[closed thread] Logan & Laura : Family ties

[canadamantium.livejournal.com]

Logan stalks the mansion at night, the change of seasons always makes him restless. Maybe it's his animal nature, maybe it's the added rustle of the world outside dying, preparing for a long winter's slumber. Whatever it is, it has him feeling suffocated even in the vast network of halls and classrooms, like a rat in the maze. He watches the students like small animals, scuttling about trying to escape his watchful, increasingly predatory eyes.

The hunt rises up within him, and he knows he must move...

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[trainedweapon.livejournal.com]

It is restlessness that Laura feels. All is quiet besides the occasional singing of crickets, the rustling of wildlife. She likes this kind of quiet, her legs folded to her chest as she looks out over the school's grounds, perched atop the step's railing. A breeze rustles her long, dark hair, pushes it across her eyes.

For all her restlessness, she is perfectly still, calm.

[canadamantium.livejournal.com]

He can smell her the moment the breeze hits his nose. Sister, daughter, killer, clone. He can smell the blood on her, as she must smell it on him. Blood they will never wash away, it is part of who they are; who they were designed to be.

He crouches on the hedged wall of the mansion's entrance, sensing her stillness. Then he is gone, ghosting across the grounds to her like a wind in the grass. He knows she is aware of him well before he comes to a halt below her, he wanted it that way, but she does not move. Yet.

"X."

[trainedweapon.livejournal.com]

She does smell him, senses his movements, his own restlessness. Familiar and violent and angry, just like hers in as many ways as it is not. She does not look down as he stops below her, even when he says her namesake. Her head simply tilts just so, her chin resting on one of her knees.

"You are restless."

[canadamantium.livejournal.com]

"Hn."

The man who does not smile, he cocks the corner of his mouth for her. The shadow of a smile of kinship, the call of the pack.

"You feel it, too."

He does not speak further to her at first, usually content to leave her to do as she will, but as he turns from her to take to the landscape, he can feel something deep and primal cry out for her to run with him. He knows she must feel it, too, and would not have her resist it if that choice was his.

"Come on, darlin'."

[trainedweapon.livejournal.com]

He does not receive a smile from her, merely a blink. But her silence is a communication all on its own--one he understands. That same feeling of kinship as she peeks down at him wordlessly.

Only as he turns from her does her body tense and seem to ignite with that same call. Her head perks up to follow his gaze into the night. He is correct. It is a restless one. A dark night, one for movement, hunting, blood. She breathes it in, the cool, sharp air. Only when he calls her along does she copy his smile, even though he does not see it.

She lands soundlessly beside him.

[canadamantium.livejournal.com]

They are silent, unseen unless by the keen and finely trained eye. Reapers in the night, they trace the land together in silent harmony. They are forever alternating high and low grounds: Logan crouched in the high grass, Laura spryly flitting from tree to tree among the branches until she drops to the earth and Logan takes to the cover of canopy. Theirs is the dance of nature, of predators.

They halt, a fox sensing them and freezing, ducking low. Logan peers through the foliage at the animal, his periphery keenly aware of Laura. He signals her to take point, waits for her move.

[trainedweapon.livejournal.com]

An easy kill. But a satisfying one. One look is exchanged, and then Laura all but seeps into the shadows, only a passing glint of her unsheathed claws giving her away momentarily.

She has never hunted like this before. But it is all the same, isn't it? What is the difference between a fox and a human? The same vulnerabilities, the same kill-spots. Flesh and blood and bone. The same adrenaline in their hearts, the same death throes.

She climbs a tree over the quivering, sly animal, crouches and peers down at it. Her hands grip the branch and fluidly, she balances her torso, her hips, her legs into the air.

With a 'snikt a blade in her foot erupts from between her toes. She sees the fox's eyes widen, smiles at its panic. She swings down, her claw slicing its gut as it tries to scamper away.

[canadamantium.livejournal.com]

Blood and death and the thrill of the kill, they are gods and beast for a moment as the animal is eviscerated quickly, efficiently. Adamantium holds no quarter for meat and bone and blood and marrow, all things giving way to the edge of the blade.

Their brutality is not irreverent, though, and Logan ensures this taking a moment with the slaughtered, like the natives he once lived with had taught him. He shows Laura the quiet rights, how to change something from senseless death to a ritual for quieting the beast. Ritual, respect, it is the fine line that separates them from the animals they are so often mistaken for, the savages they sometimes fear themselves to be.

[trainedweapon.livejournal.com]

She is confused, but she follows. She watches and absorbs the lesson he teaches, copying his quiet rituals of respect for the dead. Doing so without a word, going through the simple motions. She understands what this is, what this stands for, but it is new. Different. Something she has trouble grasping; a funeral for an animal.

She sits back on her heels after they are finished, her brow furrowed. She thinks about the freezing skin of her mother's cheek, her finger dislodging snow. Her mother's corpse.

"You honor the dead," she says quietly, as if it is a fact that is new to her. She means Logan and the fox. She means her and her mother. She means all those living and their loved ones.

How many loved ones has she slaughtered?

[canadamantium.livejournal.com]

He is crouched opposite her, sees the confusion, the struggled to not just absod, but understand the lesson. Is this why he brought her with him on this restless night? He is unsure, but regardless, they are there, together, with the hunters rites and the prey's ritual beneath the harvest moon hung low in the sky.

He knows, vaguely, her feelings. He felt them himself, once, so long ago. They are feeling both forgotten and reclaimed a hundred times over, he has been both man and beast too many times to count.

"I haven't always." With another, Logan would move so as not to unnerve them with his stone-like posture but with Laura, she keeps almost the same stance. "I had to learn...am always learning. Honour the dead, honour life." His eyes catch upwards to the flutter of wings and the hoot of an owl, but the rest of him is motionless.

"When we take so easily, we lose sight of what it is we reap. Remembrance, honour...restraint: without this, we are everything they programmed us to be." He sniffs something on the wind, back straightening. "We are more, though, Laura. You and I, we are much more."

[trainedweapon.livejournal.com]

Even if the words settle in her as something strange, as something she understands but does not feel as he does, she will remember them always. Take them out many times and play them over, try to grasp more and more from them as each piece of her, of her past and her future coalesces. As she makes sense of herself, of her life and what was done to her.

"What are we?" she asks simply. "Weapons. Killers. Takers of life."

[canadamantium.livejournal.com]

"Yes." He tries to remember for himself. "Hunters. Hunted. Mutants. Men."

Timeless he thinks. She doesn't know this yet, doesn't understand. She won't, not yet, she is still too fresh, too new. Maybe she's better off like this, distanced from the world she's destined to watch pass her by. How hard it's been, sometimes, the mere passing of time around him.

"Ours is the hard task, one few can understand." He means the others, back in their sunlit world of classes and trivialities, the ones who train to learn to almost kill. For Laura, for Logan, they train to learn the opposite. "We work for control, but eventually...we are the executioners. We do what must be done. What others cannot do."

Is this an explanation? He doesn't know, but there it is. They are the same, tamed angels of death walking among the living.

"We are the wild, Laura."

[trainedweapon.livejournal.com]

It wasn't the explanation she wanted, she hoped for. She stares at him, that same dark, confused look, but she is not confused. She understands too well. She knows the answers now, because they are the answers she fears. She thinks of her mother, her letter. Her promise that she was a girl, not a weapon. That she was not the marionette, but the master.

All of it is not true, not where it matters. She was trained to kill, so killing is her fate. She cannot change what she has done, wipe the blood from her hands. She will kill again. She wants to, sees the inevitability, the desire of it.

She is not a child, a girl. She never was.

"And what are they?" she asks. "Puppet-masters. Pain-makers. Weak. Good. People."

[canadamantium.livejournal.com]

"Yes." He knows that there is more to it than that. "Friends, too. Family. Even..." He must pause, pain blossoming up in a fleeting wave. "Even lovers. They keep us human, help us hold the balance. Give us a cause. Without them," he darkens, knowing this truth is hers as well, "we would kill indiscriminately; for the killing. For the blood."

[trainedweapon.livejournal.com]

"For the game," she adds. "For the pain." She is quiet then, her gaze steady, strong, unblinking against his. They are predators, part of a pack. He is the Wolverine and she is- Sister. Daughter. Clone. Part of a whole.

[sleepall-day.livejournal.com]

AW GUYS, I LOVE THIS, IT'S JUST SO GOOOOOOD! :') Am I allowed to feel like I may have sparked this? For my ~suggestions~ :P

[forgingthings.livejournal.com]

Of course you are. Goof.

<3 thanks. Isn't Crystal the bestest ever?

OOC

[never-too-cold.livejournal.com]

GUYS THIS IS BEAUTIFUL.

Re: OOC

[boggie.livejournal.com]

<3 Thanks minds! You guys did ask for it, so we felt duty bound to deliver.