Chapter 23

The wind cut through the loose cotton weave of his shirt. James shivered at his side. The younger boy's clothes were finer, but they were still not suited to their midnight run away from everything either of them had ever known.

Victor spotted a hollowed out tree up ahead and tugged his little brother along. He could tell that the shock was wearing off, and the child would not be able to make it much farther.

When the pair finally stopped running, they huddled together for warmth. It was early in the season yet, but the night had grown cooler than comfortable, even for him.

James broke down.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I-I didn't. I didn't mean to kill him."

Victor felt the damp spread through his shirt. The younger boy was shaking uncontrollably. It was not solely from the cold.

"He deserved it. We'll go somewhere better tomorrow. I'll take care of you. Promise"

If anything, the crying worsened, and the younger boy gripped him tighter.

Abruptly, the child was ripped from his arms, disappearing into the night. Victor batted at the darkness that threatened to swallow him whole. Thrashing to escape, he landed with a thump.

Victor growled as he woke, haphazardly sprawled on the bedroom floor.

It was the fifth dream in as many nights, dredging up old memories he was content to leave buried. They all started distinctly enough, different times in their lives, different circumstances, but they always ended the same way. His brother disappeared, and he ended up alone. Even when Victor avoided sleep altogether and cat-napped, the flitterings of dreams followed the same pattern.

He didn't need to be a psychologist to figure out what they meant.

He'd left Magneto and returned to an old, close by bolthole without checking in on the kid - or his brother- again. Going all the way back home would have been a pain in the ass until the latest storm passed.

He needed a mission to clear his head, anyway.

At least, that's what he would have done a year ago.

A mission wouldn't work now, and Victor knew it.

"We're going to talk." Sabretooth decreed, unceremoniously, after having disappeared for more than a week.

Logan had just assumed he'd fucked off back to Canada.

He pulled a cigar from his pocket and lit it before rising to the other feral's bait. Marie was going to screech when she saw the damage, anyway. What was a little cigar smoke, at this point?

"Did you have to bust the window?" Logan shouted down to the man still outside and below aforementioned busted window.

"Not my fault you didn't pay attention to the first two damned rocks!"

The older feral was uncomfortable, Logan could tell even from here. Like himself, Sabretooth wasn't one for talks, and in some ways it was like looking in an eerie, distorted mirror. He instinctively knew the the other man's tells and what he wasn't saying, in the same way that he knew all of Rogue's moods. That wasn't something that appeared out of thin air. It felt odd, but, in a weird way, seemed right.

Logan wasn't above baiting him back.

"Laura's fine by the way. Since you bailed."

Victor growled.

"Didn't come to talk about the kid. You and me got shit to work out, and we ain't giving your little cronies a front row seat. Get your wallet. You're buying me a beer."

Logan growled then, but relented. Marie might be able to forgive the window being shattered, but he'd really be in the dog house if everything else was reduced to rubble, as well.

"Never took you for a talker," the younger feral jibed, once he pulled the truck up front.

"I'm not," Sabretooth agreed, as he climbed in, "But I'll use short words and maybe you'll be able to follow along."

A tense eight mile drive later found them at a local dive bar.

Victor secured a booth in the corner and there was only a moment of squabble over who would face the door.

Victor let him win, and it felt like a concession, which made Logan all the warier.

"You're dying," Sabretooth accused, without preamble.

Logan took a swig of his beer.

Oh. He relaxed infinitesimally. This.

"You just now figuring that out?"

The other man looked like he wanted to say something else but held back the smart remark. Who have thought that facing his impending mortality would have its perks?

"Knew first thing," Victor contradicted, "just didn't know that it was something fixable and you were too big of a moron to do something about it."

Logan shrugged off the complaint; he'd already been down that road.

"Can't. It's a catch twenty-two. Can't get the metal out without the virus getting me. Can't heal from the virus with the metal load in my system that's not being filtered out by my healing factor like it used to be."

Victor started at him like he was a prize idiot.

"So, what? You need a blood transfusion. Probably a lot of them. What part of brothers with nearly identical mutations do you not get? I'm allergic as fuck to adamantium, but I'm sure the beast and the red-head can figure out how to filter specific antigens out of the blood or something. The real trick'll be getting bucket-head on board to get the metal out without him o-"

Was Sabretooth- Victor- actually offering to... help? Logan gawked, thought about it, and gawked some more.

They'd looked into transfusions, but Hank had determined it would be best if blood was donated by a mutant with both a blood type match and a similar mutation. Logan dropped the ax on the whole conversation months ago when they'd mentioned using Laura.

His delay in responding apparently caused the older feral to misinterpret his astonishment.

"I read," Victor defended, surly," What do you think I do in the winter? It's your damned fault I learned to read in the first place."

"No. Not that. Why."

Sabretooth visibly loosened up.

"We're brothers. Brothers look out for each other. Even if one is an amnesiac, goody two shoes, fuckhead. Besides, you think I wanna take on a cub full time? Laura sure as hell wouldn't stay put at that damned school at all, if you weren't around."

It made a weird sort of sense, Logan supposed. He was deflecting, definitely, but as far as he could tell, Sabretooth didn't have any true ulterior motives, in this case.

"What about the last thirty or forty years? You weren't looking out for me then."

"What was I doing?" Victor growled lowly," You ditched me."

Logan took in that revelation.

"We had a... disagreement and didn't see eye to eye. You left, we were both pissed, and I thought I'd let you cool off for a few years."

"Sounds like a hell of a 'disagreement'," He retorted.

"We were soldiers for a hundred years. I enjoyed it and everything that came along with it. You didn't."

There was still likely more to that particular story, but Logan could tell that was all he was going to get right now.

"Anyway, next thing I knew, you got the metal on your skeleton, we took out Stryker's genetic monstrosity on Three Mile Island went our separate ways again. It was some time after that, you lost your memory. Next time I saw you, you jabbed a claw into my brain."

"What?" He asked sharply, but Victor did not elucidate further.

Logan had always assumed that whatever procedure he underwent to get the adamantium bonded to his bones had caused the memory loss.

But if that wasn't the case, then something else was the cause. Had he been in another lab?

"And how long was that? Between?"

"Between Three Mile Island and the claw to the fucking frontal lobe? Three, maybe five, years" Victor shrugged, finishing off his third beer. "You'd said we were done after Three Mile. Thought I'd give you some more time to cool off."

He still didn't completely trust the older feral, but he hadn't lied to him yet, and Victor's version of events lined up with what he could remember, just not the way Logan originally thought they should.

Logan's first memory was stumbling through the snow with the world's clunkiest night vision goggles on his head, flashes of a liquid-filled chamber, and the searing pain of adamantium fusing with his bones. He had vague notions of a bear and that he'd killed it with the knives jutting out of his hands, but the scent was Sabretooth's.

He'd recognized the same scent, remembered it, when the Brotherhood first tried to kidnap Marie. The other feral's scent had screamed 'enemy,' and Logan never questioned it until Laura came along.

Victor had tried to do right by the girl since the beginning. And for a murderous psychopath he seemed more... stable... than Logan expected.

"Wouldn't hurt to run your idea by Hank," he conceded.

For the first time in a very long time, Logan allowed himself the tiniest ray of hope.