Everything Breaks
Every cage has a door, Victor knows. Every door can be broken. But sometimes in his sleep, the bars close in around him, and he snarls and thrashes in his sleep, fighting the things he can't see.
*****
He's back in the basement, staring up at the door he'll one day (why hasn't that already happened?) smash again and again with his fists until it splinters and breaks. It's cold where he is. The door is rimmed with light, and someone (weak, nothing like him) is crying because soon they'll all go to bed upstairs and turn out the light. He didn't mean to be bad. Things just keep breaking in his hands.
*****
He's in the army, beating at the bars of the jail cell with his fists, smearing them red as his knuckles split and heal and tear again. He hasn't done shit, just tried to sign up, but they'd looked at his hands and his teeth and called him freak , so he'd shoved one of them up against a wall and hit him until his face went bloody and blank.
"Well, what have we here?" drawls the man looking in the door. He's got a weak face but he holds himself like he's strong.
"Who the fuck are you?" Victor growls.
"I do believe I'm your new best friend."
*****
He's in the jungle, tasting the new smells, stopping every now and then to run his palms over the trunk of a tree or bend down and feel the dirt. He can hunt here. He can hunt anywhere.
"Find me the enemy," Stryker says, and he slips away through the trees following the smell of rifle oil and fear that might as well be sloshed over the leaves by the gallon. "Better than a hunting dog," Stryker says behind him.
"But is he better than me?" Logan asks, and Victor can feel the man's gaze on his back as he pushes deeper into the forest.
"Nobody's better than the Wolverine."
*****
He's in the camp, where sometimes Stryker brings back prisoners that they've taken and Stryker and Logan ask them questions. Victor walks around the cages where the prisoners huddle while the one in Logan's tent screams. He doesn't like cages. Logan does things to them when they're tied up so they can't even run. Then he comes out and smokes for a long time, staring out into the jungle.
There's a night when it's a girl from the village, one they've both fucked. Logan stares at her for a long time after Stryker puts her in the cage. That night Victor can hear her screaming. Logan puts her back in the cage almost gently. She doesn't have any fingernails left. Logan slams the door shut and walks off fast. The lock hasn't caught. The cage door swings open, just an inch.
The girl looks up at Victor, her eyes pleading. He opens the door and gets inside with her, bends down. She cried when he fucked her, but now she crawls into his arms and huddles up against him like it's cold where she is. She's talking in the language he doesn't understand, but he knows she's saying please, please .
There's nowhere she can run, nowhere he can hide her where Logan can't find her. No one is better than the Wolverine.
He reaches out and takes her throat in his hands and shakes her once, hard. Breaks her neck.
Every cage has a door.
*****
He's strapped to a table in a room with metal walls. One of the people in white coats said it was in Canada once, before Stryker looked at her and she shut up. Not that he gives a damn. He can't break the cuffs on his wrists and his ankles. There's some kind of special metal in them. Stryker told him that once while they were taking his blood, or maybe it was one of the times they burned parts of his skin off. It all blurs together.
Logan comes in, once, and looks at him. He's smoking, smoke from his cigar curling up to the metal ceiling and dripping down with the water that beads from the ceiling and the walls.
"Still Stryker's best dog?"
Logan smiles slowly. "Better than being his lab rat."
*****
He's back in the States, and he can't really remember how he got there, but he's not trying. Everything blurs after a while, and he likes that. Now is good. Once he picks up a girl who says she's a nurse, and the smell of antiseptic on her skin and the white rubber gloves lying discarded in the back of her car make him snarl and hit her over and over until she crumples like a crushed leaf. He has to leave town after that, but that's all right. He likes to keep moving on.
*****
He's dancing with a blue girl in a room full of freaks, watching her clothing slowly melt away until she's dancing in nothing but scales and skin. He wants to fuck her right here, and she laughs and lets him pick her up, wrapping her legs around his waist. He rubs against her until he gets off right there on the dance floor, and she kisses him just above the ear.
"Let's go fuck," she says, and so they go back to her apartment and fuck until she's tired of it. He's hungry, so they call a pizza and eat it sitting on the edge of the bed. There's another man's stuff here. Victor can smell him everywhere, his scent only starting to wear off with age.
"What's your husband going to say?"
She shrugs, biting into a slice of sausage and mushroom like she's starving. "He's not my husband, and he won't mind. He knows I get bored when I'm all alone."
"Is he a freak?"
"A mutant." She says it like there's a difference.
*****
The man looks soft but his eyes are hard. He looks Victor up and down with an arrogant disregard that makes Victor growl low in his throat. Raven puts a hand on his arm to quiet him.
"Tell him what you told me," she says. "Tell him about Weapons X."
"What the fuck is it to you?"
The man jerks his sleeve up to bare his arm, showing pale blue numbers staining his fair skin. "I've been in a cage."
And so he does.