better days it might have been meant to be the riverbank, but now it would be a dusty and rough scramble to reach the bottom. "The way's steep, but we can make it down there."

"And it may be a relief to put some distance between ourselves and the old architecture -- especially before nightfall."

Peggy left blank spaces in her sentences. Absences, whereby she hoped he might infer their meanings. The deeper they pushed into the city's heart, the more and more they risked any time spent apart bringing ruination down upon their heads. Night-time made it a more tricksome thing, and she would offer up no complaints if they spent the remainder of the afternoon hours heading deeper into the perhaps-once-fecund riverbed.

"As for steep, well--" she raised their joined hands. Her smirk was wry -- sharp and thorny. "At least I needn't suffer the indignity of asked for your hand when we get there, yes?"

Nightfall might be hours off or even days away, but that did not make her any less right. The city posed its own kinds of danger and even if they refuged inside one of the buildings, it was no guarantee of safety. Logan would much prefer something a little more natural. Not that natural applied much to this world.

He offered her a snort of agreement (such as it was) matched with that twisted grimace that passed for a smile. He squeezed her hand and then directed them to begin walking to the opposite end of the bridge. "I'm startin' to think you're enjoying this."

"Would that be such a terrible thing?"

Carter asked it in her haughty tone: all arch and little leniency. A kind of false concern over his opinion when (it was supposed) she cared very little whether he thought well or ill of her by-times enjoyment. To add fuel to this feeling, she continued on: "It isn't everyday one gets to be the pioneering soul into an ancient civilization -- provided that's even what these people were."

If the SSR had turned into something of an intelligence bureau in its adolescence, then Peggy Carter still embodied a devilish excitement for the unknown -- for a kind of intelligence gathering that wasn't staid and stodgy behind a desk.

"Aren't you even a little bit curious?"

"That's not--" Logan immediately gave up on explaining what he had really meant. Instead he groaned, rubbed at the back of his neck, and plodded on. "You know, I didn't figure you for the type. Most stuffed shirts seem to like their desks. An' with you bein' a woman and all..."

The statement did not need conclusion. Logan had already protested about dragging a woman into this kind of situation. She might have proven herself capable against Hydra, but they had the Howling Commandos at their side. It was another matter entirely when it was just the two of them. Even now he persisted in the notion she was in the way and useful only because the passcode required human contact to remain active, regardless of what her insights and talents had brought to the forefront already.

Aha. This old horse and cart. Peggy kept her lip buttoned -- because she didn't feel the need to stomp her feet and make noise over what her perceived value ought to be for a mission such as this one. Nor was it entirely appropriate to retort (however acidly) that her shirt was anything but stuffed. Particularly because she knew that wasn't at all what he'd meant --

"A desk is all well and good," she concluded, "so long as there is worthy work being done at it."

Because Peggy didn't spurn the paperwork, she merely wanted to be involved with it. Signing reports, rather than delivering them. Or depositing coffee mugs in their general vicinity. In a twist of cruel fate, it took losing the Chief and nearly losing Howard before the SSR gave Peggy Carter her dues. Doubtless, Thompson would never have signed off on this mission had it not been for what had happened with Leviathan.

"And the same can be said for the field. I follow the trail of what needs doing, Logan," she said his name with a mild reserve. Gentle, almost. To prove she wasn't arguing. "And then I do it. It's only ever been as simple as that."

And to prove her point, she took the first bold step down their intended steep incline. Still anchored by him, of course.

Logan moved slower behind her where he played the role of a solid anchor well. His boots had no more traction on them than hers did, but it was just as well she went first. If he was to go first and slip, he'd drag the both of them down. If there was one thing to be said about having to go on a mission holding hands, he'd much rather be doing it with a pretty woman. Even if she still struck him as too tightly laced for this kind of work.

"Life an' death ain't ever simple, sister. There's stuff I've done an' seen that reports can't cover." The going was slow like this and he had to pause his reply to shift his footing down the steep path to once more give her the length of two arms to further the descent. "An' ain't none of it ever been by the book neither."

"On the contrary," she smiled her mirthless polite smile -- eyes up and head tilted so that she was (for a moment) watching him more than the ground ahead. "Life and death are terribly simple. You live, Logan. Or you die."

Or so she trusted. Peggy had known wondrous people in her life, but not even the best of them could triumph over death. So she kept on smiling in that way that never reached her eyes -- determined to wear Steve's absence like a badge of spirit instead of an arm-band of mourning.

"And I intend to live a very long time." Her addendum was given in a raised volume so it might carry back to him; she'd already turned back to the task of scaling downwards, and her arm trailed stiffly behind her to keep hold of his fingers. "I doubt longevity comes to those who follow the book, so we're at least in agreement on that front."

Had she been talking to other man, then she wouldn't have been wrong. But life and death did not come simple to James Howlett. He had died a hundred times now, yet he remained still. It was a persistent fact of his existence that was as complicated as it was difficult. Only his brother understood that and no matter how poorly they might have got on at times, it was what bound them together. Eternity was a damned hard thing to do alone.

"Not like this you won't," he said mildly as he followed here into the descent. He kept his grip on her hand tight, though it was becoming increasingly uncomfortable carrying on like this. A rope would have done them a lot better here. "If yer lookin' to die with gray in your hair, you should've stayed at yer desk."

"What? So I can die that much sooner -- with boredom scribbled on the toe-tag as my cause of death?"

Big words. Broad claims. Boredom was never quite the problem. Peggy didn't act out because she was bored, but because she saw a hundred little things that weren't being accomplished. Every speck of neglected evidence was a point on which she focussed and asked herself...would Steve have cared?

Yes. Overwhelming (always) yes. But months turn into a year, and she relearned how to care in her own right. And all that care had brought her to the jaws of this city. There were secrets locked up at its heart: the kind that might propel mankind forward by leaps and bounds. Howard had assured her and (against all natural judgement) she believed him.

Peggy paused before a particularly vertical drop. He had only a few steps needed to draw equal with her.

"This," she reiterated, "is what makes life worth living."

Not so much the adventure but the...productivity of it all. The opportunity to make good work of idle hands.

"This is just survivin', teacup. A cold beer and someone tucked up next to you in bed? That's what's worth livin' for."

He once again closed those inches to bring them together again, but this time it was his weight that betrayed him. A foothold of dirt that supported her weight did not do so well for him and slipped beneath his heel. Rationally and objectively, he would have known to release her hand and take the tumble alone. But in that moment of instinctual panic, those thoughts were far away. His hand remained tight as he tried to use Peggy as his own anchor, even if it was likely to bring the both of them tumbling to the bottom.

Peggy Carter wasn't a shrew. She wasn't (exactly) shrewish -- but there was a kind of obstinate abstinence wound into her core being that had the potential to seem shrew-like. "I'd make it something strong," she argued against the beer, "and perhaps settle for a good book inst--"

But her stunning display of almost-but-not-quite-shrewness was interrupted by their sudden calamity with gravity. Peggy's grip firmed up: tight and solid. She could only ever be as strong as her body allowed her, and despite commanding a rather commendable reserve of force...well, the biological math had her defeated well before she even thought to try. Her boot gripped the loosening ground for (maybe) three seconds longer than either of them might have ever hoped for, but then his mass (coupled with inevitability) at long last conquered them both. He was heavier than she'd anticipated.

For a moment, they were in free-fall. Indistinguishable from that first heart-wrenching leap from an airplane. And then (microseconds later) the heel of her boot twisted on pebbled dirt. Her body thudded against his -- chin bouncing loosely on his shoulder so that her teeth seemed to rattle in her head. It would leave a bruise.

They hit the ground sideways and began to roll: sleeve-cloth tearing and her rifle jangling dangerously between hip and rock. A brief moment of clarity told her it likely would have jammed up regardless, no matter how much damage it might be spared. But it was the least of her worries when they came to a rocking stop on a short plateau. Her shoulder felt...wrong. Sprained, at best.

And worse still, she'd seemed to have taken the brunt of his weight in the end. Although he wasn't wholly sprawled atop her, their legs were in a tangle and one of her arms was still pinned beneath his back as they laid almost side-by-side on the plateau. Peggy groaned. "Well. That was bracing."

A sharp rock had ripped into Logan's back on the way down, leaving a searing mess of blood that marked part of the trail they took down. He might have suffered worse, but Peggy unfortunately provided a shield he didn't need. Already the skin was repairing itself much in the way it always had. But it had still taken the wind from him and he did not immediately recover the energy to stand. Her arm remained pressed underneath him and in the time that it took for them reach the bottom, they had finally released one another. It was unfortunate timing, but the passcode was the furthest thing from his mind. Logan twisted onto his back and rolled forward to give her back the freedom of her arm. His blood coated her fingers.

It meant the gash was exposed for her to see, though it was a rapidly vanishing sight. Too stunned to consider that concern, Logan pressed a hand to his forehead and spat out blood from a torn tongue. "Bracing." He snorted. "Shit. You still in one piece?"

"Barely--"

Her answer was a hiss. A whisper. Because she was the fool who, encouraged by his quickened spring to action, attempted to make moves of her own. A cursory attempt to sit up left her panting, face screwed up with pain from what was most likely a case of bashed ribs. And her arm -- the one that had been caught beneath him -- protested with pain with every fresh try to lift it. She felt his blood drip between her fingers and felt her throat constrict. But none of it was half so horrible as watching skin knit itself back into place. Crikey O'Reilly didn't cover it.

She fixed him with a look of severe disbelief. But it only lasted a few heartbeats before Peggy found herself feeling a little too woozy to keep her head propped up. She let the back of her skull thud dully onto the plateau. Shutting her eyes and gingerly crossing her good arm over her chest, she began to feel her hurt shoulder for the precise source of pain.

"You're cut."

So was she -- upon her chin and forehead, but not so deeply as he had been.

In his long lifetime, Logan had felt pain so severe and intense that most were lucky to simply die from it. But the one kind of pain he had never been made to experience was the lasting and persistent kind that required healing and medical attention. It was the kind he already knew Peggy would need, which was unfortunate because he was wholly unequipped to provide any of it. He cursed under his breath and twisted himself around to have a look at her. The scrape along his cheek was already gone, leaving only dried dirt and blood in its place. His cigar was long gone.

"I'll live. What about yer shoulder? Still attached?" He had learned long ago the art of popping his own joints back into place. It was not a pleasant experience in the best of times. He needed no instincts to know it would likely go worse for her.

"Attachedish," she answered. But her thoughts were already honing in on exactly the same conclusion as his: the unpleasant chore of putting the shoulder back into place was about as inevitable as anything else involved with this mission. Peggy gave herself the length of three more breaths before she tried (again) to sit up. The injured arm sat limp and tenderly preferred, while she made the other do the brunt of the work. "Give us a hand, won't you?"

She gritted her teeth and nodded at the shoulder in question. What she did not say was that he (having so handily knit himself back together before her eyes) might as well help her get herself set to rights, as well. Any interrogation about his strange healing had to wait until her head wasn't swimming with pain.

It wouldn't do to pass out mid-questioning.

No one would ever accuse Logan of being sensitive, but he had at least the decency this time to help ease her into a sitting position. He was beside her now, one armed around her back and resting on her healthy shoulder. It might have been an uncomfortable kind of proximity were they not both already accustomed to holding hands by now. Even so, playing doctor wasn't what he'd signed up for.

"Ya know, darlin'. Yer real pretty when yer tryin' to act tough."

It was a comment he did not expect her to appreciate. But that was the point. The very moment he could see a response preparing to roll off the tongue, he placed his hand against the injured shoulder, braced her other half against him, and pushed hard. It was a sort of kindness to do away with any kind of countdown, but not one for which he expected to be thanked.

Indignation. Pique. Pain. Without the benefit of anything to bite down upon, Peggy was left to grit her teeth all the harder and wear her resistance like an iron in her bones. There was no shame found in betraying her nation-given mandate to maintain a stiff upper lip, and her abrupt cry of hurt reverberated back at her -- bouncing off the narrow valley walls. Adding to the pain was the sudden instinct to close her fist, squishing what was left of his blood between her fingers. The moment was visceral and arguably more intimate than all the reluctant hand-holding that had come before.

"Wanker," she growled through her grit teeth. It felt good (better) to let some of the office polish melt away in a crucible of injury. The deep ache remained, but she could already tell it apart from the hot unbearable sting of a dislocated shoulder. "You ought to have told us--"

She honed her anger into a hot point. Flushed her word with disdain for what he'd held back and what he'd not said. Not to her, at least. Peggy couldn't decide which scenario was worse: that Logan had hid this strange talent of his from all of the SSR, or that he'd shared it only for the SSR to neglect telling her.

Having not realized his own secret was in jeopardy, Logan did not know what to make of her accusation. He'd loosened his hold on her the moment he heard the bones pop into place. Her cry of pain was certainly worthy of sympathy, but he wasn't prepared to coddle her while she dealt with the pain. He liked her, but he didn't like her that much.

"Told you what? That handholdin' ain't good for rough terrain?" He looked to his right and found his cigar, flattened and turn halfway in two from being rolled on and lost. He picked it up and examined it before realizing that it was in a sorrier state than the both of them. It would not be recovering from its injuries. He tossed it away. "Shit."

A woman did not rise through British army intelligence on a pretty face alone -- though God knows it helped. Peggy's expression was one of haunting hurt and hollowed eyes, but she mustered enough verve and emotion to look proper pissed. It hadn't taken long to go from seeing him heal to understanding that he was something...special. Peggy was no stranger to special. Wincing, she tucked her injured arm against her belly and flexed the bloody fingers despite the cost of doing so. This was how she drew attention to his blood.

"You're extraordinary." She said it like an accusation. Like a charge.

Extraordinary. Logan sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. Beneath his skin, he felt his claws and an instinctual urge to draw them. His brother Victor had maintained a very firm policy on what to do about people who found out things they didn't need to know. Logan, ever the pacifist of the two, generally paid no mind to common soldiers who knew. But he knew well that Victor would argue a government agent would be no end of trouble. Even without his brother nearby, he could scarcely argue that logic.

He tightened his fists, clenched his teeth, and then relaxed. "Drop it," he said acidly. "It ain't nothing fer you to care about. You didn't see anything."

"I know what I saw," she said -- voice hoarse with the last few minutes of torturous bad fortune. She might not know what lurked beneath his fists, but she could at least observe how they tightened. She could see the tension permeating his body right up until the moment it didn't. And yet: "You can't intimidate me into having not seen it."

It was (perhaps) a foolhardy hill on which to make her stand. She'd endured insult to her sex and injury to her body and hadn't met it with as much fire as she did this fresh attempt to monitor what she knew.

He stood quickly and abruptly without a trace of pain evident. "Intimidation don't even enter into it." He looked down at her with an icy and unfriendly coldness in his eyes. "We finish this and you forget what you saw. Otherwise I'm gone."

He did not need to make any grand gesture to make his words seem more convincing. They were not a threat, but rather a simple choice to be made. He might have signed on to complete the mission, but it was not so important to him as to risk the government asking questions he didn't care to answer. If it meant abandoning her here, then he would rather face a guilty conscience than whatever her SSR goons would have in mind for him. If he left her, then he might risk losing his own chance to ever escape - but right now he knew she needed him more than he needed her. He was the one with the passcode and she was the one withe injury.

Peggy wondered if this was the truest version of him: hostility beneath a cloak of cigar smoke and false flirtation. And then she wondered which man she preferred -- the honest one or the one she'd expected all along? She sat (hamstrung) and watched him unveil his coldness to her. It hardened her freshly-bruised jaw. It hardened her very soul.

Grappling with the loose-rock valley wall, Peggy made a point of standing on her own. It was a slow and labour-intensive action, with false starts and frequent pauses. The pain was prohibitive and her head still swam, but after much expended effort she found her own feet. Gingerly, she walked forward. It was safe enough to eschew his touch for now, but she knew she'd have to seek it eventually.

For now, pride prevailed.

Both sides of him were as real as Logan came. There was an honest chord to him that fought for the sorts of thing men should fight for. But there was the beast as well and the beast thought only of survival. He could be protective and loyal, but only to the point that his safety was threatened. Peggy represented a cog in a greater beast that he knew he had no hope of successfully fighting off. He didn't need to be caught to know what lay in store for a mutant and especially one that didn't die.

He watched her silently stand and move along on her own through the pain and injury. He himself did not budge. She was entitled to her pride, but she was not worth risking his own survival. Not many people were. Like her, he said nothing. But unlike her, he was making no special effort to resume their journey.

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LOGAN @lumberjackman X-Men (available in film and animated canons)

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