munebox | OPEN POST

"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.

Each step delivered shockwaves: vibrations from foot to skull, shaking up all the little bits of her that got banged and bruised and bashed on the way down. Peggy was (at least) pleasantly surprised to find herself capable of movement -- wondering whether he didn't take the brunt of their fall, somehow. Not that he looked particularly impacted when she glanced stoically over her shoulder. He wasn't moving. All well and good for him, who'd done his healing. But she craved somewhere with a bit more cover -- somewhere lower, well-beneath the narrow bridge above, where she could sit and let her own much slower healing process begin. The plateau would not suffice but -- mercifully -- the remaining handful of switchback path wasn't quite so dreadful steep as the first half.

"Do keep up," she grimaced. But there was no bite left to the words -- indeed, they betrayed an unhappy desperation. Until this past minute, she'd been trying hard to convince herself they needed each other rather equally. She may not have cared much that he disparaged her, but she cared to realize how mismatched she was.

Much as he wanted to address the problem of her knowledge, he was cowed by her insistence to carry on in spite of injury. He did not perhaps feel guilty, but he certainly felt shamed. Battered as she was, Peggy Carter was continuing the mission. He could scarcely stand behind while she dragged herself into the mouth of hell. So despite intending to hold his ground, he finally yielded and fell into step behind. Free to move at his own pace and maintain his own balance, it was easier now for him to navigate his way down. He could have easily moved on ahead of her, but he kept his eyes glued to the back of her. She was in no right state to be handling this on her own.

He said nothing, though. Aside from pressing the point of his secret, there was nothing to be said. For now, the mission and survival had to continue. Perhaps by the time they found somewhere to rest, she might have enough wits to come around to his way of thinking. He didn't see how she had much of a choice in the matter.

Peggy was hard-pressed to think on a time she'd felt worse. Her career had never been easy or simple -- and one doesn't reach even her level within an organization without enduring some manner of hardship. Violence. Cuts. Gashes. Burns. Bruises. Broken bones. It wasn't even the first time her shoulder had been dislocated -- but it was the first time she'd experienced so many injuries in tandem. And it was the first time they'd been incurred so far from active civilization. So far from so much as a field hospital.

But she knew she wasn't prepared to languish part-way to shelter and waste away with more weakness than was her due. And so it was a hefty forty-five minutes before they reached the culmination of their chosen path. The bone-dry riverbed was narrower even than the bridge (in parts) and provided ample cover. Coves and caves where one (or two) might spend a passably secure evening. Peggy didn't wait for his agreement before she chose a particularly roomy berth, staking its claim by dropping her rifle onto the dusty ground.

"We won't manage a fire," she announced as she eased herself down to sit on a rock that was just-about the right height for a chair.

Silence suited him well, though it was not easy for him to follow the slow pace she'd set for them. But he preferred she kept his back to him where he did not need risk seeing what accusing look she must no doubt be harboring for him. Indeed he saw little of her until they had found the cave. Daylight still seemed to persist above them, but by now there seemed little point in waiting for the natural cycle of night to come to them. Even a regenerating man needed his rest. He raised no objection to their choice of lodgings and so seated himself on a smaller rock not quite so chair sized.

His heavy pack came off first and he immediately began to look through it. They had days worth of rations and plenty of water still, but not enough to last if they did not find a natural source soon. This cove they found themselves in wasn't even damp, despite having once been pat of the river itself. He grimaced as he pulled out the canteen and felt the weight of it. He held it out to her. "You'll be wanting to clean those cuts. Bad enough you waited this long already."

Her mouth opened. Shut. Opened again. A dozen-odd barbs sprung to her tongue, but she weighed the value of each one and found their usefulness wanting. She was angry -- oh, she was livid. But she had to ask herself what would be accomplished by letting that anger pilot her words. Very little, she surmised.

"Our water?" She asked -- chin tipped up. Defiant. "Come, now. A man who thinks to bring cigars must not have skimped on the--" her eyes narrow. As though she's sizing him up. "Whiskey? Rye, most likely. Every rye drinker I've ever known has looked like you. Alcohol will clean better than our drinking water will."

Perhaps she could not help herself but be a little contrary.

Having lived a life of short term injuries, the notion of using hard liquor for a wound had literally not occurred to him. He had never played the medic before and it wasn't often he was with anyone that needed tending after. Logan carried his injured comrades to safety, but then it was always someone else's job to patch them up. Only this time, there was no one that he could take Peggy to. Even so, he wasn't eager to give up the vodka.

But out it came in a separate flask from the bottom of his pack. Before surrendering it, he had himself draft. It wouldn't even do enough to get him buzzed, but it at least would improve his mood. "Try'n be sparing. That's all I brought."

She went to great pains while raising the flask and giving it an experimental sniff. The crinkle of her nose suggested (quite unabashedly) that she judged his taste in spirits. She judged it harshly. Too much time spent on the Western Front had brought her into contact with too much bad vodka. But she likely couldn't ask for a better booze to clean her cuts: no pesky sugars and grains getting in the way of its work.

Peggy was sparing when she doused the worst of her wounds. It stung -- perhaps worse than the relocation of her shoulder had done. It was torturous work to tend to her own injuries. Not because she wasn't up to the task, but because the introduction of such sting was easier when done by another hand. It made her long for Mister Jarvis's company, for he had a steady hand and a good bedside manner.

"--I trust you can spare a mouthful more for the patient?"

Logan was of no help whatsoever. Aside from sacrificing his supply of booze, he simply sat perched and watched. Halfway through her session of wincing, he began to distribute their food rations. A fire would have made for a more interesting meal, but their supper tonight would consist of dried goods and water. Anything fresh had been already consumed well before they arrived in the city itself. Going forward, their meals would be more of the same. At least until they found something more palatable or reached the point of their mission where they had no option but to turn back the way they came.

He gestured for her to drink up. "My brother'd have killed you already. Victor never did care to risk anyone knowin' we weren't like other folk."

"You have a strange manner of comforting a person," she answered so dryly. Fully aware (it seemed) that he likely made no effort to comfort her. Luckily, Peggy had herself convinced she didn't require it of him. The vodka (rancid-bitter as it was) would be comfort enough, and much like with the cigar she grinned and beared her way through another unpleasant ritual. This one, at least, put fire in her belly.

"It ain't meant to be comfort." He held out his hand, expecting the flask to be returned so he could have his own share before putting it away. "You've seen what I am. You got any notion the trouble you could cause me?"

Killing her or abandoning her was not an outcome he desired. He liked her, for all she actually represented. But Logan was a survivor and that kind of survival meant doing things that he wasn't too proud of.

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

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject