Ha! I said it would be two weeks, and here I am at two weeks, posting just like I said I would.
So you readers out there, a review would be a nice reward, no?
Anyway, sorry that I’m a bit giddy; I had my last day of student teaching yesterday, and am pretty much all wrapped up for this semester, just as I’m seeing all my friends begin to frantically study for finals next week. My lack of stress compared to their rising stress is something that is just a little bit buoying.
But no, I’m not a sadist. Not at all.
To business, then. Thanks you all for your reviews! I think I tried to responds to most of them this time, so check your inboxes and junk mail if you didn’t get one. Thanks so much for those reviews: they made the last couple weeks of student teaching go a little bit faster, and for that I am most grateful.
So onto this chapter. Again, a bit slow on the
action part of things, but I can tell you that this was a jolly fun chapter to write, even if it was a bit more difficult than some. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Now, if you would excuse me, I’m going to go start chipping away at chapter 39 . . . .
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Chapter 38: Re-Education through Labor
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Then:
“I call.” Gambit laid out his cards, and Heather groaned, throwing her own down on the table.
“Again?
Re-my—”
“None a dat, cheri. Pay up.”
Heather reluctantly slid the plate of Oreos across the table. Gambit took his winnings, carefully placing them on one of his growing stacks of cookies, then began gathering the cards together.
“Oh, no. Not again. After living off nothing but meat for days? I’m not going to let your come and get sick off junk food.”
“Ah, you jus’ afraid a losin’, dat’s all,” Remy said, glancing over at her and flashing her a crooked smile. His red and black eyes flashed, but she didn’t even blink. He shuffled the cards, his fingers adept and familiar on the deck. “’Sides, you ever hear a savin’ ‘em for later?” Remy arched the cards, flicking them sharply from hand to hand before glancing over his shoulder.
“It might be more fun if you let me win every once in a while,” Heather said, half-teasing the young boy across from her.
“Aw, you not half bad youself,” Gambit said, nodding towards the two Oreos at her elbow. “If you din’t keep eatin’ dem soon’s you got dem, you’d have a good bit a’yo’ own.” He winked at her, and Heather smiled back, charmed by the boy.
“Fine. Last one, though, okay?”
“Truce den. Jus’ one more,” the kid said. He turned his head. “Wolvie? You play dis round, petit?”
Wolverine glanced over his shoulder at them. He arched his eyebrow, looking doubtfully between them, then at the cards. Gambit picked the top one and held it up between his fingers, and Wolverine’s eyes narrowed.
“I tol’ you, it just a card. A card game. Remy bet you play a mean hand wit’ dat nose a’ yours.”
Wolverine just turned away, continuing his way around the room. He stopped at a line of books along a shelf, sniffing with curiosity before pulling one out and inspecting it suspiciously.
Remy looked up at Heather, then took one of his cookies and held it out.
“’Ey, Wolvie.” He waved it, trying to coax him over.
Wolverine glanced over, then stopped, staring at the cookie. He frowned, his eyes moving to Gambit as he straightened, tilting his head as his brow furrowed.
He lifted his hand and flipped him off.
Heather choked on the Oreo she’d just taken a bite of. “Wolverine!”
Wolverine looked at her, wary at the tone of her voice.
Gambit snickered, putting a hand over his mouth, and Heather turned to glare at him.
“Okay, you two, that’s enough,” Heather said. She stood, putting her hands on her hips and facing Wolverine. “I won’t have any of that here.”
He looked confused now, and Heather stopped, a sudden thought occurring to her.
Did he even realize what he’d done was wrong?
Well, he’d known to do it in the first place, hadn’t he?
She frowned, turning to the boy. “
You don’t tease.”
Remy took a bite of a cookie, looking thoughtful for his young age. “Jus’ a couple days ago an’ I wouldn’t’a been,” he mumbled.
Now what’s that supposed to mean?
Wolverine was apparently ignoring them again. He’d put the book back and grabbed a magazine instead, and had slid onto the floor to sit, turning the magazine over in his hands. As Heather watched, he opened it, turning through the pages with extra care until coming to a stop. He held the book close to his face, then put it on the floor, bending over it so his nose was inches away from the pages.
Half-feral, but somehow he reminded her more of an inquisitive toddler.
Somehow sensing her gaze, he glanced over at her and frowned. Heather looked away as Remy finished dealing the cards.
The game ended as predicted—with Remy bringing home another victory. He gathered up his winnings and put them aside, and Heather glanced out the window. At least the rain was finally letting up.
Remy was shooting puzzled looks towards Wolverine as well, and Heather leaned close to him. “He can read?”
Gambit shrugged. “Dunno. Wouldn’ be surprised, though,” he added, almost to himself as he glanced over again. “What he readin’?”
Heather shrugged, standing from the table. She approached Wolverine slowly, but he looked up, his usual frown in place.
“Hey,” Heather said, kneeling next to him. “What do you have there?”
Wolverine shrugged, and Heather leaned over. “
National Geographic?” Well, what else would she expect to be at a cabin in the middle of the Canadian Rockies?
“
Mono o aware,” Wolverine said softly, apropos of nothing. It flowed from his tongue easily as he lifted his eyes, looking into the air at nothing.
“What does that mean?” Heather asked.
Wolverine shook his head, then shrugged, his hair hanging around his face as he looked back down. He was in the middle of an article on something Oriental—Japanese, it looked like. There was a picture of a tree obscured by thick, warped glass. A haiku was penned beneath it in elegant script.
A courtyard window
This tree stands, remembering
The old Tomoe.
“Well, you’re supposed to start at the beginning, you know.”
“Did.”
“Hm?”
“Did,” Wolverine murmured, his words a bit rough, barely above a whisper. “Last night.”
That probably one of the longest responses she’s gotten from him yet. She scanned the article. “
Mono o aware,” she read, tripping slightly over the unfamiliar words. “Seeing with the eyes of the heart.” Wolverine frowned.
Encouraged by his attention, she tried for more. “I have to admit, I wouldn’t cut you out as a reader.”
A pause. She wondered if he had even heard her as his eyes scanned the page, or if he had decided to ignore her again. “’m not.” He paused, sitting up from reading. A hand moved to his chest, then to his neck—again, not finding what he was looking for.
He paused, then glanced up at her, uncertainty breaking through his usual frown. He looked down—thinking through his words before he spoke them. “What . . . what day is it?” he asked, looking up at her.
Huh. This was something. He’d shown plenty of curiosity so far—sniffing around and inspecting everything in the cabin with grim scientific exactness, and sat through Heather explaining some of her pictures of the photo album he’d found, but had hardly been open in actually asking any questions he might have had.
“It’s Wednesday. April 14, 1985.”
Wolverine grunted softly, looking down again, his shoulders hunched around him.
Thinking . . . what?
Heather wasn’t an expert on amnesia, even if she was a doctor. But even she could tell that this wasn’t a normal case of brain damage. He seemed perfectly lucid and intelligent, if a bit slow at times, but seemed to have lost all memory of what it was like before, and was left with nothing but animal instinct—from his mutation? Forgotten everything, except the things that were creeping through the cracks. It seemed almost pick and choose—with him adapting constantly as random facts or understanding came front in his mind.
She looked at him. He’d trimmed his hair and chops back, making him look a little less like a wild man, and the last residual scarring from getting shot in the face was long gone.
Was that it? Was his contradicting knowledge and obliviousness due to his healing factor at work? Could it work with memories, reconstructing and connecting memories which had been lost—separated from consciousness?
How would it be, to know things and never remember how he learned them? To know how to read, to speak, and to have floating memories of ideas and objects, but having no context for that knowledge? To have his memories filled of being hunted by whoever had attacked him and Remy in the woods?
How long had he been out there, running wild in the woods? Months?
Years? Decades? With his healing factor, would the time even show? She’d dealt with a mutant with a healing factor before, but it was nothing beside Wolverine’s.
He had
metal-coated bones
. Well, that’s what she assumed had happened. But how could anyone survive that?
Who would put another man through that?
Who
could have? The cost for some secret operation like this had to be massive.
What she would give for some of her lab equipment. The questions were driving her crazy, and she wanted to get cracking on the ones that might have answers to find.
She didn’t know what Wolverine’s thoughts concluded with, but he closed the magazine with a final frowning glance at her and stood, leaving it there on the floor as he pushed his hair from his eyes and moved towards the door.
Heather had been watching him, content to let him wander through the cabin. He didn’t seem to mean any harm, and it was interesting to see him stop, picking up a wooden carved figure of a bear from a shelf, or sort curiously through the food cabinet, pausing to sniff and frown at each curiosity he found. It made her wonder what he was thinking.
So she didn’t realize that he had moved to the door until he’d already pulled it open and stepped outside, closing it firmly behind him.
Heather looked up sharply as the door clicked shut.
“Wolverine?”
She stood up sharply, stepping quickly to the door and throwing it open. She expected to catch him on the porch, maybe standing in the rain-soaked mud at the foot of the stairs, but he was gone. Vanished in the gloom of the storm-dampened wood.
“Wolverine!” she called, scanning through the gloom and mist.
Silence answered—just the soft drip-drip of precipitation not quite heavy enough to call a shower. She shivered, pulling her head back inside and grabbing her coat and hat from beside the door.
“He take off?” Gambit asked. He hadn’t risen from the table.
“I couldn’t see him,” Heather said, pulling the hat over her head.
“You not gonna find him ‘nless he want t’be found,” Remy said.
She supposed he knew best, but once Wolverine was out there . . . . What if he just started walking and decided it was too much trouble to come back . . . or simply forgot? She wasn’t sure how his amnesia worked, but she couldn’t just let him wander off alone. Even if James hadn’t told her to keep him there . . . She hated the thought of having him out there, wandering on his own once again.
“I’ll be back,” she said. “If he comes back before me, just . . . try to keep him here, okay?”
Bundled up as Heather was, the cold barely touched her at first—just nipping lightly at her nose and leaking down the neck of her coat and giving her a slight shiver. But she folded her arms in front of her, walking forward on the small path.
She was sure the path wasn’t man-made. James had said on their way there that the only way in or out was hiking, and even if his manager rented it out to the employees regularly, the weather hadn’t allowed anyone out this far in months. Yet it was still well-tread: the new spring grass was well-worn and beat down by the passing of feet.
“Wolverine?” she called again—but not as loud as before. It felt silly, calling for him where he could be anywhere by now, and the damp forest seemed to swallow her voice whole.
Despite herself, she felt tears beginning to burn at the corner of her eyes.
“Dammit, James,” she spoke to the air. This was supposed to be their time—a vacation from everything: work, people, family. And now here she was, stuck alone in the middle of nowhere with two strangers—a boy that was almost so good at dodging questions that he made her forget she had asked them in the first place, and a lost man that she wasn’t sure how to help no matter how much she wanted to.
Except maybe now she’d lost him, maybe for good.
She sniffed, rubbing her eyes. No point in crying about it. Just head back to the cabin; maybe Wolverine had already returned, and was staring at the fire like he had for hours after she had built it up that morning.
She pushed a strand of damp hair from her eyes and turned around—only to run almost-full on into the short man standing right behind her.
“Ah!” Heather cried in surprise, jerking backwards. Wolverine was startled by her shout, and he blinked.
He took a wary step backwards, looking around the woods as if to find the source of the sudden spike in fear, then rise of anger.
“Wolverine!” Heather said, voice still sharp. “Where have you been? You can’t just . . . take off like that without a word, you know. You almost gave me a heart attack!”
His wariness turned from confusion into something else—and he gave her a strange look as if she were the crazy one.
“’m fine,” he said, his voice as soft as ever. He paused, then added, almost as an afterthought, “Heather.”
It was funny to hear him say her name. Funny to hear him talk at all.
He seemed to feel the same way; he grimaced as he said it, looking away from her quickly and staring out into the woods. His hair was damp, his bare feet wet, and his breath white in the air, but he wasn’t even shivering. In fact, he didn’t even seem to notice it as he took a step forward, his feet uncringing at the rough earth beneath them.
He kept staring, his eyes flickering over the trees, and Heather hovered there, unsure what to do. He looked so much more in his element here—at ease—and suddenly she felt the one out of place.
“What is it?”
He glanced back at her, lifting an eyebrow. Looking back to the woods, he bent down, fluid as a panther, and straightened with a rock in his hand. He hefted it for a moment, and then drew back his arm and let it fly. It flew straight and true, disappearing into a tangle of brush with a thud and a squeal. A rabbit bounded out, jumping a good two feet in the air before it bolted forward, zig-zagging a blur through the grass and out of sight.
Wolverine watched it go, no sign of his thoughts on his still face.
At last Wolverine looked away from where the rabbit had disappeared and looked at her. It was a careful look: a curious one. She was the stranger in the woods, and he knew it.
Uncomfortable with his scrutiny, Heather looked away from him, stepping forward on the path. “What are you doing out here?” she asked, shivering. Just looking at him, standing there dressed as he was, only made her feel colder. “It’s warmer inside, and . . . .” She paused, something occurring to her, even as it churned her stomach a bit. “. . . if you’re hungry again, you could just ask.” She couldn’t imagine how he was, but maybe perpetual hunger was part of his mutant package.
He looked down at that, frowning, and Heather was surprised to realize that she’d hit at least part of it right on the button. He’d been hunting.
She very pointedly did not let herself think too much in detail about
what he’d been looking to eat, and
how.
Hunt with his bare hands—those claws—and gulp eat the red meat raw.
Ulgh.
She shook her head, even more pointedly banishing that train of thought.
Goodness, she just hoped his appetite slowed down eventually, or maybe they would have to worry about foodstuff.