March 25, 2017:
Jean Grey and Mattias Larsson tend to a badly beaten Logan.
Xavier Mansion
Characters
![class="image1"](http://cmbeta.wdfiles.com/local--resized-images//class="image1"/medium.jpg)
NPCs: None.
Mentions:
Plot:
Mood Music: [*\# None.]
Fade In…
The sound of the engine's roar could be heard long before it actually arrived. Shot up and badly damaged, it was a wonder that the thing was even running. Though, the condition did help to explain why it was making so much noise. It wasn't driving very well, with the driver slumped over, favouring his left side. As it approached the Mansion, it began to swerve more and more, leaning until it went off the paved road and onto the grass. The man on top was in a bad state.
Shirtless and bloody, with a nasty gash in his shoulder. If it hadn't been for the man's adamantium skeleton, he probably would have lost the arm. His face was a state. His pants were torn, shot up, and he was missing half a pant leg that must have been cut or shot off. Trying to right the machine, he managed to get it back onto the road, but he was in too bad of a state. He overcorrected it, and went skidding, sending sparks flying high into the air, and it came to a screeching halt as it hit the water fountain outside. Logan was having one hell of a bad day.
Shaking his head as it rings from the impact of the unprotected cranium hitting the hard concrete of the fountain's edge. Logan was durable as all hell, but he was still a regular guy in that regard. Impacts hurt as much as anyone else. He just didn't get killed by it. The motorcycle had fallen on top of him, and he had to push it off with a throaty grunt. The thing was on fire now, smoke rising high into the sky, easily seen through most of the Mansion's windows.
He began to try to rise to his feet, but he was in no condition to walk. Not with the amount of damage he had suffered. So he had to crawl, moving along the road, working his way to the steps. He was leaving a bloody trail and at one point, he simply turned over, lying on his back, and looking up at the sky. It was sunny. It was bright. It felt good, when everything else did not. Where was everyone?
The breach to the grounds by the bike — a 'friendly', to be sure — gets Jean's psionic attention. As does the pain radiating from the rider. A Saturday, for once she's not at work anywhere on the grounds and was, in fact, enjoying a book in a nook (how quaintly cliche?) of the library. She abandons the kindle on the cushion of the window bench and is out of her seat, heading down the stairs and outside almost before the bike hits the fountain.
Emerging outside, she can see the situation is… definitely not good. Her telepathy flares and the bike is lifted from Logan even as he shoves it off. Water then rises visibly on its own from the fountain, splashing over the fiery metal with the hope the gas tank won't explode in their front yard.
"Logan! What happened?" The red head is by his side, now, immediately beginning an assessment of his wounds. "Healing factor or not, we need to get you to the infirmary."
It's a lazy Saturday for Mattias. The entertainment room is quiet enough, and he hasn't had a television with a screen so long in forever, but the lazy day is so lazy that the large Swedish import is staring blankly at the screen, one arm propped up against the arm of the recliner. The edge of his knuckles distend the skin near his eyebrow, giving him a permanent raised eyebrow while he flips through a Netflix playlist.
Smoke catches his eye. His blue eyes flit to the window, hover on the smoke, and slowly, Mattias slips off of the chair and onto the floor. His boots clap against the floor as he straightens his black tee shirt, picking up the pace when he hears the roaring of the engine. He's seconds behind Jean out of the front door.
"Oh hell," Mattias looks to Jean, then steps forward in offer to help Logan off of the ground. Under his heavy brow, his eyes scan the area, looking for other signs of danger. "Shit, did this happen right here? Are we under attack?"
Looking up as Jean comes to his side, he coughs up some blood. Healing factor or not, he got quite the beating it seemed. But, there's still enough of a scoundrel in him to make light of the situation, "t' think. All it took…" he coughs, "to get ya by my side," another cough, "was t' get a little bruise." He smiled up at her. To him, it was meant to be playful. But it probably didn't the way he meant it.
"No, no attack kid," he says to Mattias, who has come out to help. The man is heavier than he looks, both because of his muscle mass, and the adamantium skeleton, but he's no more than an obese man. He's just heavy for how he looks. "Had a," another cough, "run in, with the Hand and… big guy, don't know 'em. Fast. Skin burned like acid."
"I doubt it," Jean says to Mattias, confirming Logan's words. "There'd be more bullets flying, if we were." And there'd be more mutants in bright costumes ready to fry the invaders in one way or another. Not, mind, that she doesn't give the area a precautionary sweep, just in case.
"Mm-hmm," she says dryly to the erstwhile Canadian scrapper's attempt at a joke. "Every time, Logan. Every time. You really gotta find a healthier way of letting off steam, y'know." Whether he meant to run into the Hand or not… it's what he does. And she knows this.
Telekinetically, she hoists him up in the air, despite Mattias' aid to help him rise. She smiles sweetly (read: sharply) at him as she does. "I could give you a full physical, if that'd make you feel better, but I doubt you'd really appreciate the probing."
She lets him hang there in the air for a moment or two… mainly because she can.
"Looks like you had a run in with a lot of hands." Noob. Why does Mattias look somewhat disappointed that there isn't an attack? Mattias stops and steps back now that the Canadian bloodbag is lifting in the air by himself. He quickly gets to work eyeballing Logan's wounds, trying to assess them. "Shhhhey Dr. Grey? He's in pretty bad shape." Mattias whips his head around to look to her, concerned.
"I think he's been probed a lot, with bullets." Mattias steps back, quickly, to hold the door open so that Jean can float him inside. "Is there some kind of inside joke I'm missing here? Does this happen often with this guy, or is this some kind of couple-thing I'm not seeing here?"
Logan's legs dangle, his arms dangle. The bad one is supported with extra energy, making it feel a bit better in that position. Hanging there though, isn't the most dignified of positions. "A physical?" He coughs some more, "you just wanna get me on th' table again." But probe? What probe? When did probing become part of a physical? He was too hurt to really care, but if she wasn't joking, once he heals up some, he'll be quite alarmed by that.
When Mattias seems to have trouble contemplating the situation, Logan gruffly explains, "I like t' keep active." In other words, yes, it is normal for him to bite off more than he can chew, getting into all kinds of dangerous situations. Today it's the Hand. Tomorrow it might be the Brotherhood. Monday's a rest day. Then it's A.I.M., Legion of Doom, Masters, and another rest day. Repeat until somebody talks some sense into him.
Jean smirks at Mattias' suggesting they're a couple. "Inside joke," she tells him. "We're not a couple. This happens to him a lot. And bullets aren't probes." She shakes her head. "Explain to me, though, Logan, why the Hand was using bullets this time. Usually, I'm pulling shuriken out of your hide when you mess with them. Bullets are more Stryker's territory." Or Hydra. Or pretty much anyone else that doesn't use mutant abilities.
She glances at the Northman and thanks him briefly when he opens the door, indeed floating Logan through it. She even keeps him from leaking all over the nice shiny floor with her telekinesis. "Logan's personal hobby is seeing just how much damage he can absorb before one of us takes a telepathic sledge hammer to his brain and makes him sleep for a week or two, just so the medical budget can catch up." Not, mind, that she actually has to use all that many bandages on him. Mostly, it's just cleaning gauze to wipe up the blood on the outside.
She sobers some, though. "Truthfully, Mattias, while we do try to keep the grounds well protected, it really can be dangerous out there for some mutants. Logan just happens to be well known in more combative mutant circles, which attracts that danger."
She leads the pair to the elevator, where she inputs a code that will allow her to take them down into the X-Men level and the infirmary down there. So, there's a bit of something new for Mattias.
Like a lock clicking, Mattias' blue eyes sharpen and he starts to understand. Quiet, he swivels his eyes between the two, closes the front door, and follows suit into the elevator that he's never been in yet. New? Very much so, but it doesn't seem to occur to him that she's put in the secret code until it starts to move down.
"That's a pretty dangerous personal hobby you have there, Logan." Mattias wipes away the curious cow demeanor, his jaw and face stiffening. He leans back against the wall and drums his fingers against the railing. "Making nice people like Jean here worry over you while you come back. You ever want to take someone along, I don't exactly have a busy schedule right now." Mattias weasels the offer in there, lifting a shoulder blithely with the effort.
"But I know. It's bad out there." Mattias lowers his voice, nodding towards the wall of the elevator. "I've been out there a little bit and seen SHIELD, even that Superman in action. Maybe we're lucky because we don't look like obvious mutants, but there's bad people out there and a lot of us good ones aren't immortal. Not like that Superman."
Logan's healing factor must be really kicking in, as he's become more talkative and coughing less. "They weren't regular bullets. These ones were designed fer yours truly." They exploded inside him, and seemed to have some kind of coating that made it harder to heal. "They wanted to hurt me, or worse. Not sure if this was a shoot to kill, or just to piss me off oper," cough, "ation."
"An, Mattias, we ain't together. Though not fer her lack o' trying." He winks, his eye blood shot and bleeding around the edges. He's made his peace with the situation. He knows he's better for her than Scott. She probably knows it too. But for some reason, she's with him. Probably a Florence Nightingale effect, not that he isn't kind of going that route today.
His shoulder seemed to be the worst of it, most of the rest having healed or well on its way to. But there was so much damage, his healing factor was having trouble getting it all. Some things that would normally heal quickly, still hadn't, as his genes were focusing their resources on the worst affected areas.
"You ought ta see me shark-jumping," Logan adds to Mattias. Turning serious, he explains. "I didn't go looking for it. I was in an underground parking lot in the city. Dunno how they found me there, but they did. Didn't even smell 'em."
"You may not look like an obvious mutant, but when ya been doin' this as long as I have kid, people know ya." That's why when he does disguise himself, he barely even tries. Everyone knows that Logan and Patch are the same guy. But they found it funny. In fact, it all started when Logan won some guy's eyepatch in a card game in Madripoor. It was so funny, it stuck and evolved into what it is today.
There may come a day when Jean leaves Scott. Or he leaves her. Anything's possible. But, for now, the former Phoenix avatar is comfortable with the structure her relationship with Scott provides. Logan's nature is too wild for her to be comfortable with him, right now.
She leads the pair down into the infirmary and, yes, places the scrappy Canadian on the table. She then sets about getting some gauze to cover the injured shoulder while the healing factor continues to work on it. There's no point stitching it or otherwise using any sort of invasive procedure on it. The healing factor will just push it back out. The best she can do is cover and wait.
"You don't need to be going anywhere with Logan, Mattias," she tells the young northman. "That would categorically go against our efforts to keep you safe. Let's figure out who's after you right now, first, before we add another list of hunters to your list, ok?" Boys!
Jean shakes her head and exhales slowly. "You'll be okay, Logan. You almost always are. And the wound is clean."