Autumn Leaves: Winter Stays

by Alestar

And that ended because everything ends. Or, really, nothing ends. I'm still here. Here being-- grey and white, and cold, in a poisoned landscape of nuclear winter. Season is dead. Autumn is over, and there are no more Springs, no more. Summers.

Within five years, me and Scott were underground full time. The vegetation came back eventually but all the birds started to die, followed by the rest of the surface animals. We sealed ourselves in-- but it didn't matter, it was only a matter of time before the radiation infected our water source. Scott began to get sick, and five months later he was dead.

That morning, we went outside-- it hadn't turned cold yet-- and we sat and ate from the trees that'd sprung up with poisoned fruit. We made love and he told me a story he'd heard from his dad when he was a kid-- and then I killed him, because he asked me to and because he was my last friend. I took him back to where the mansion used to be and buried him with a chrysanthemum.

And that was the end.

Except, nothing ends, and I'm still here. Here being the lowlands outside of an Ai factory. It's hard to consider it forest without the signs of life, but that's what it is.

I live here. The radiation gets inside me, and my healing factor deals with it in a way that hurts all the time-- but it's no harder for my body to take care of than the adamantium was. Both of them together might've killed me, but as it is I'm just-- weighed down. The air is thick.

When I first came back to the world, I came to a city that was dead and dying further. I went out into the forest-- that's what it is-- after that and built a cabin, and from here, looking out, it just looks like another Canadian winter, with all the world just sleeping and not dead, and I rest a little easier.

I need to go out and find food now. There's no meat to be found, but there's some insects-- all the quacks who preached about the survival of the cockroach were right, fuck them-- and some plantlife. It does alright.

I do alright.

As a tribute to the distance in me that's become my only enemy, when I return to the cabin hours later, I don't notice the open door. I throw the food sack aside and bolt the door shut behind me-- and only as I lean my head tiredly against the woodgrain of the door and breathe deep does it occur to me.

Big lump in front of the fireplace. Breathing.

I look over, hand falling numbly to my side.

Creed.

I move over to him, ignoring the ghost of caution that urges distance. He's unconscious. The scent of blood is on him, his own-- he's knitting up slowly. Radiation's taken it out of him, looks like. Can't imagine who he could've been tussling with, why he'd be throwing down with Ai, if that's it.

I think, holy fuck. Victor Creed.

I poke him with the toe of my boot and he makes a sound. I'll be goddamned. I retrieve the food sack, settle back on the bed, and wait.

After a while, I wake up and the fire is low. Vic's still out on the floor--kindling's in the corner. I take a stick, poke him with it once-- no response-- then lean over him to prod at the fire. It's predictable enough, I know, but I go still with shock when the hand shoots up around my arm, rearing up beneath me, hurling me across the room. The existence of others is that forgotten by me.

My eyes open to his frame in front of the fire. He's looking at me, not moving. I don't move either, and after a few seconds he drops back down to the floor with a huff.

"This is yer place."

"Yeah."

First word I've said in years. Only a scratch of rasp.

"Didn't smell you. All this," he waves his hand skyward, "stuff in me. Can't smell anymore. Things . . " He trails off, shrugging one shoulder. His voice is less rusty than mine, less disused. Knowing him, the crazy motherfucker's kept busy talking to himself.

He laughs, and the desparation in it doesn't chill me as it has in all the other laughs I've heard in the last few years, because it's always sounded like that. "Crazy motherfucker," he says, "Ya said that out loud."

I move away from the door, half-way towards him. "What the hell happened t'you?"

"I dunno," he says, dully. He pickes up the stick where I dropped it, and turns and stoops.

"Ya don't know? How d'you not know?"

He shakes his head, tending to the fire. "Stopped noticin'."

I drop back down onto the bed and watch him. He's in civilian clothes, torn and blood-stained around him. His hair isn't as long as it might've been, because it probably falls out in chunks, sporadically, like mine does. His eyes're half-closed.

"What're you doing?" --Then I frown, because that wasn't the question I meant to ask. It doesn't matter, he doesn't hear me, or doesn't respond if he does.

"You got food?" he says a few minutes later, after he finishes with the coals and sits back down.

I get the bag of scavengings from the door and toss it to him. He digs in, not suprised by the fare. I guess he does alright, too.

While he's eating, he looks a little frantic, a little fierce, and he starts to look like some Victor Creed I recognize, from long ago. And that reminds me of more. I actually feel the curl of something in my gut-- distantly familiar, like the song Rogue used to sing all the time, that I heard myself humming a few days ago-- and I flex my wrist, feeling the claws shift slightly under the skin.

A fight. The fight. With both of our healing factors on edge, this would be the time to do it. One last rumble, winner takes all. Or, well, ain't really anything to take. Winner takes-- longer to die.

It's kinda funny, I think, as he shuts his eyes to swallow something--considering how long we've been going at it, and how high the stakes have been, and how it would all come down to this. Two aimless old men who talk to themselves and try to kill each other out of nostalgia.

He raises his head and looks at me, so I figure I must've said some of that out loud, too. He puts the empty bad of food aside and stands up slowly and so do I.

"You up to me, runt?"

--That comes from me, actually, and startles us both. He cocks his head, and I take a step forward. He nods his head a little. We meet in the middle. I pop the claws on one hand and scrape them across him, catching the cloth of his shirt, riping it further. He doesn't move, except I think I feel him leaning into them. I retract the claws.

His hand comes up around my neck. If his thumb dropped to my throat, it would be a choke-- but instead it rests against the bone of my jaw. His eyes are distantly focused over my shoulder, until they lower, and he drops his forehead against mine.

A corner of my mouth tugs upward. "Yer supposed to try'n kill me."

"I am," he whispers. "It's not workin'?"

I turn my head so that his forehead catches on my cheek. "Maybe it is."

His mouth pushes in from there, down to my throat. He's crazy. He was crazy with pain and evil before, but now he's crazy with time, and he's rambling, mumbling something about biting through me. To see if I really exist.

"Yeah," I say, resting my hand on the back of his head. "You find out, you tell me."

He pulls back up and our mouths come together, I don't know why. We need to breathe something besides this thick, white air. I hear the wind pick up outside, which means another blizzard, which means the ending of that blizzard and eventual showing up of some other blizzard. My hands clutch at Creed's middle and I think, he's not dead. He isn't dead.

"Logan."

"Yeah."

"Logan."

"Yeah. Yeah."

His hands come up to hold my head and I take ahold of his wrists. I pull him towards the bed, turn, tip him over onto it. We move on it together and he's frantic again, he's still bleeding a little, I can't take my mouth off him.

"Can't smell you," he breathes against me, jerking against my hip, tugging. "Wish I could smell you."

* * *

He doesn't talk alot. He'll tell me about things when I ask-- he actually worked for the Ai, years back, and he was involved in the trap that took down the remainder of my people in the last resistance attack-- but it makes him jittery, and he gets lost in the words, like they don't mean anything, sometimes. It turns out, I talk all the time. Funny how things like that end up.

Outside the cabin-- and, hell, the rest of the world, for all I know-- stays white and still, but Vic's been keeping track, following the nights and months, and he tells me it's Spring. I tell him it's all the same to me, and he opens his eyes and turns his head on the bedding to look at me, and I say, "Listen. We do alright."

-end-

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