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“Don’t be melodramatic,” Laura says. “You got on a plane. You probably at some bad food and drank a lot of free booze.”
She can see it in her mind clearly, the world her words create, because it is something she has imagined many times before. Logan has never crossed the world for a daughter before, but he’s gotten on a plane.
Once.
When Remy thought she’d tried to kill herself. Something Logan had known she’d already tried to do.
Twice .
“I think you’d prefer to fight undead ninjas than spend time with your daughter,” she says, trying not to sound too bitter about it. She can’t let Logan know who she is. “Her life shouldn’t be threatened for you to give a damn,” and saying that hurts , because Logan had rarely cared when Laura’s life was in danger.
“What do you want from me?” he asks her.
“I want yout to make an effort. Not just for her, do it for yourself. You’re allowed some happiness. Take it when it’s there.” Make it about him. That, she thinks sardonically, is the only way to get Logan to care about something.
I want to know why I’m so different from Akiko and Jubilee and Idie, she thinks. I want to know why I have to fight my own battles and they never do.
“Don’t leave her tonight,” she says, almost begging, just to the left of the truth.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “For however I’ve screwed up your life.”
She plays dumb. Tries to deflect. If this is time travel… “I don’t know what you’re–”
“Nah, don’t try it,” he says. “I can see the truth. It’s not just the claws and the costume. You smell like me, and… I haven’t seen my mother’s eyes in a long time.”
Laura experiences a moment of blinding clarity.
Akiko is only a handful of years younger than Laura, but here she is a small child. This, whenever this is, is before M-Day, when Logan had regained his memories. He should not recognize his mother’s eyes in his daughter’s face.
It’s almost laughable. She has experienced almost every kind of cruelty, but this is…
Logan is dead. He will never have treated her like his other daughers, his protegés, his students, and he never will, because he is not coming back. This is the only apology she will get from him, the only time he will ever say ‘I should have been better’.
Except it isn’t. This isn’t Logan.
This isn’t real .
The illusion asks what she suggests. She tells it to go inside, read its daughter a story, advice rendered meaningless by the non-reality of the situation.
“You want to come, too?” the illusion asks.
Laura has no possible response to that. This is another thing Logan would not say, not to her. She is twenty years old. She does not need a bedtime story to go to sleep.
Dr. Kinney read to her. Remy read to her. Logan…
Laura is twenty years old. Her father is dead. This is the only way she will hear him read to his daughter.
You’re allowed some happiness , she had said. Take it when it’s there .
This isn’t Logan. But maybe if she pretends, just for a little bit… then she can have her father back, and he can be a father.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s hard to see you.”
“Hey, if you’re who I think you are, then dealing with grief through anger runs in the family,” he assures her, just as easy as that. Had Logan ever been like that, once upon a time? Before everything went wrong? Or was that simply another product of the illusion.
“It’s what we do,” he says, not unkindly. “We take our emotions and we stab something with it. That’s the Wolverine way.”
No. It had been his way, when he was alive, and she’d tried to follow it, but hadn’t been able to. Acting from anger had been exhausting.
She had become Wolverine to be better than him, to take his name and move so far beyond him that it stopped being his and started being hers .
“So, you coming inside?” he asks.
If anything, it makes the illusion easier to believe. Logan had always had trouble seperating her from himself.
Logan reaches for her. She reaches back.
Her hand is flickering, fading, disappearing.
How stupid of her. Of course she doesn’t get the even small comfort of illusion.
“I think I’m going back,” she whispers. “I don’t want to leave.”
“I miss you,” she says. It’s half a lie– she has, in truth, very few good memories of Logan. But she misses knowing he was out there , that no matter what, she was not alone. His death had unmoored her.
“It’s okay,” Logan says. “I can’t wait to meet you, Laura.”
Laura had not been at Logan’s funeral. She had not been by his side as he died, had not met with him even once after he lost his healing factor. In the year since his death, she has not been able to bring herself to his grave– that awful, grotesque monument displaying his body.
“Goodbye, Dad.”