Unbound
It was growing daily more difficult to distinguish between dream and memory and guilty desire. And the further North he travelled, the worse it grew.
By day Logan scoured the land for clues to his past. He scanned the undulations of the horizon, squinted at street signs, and followed half-remembered scents and stinks down unpromising alleys and overgrown mountain trails alike, but all to no avail. Still, he enjoyed the solitude. There was something oddly soothing about familiarly unfamiliar rooms in seedy motels; about dough-faced men and women wearing name tags and plastic smiles; about anonymity and speed. The sad furnishings were always rank with the ghosts of other occupants, with echoes of their stale fries and staler sex. Old blood and sweat and coke all spilled into the dismal carpets and overlaid with the pathetically hopeful smell of chemical cleaners in clumsy parodies of pine-sap or spring flowers. He always slept with the window open, letting the cold night air carry in its own promises of unseen places. Logan had enjoyed the luxuries at Professor Xavier's school, and he knew that he would be returning eventually - but right now he wanted space, and thinking time, and answers. He'd never been much of a team player.
But after two months of playing Jack Kerouac he'd had a bellyfull of wide open spaces and spent more than enough time alone with his thoughts, and he still didn't have any answers. By day he was getting nowhere fast.
And at night, sprawling between rented sheets or under silent stars, Wolverine dreamed.
He dreamed of riding down deserted highways in pursuit of something priceless and perfect and always just out of sight. He dreamed fragmentary images and echoes of sensation from a time before his skeleton was silvered over. He dreamed the memory of pain so vivid that it woke him flinching and flailing and clawing scores across the mattress or the wall. A curtain of red-brown hair concealing a familiar face. The tentative tenderness of smooth knuckles sliding gently across his raspy cheekbone. A fingertip tracing the line of his jaw. He dreamed the mild buzz of Xavier's chair and the simple sound of shattering glass; the jarring impact of flesh against flesh and the sheer exhilaration of violence and movement. Laughter. Power. Helplessness. Belonging.
Sometimes he dreamed about Jean Grey, and in the morning he would grin as he imagined telling her the next time their paths crossed. "I dreamed of Jeannie," he would say, and her mouth would twitch at the shameless cheesiness of it. He had wanted her as soon as he saw her. Beauty, class, power and brains - and, unfortunately, lousy taste in men, because she insisted on sticking with the bland, blond All-American hero instead of taking a chance on the crazy Canadian. He couldn't entirely blame her, of course. It was the smart thing to do. The safe thing to do. But in Logan's dreams Jean Grey didn't do the smart thing or the safe thing, and there was no smug Scott Summers looming in the background. These were good dreams.
Sometimes he dreamed about Marie, with her body light as a hollow-boned bird; and in the morning his brow would furrow as he let himself worry about the kid. Because she was a kid, even though she didn't seem to realise it and all too clearly wanted him to forget. She was too young to buy a beer, but still old enough to die for some stupid cause. He worried about Marie far more than he had expected to, and he thought about her at unlikely moments and smiled. She was a brave girl, and a pretty girl, and she was his girl, but he was far too old for her. But in his dreams she was older and wiser, or he was younger and more stupid, and there was no need for gloves. These were good dreams too, but in the morning he winced and felt like a dirty old man.
And then there were the other dreams. Riding off into the sunset hadn't made them go away; if anything, they had gotten worse. He still had no idea how to handle them. These were the dreams about flying and falling; dreams in which his own limbs resisted his will and he felt himself twisted and bent and splayed like a puppet, and the only part of his body that Magneto could not control went right ahead and betrayed him anyway. This was not who he was, or who he had thought himself to be; but still the sense-memory of Magneto's effortless mastery of his flesh haunted Logan. It frightened him, and angered him - and something else besides. He knew that Magneto and Charles Xavier had a past, and that Magneto was a man who liked other men. Logan was not. Very much not. But still he couldn't stop dreaming about that strange possession, and wondering what else Magneto could have done, had he time or inclination. What else Marie could have done to him, when she absorbed Magneto's powers. In sleep his brain took the ball and ran with it, and his flawless, reliable claws bent and buckled and lost all their edge. He woke up wet and hard and dry-mouthed from dreams that should be nightmares, where his strength was all meaningless and every move he made was at another person's whim. Magneto, Marie, Jean, Professor X: in dreams it didn't matter who was calling the shots, only that they could and did, bending his flesh or his bones with some power he did not understand. These dreams went beyond good or bad, and the only comfort he could cling to in their dazed aftermath was the near-certainty that they were nothing more than dreams. Not yet shards of memory. Never that. And a man was not responsible for his dreams.