They walked northwest. Only stopping when one of them got stuck or when they needed a small break. Laura wanted to keep on moving. She'd probably make it to the border by herself at twice the speed they were keeping now. She both wanted to be left alone and have the others company at the same time. Rictor and the other kids were with her and her with them, supporting one another every step of the way. The journey seemed agonizingly slow. She missed Gabriella. She and some of the other nurses were the only people who had treated them well. The tests and experiments that had always been painful, sometimes in more ways than one, was sometimes bearable only because she was there behind the glass looking at her with comforting eyes. She would tell her stories when they were alone. A story of a doll who wanted to become a real boy, a story of a girl who married a bear-prince who turned out the be a normal person, and her favorite stories: the stories about the X-men.

"That is your father," Gabriella had told her once, pointing at the yellow man with the claws who was in the middle of fighting a green-skinned monster. "He is a great hero, and you can be one too, Laura." When she first heard that she didn't understand much about what a father was. Pinocchio's father was his father because he had created him. She sometimes wondered why the people in the facility wasn't her father instead of this clawed man. Gabriella said that the facility didn't love her, and he did. This happened before she had gone through her great change and gotten the same abilities has the yellow man in the comic book had. That man had been her father. He hadn't been like Pinocchio's father. He had been mean, always yelling, always insulting her not at all the loving man who danced with the Pinocchio at the end of the story. Charles had been nice to her, that was the reason she had stayed as well as Gabriella's wish of her to go with her father. Logan had loved her at the end and had given his life for it. She picked up the pace. She didn't care that she was getting ahead of the others. She didn't want to stop, she didn't want to think about this anymore.

After three hours they stopped for a short rest to Laura's increasing frustration. She didn't understand how the others got so tired so quickly. She sat at the edge of the group, arms around her legs while the others quietly talked amongst themselves. Rictor went up to her, sat beside her on a nearby log and looked at the sky.

"We should be close now, probably not more than an hour left." he looked at her with concern. "We're close now, you haven't smelled anything?"

Laura shook her head; the wind was in the wrong direction and the people that were there to get them was probably still too far away for her to smell. Rictor nodded, rose and placed a hand on Delilah's back silencing her.

"We should get moving. We're nearly there," he said quietly and reassuringly. The children gathered their meager belongings and started to move through the forest with Rictor in the lead.

After about an hour some of them were getting worried. What if they had gone the wrong way? What if they didn't find the border. Rictor with his compass tried to reassure them that it was only a matter of time now. And he was right. Only after a few minutes, the wind changed its direction, and Laura could smell the odor of fuel. They had gone a little of course but on the whole, they were close. Laura quietly told Rictor, and he made the group follow her. It was agonizingly slow for her, she constantly felt like she needed to slow down so that the rest of the group could catch up to her. She could now hear it; a helicopter. She nearly went into a straight up dash when she heard it. Freedom was so close now. She nearly burst out of the forest into a glade where a woman with red hair stood looking worried and impatient. Laura suddenly stopped and hid behind a tree. How did she know that this person wasn't part of the Reavers? She didn't have any guarantees on that. What if that helicopter just took her back, they would need them now that the beast that looked like her father was dead. She didn't get to think about it for a long time before the other kids went running into the glade. The woman beamed at them and motioned them to get inside, she exchanged an extra few words with Rictor who motioned at Laura to get out of her hiding place. She went into the glade, the woman stretching out a hand to her to help her into the helicopter. She smiled at Laura and started to say something. Then everything went wrong.

An explosion of colour in the sky. Red, purple, yellow, green, blue and orange raged across the heavens. The sound was deafening, Laura could feel as blood dripped down her side of her face as something popped in her ear. Then came the first shockwave. As Laura was struck to the ground with such force that all air flew out of her lungs as she saw the helicopter tipped over, her friends screaming inside of it. The strange wave seemed to come from all around her all from nowhere at the same time. The second one hit, much stronger than the last and this time the sound came with it and not before it. Laura was struck up in the air, she screamed in pain and in fear but she couldn't even hear her own voice. Bolts of multicolour lightning came down from the sky, striking the helicopter and the trees around the clearing. These were silent, and what they struck would disappear in a cloud of grey smoke. She saw from her point of view how a bolt hit one of her friends. April didn't scream, she just looked confused as she started to vanish. Laura fell down to the ground, hearing bones crack in her back from the force of it. More lightning came down in quicker succession now. The helicopter was nearly all turned to ash by now and the whole of Project X-23 was trying to get out of it. Laura felt her bones snap back into place as the third shockwave hit breaking what felt like all of her body. She was barely conscious as she saw Rictor being crushed in the same way. She gasped for breath as the fourth one sent one of her ribs into her lung. She started to pass out as a lightning bolt hit her. She was unconscious as it started to dissolve her.

Laura woke gasping for air. She turned to her side and started a harsh cough. She spit out blood and pieces of bone. She tried to stand but as she did a great nausea came over her and she threw up as she fell down on the ground again. She was breathing heavily, she was freezing and starving, like she hadn't eaten for weeks. It took her a couple minutes to get her bearings again. She wiped her mouth with her arm, and she saw that she was in the same glade she had been before the explosion, only that now it was nighttime and the helicopter was nowhere to be seen. She stood carefully on weak legs, and she almost fell back on the grassy ground again but managed to hold her balance. She only now realized that she was completely naked, and she understood why she was so cold. Rictor and the others were nowhere to be seen. She called for them. No response. She called again louder. The forest remained silent. It was like they had never been there in the first place. The trees that had been destroyed by the colored lightning were still there, everything was identical. Except for the fact that she was alone again. She looked around in confusion, everything seemed to be in slow motion. She screamed their names in fear. The forest remained silent. Laura lifted her head to the sky and screamed in anger, confusion and grief. The world around her turned blurry as tears started to form in her eyes. She continued to scream out the names of her friends: Rictor, Juile, Stephen, Joey, Gideon, Jonah, Rebecca, Bobby, April, Delilah, Jamaica, Jackson, Mira, Tomás, Erica, Stephen, Tamara. Nothing happened. She tried again, her voice breaking more and more, her nose running. She started to call for Charles and Gabriella, she started to call to Logan. She screamed until her voice was raw and when it was she popped her claws and started to slice one of the nearby trees in frustration. After the tree fell she was left standing, knuckles bloody but not damaged. Her healing factor saw to that. She fell down on the ground with tears flowing like rivers.

She wondered what she was supposed to do. It had to have been the Reavers who had done this… whatever it was. She didn't know if her friends were dead, maybe they were still alive somehow. No, that wasn't true. She remembered Rictor's body as it was crushed by the shockwave and she knew that he must have died. Maybe the rest of them survived, though. Like she had. She doubted it though, none of the other children had her abilities. She should have done something… when the explosion came, she should have taken them away from the helicopter, she should have forced them into the forest again, she should have… she didn't know. It was the second time this day she failed saving someone. The question now was what she was going to do. She couldn't go back the way she came, without the helicopter as a reference she didn't know from where she had come from and she could just go right back over the border where the Reavers would find her. But she couldn't stay here either. She was starving and her healing factor was based on her hunger so if she didn't find food she wouldn't survive. Did she deserve to survive? She didn't know. Everyone she had ever cared about was gone. She was truly alone. She sat down on the newly fallen tree, the bark wasn't very comfortable on her skin but she didn't care. She needed food. She guessed that she could scavenge in the forest for something to satiate her hunger. Her nose should be able to get her to an animal she could eat. She decided to get out of the glade, if she was going to hide from the Reavers she might as well do it in an area that wasn't completely exposed.

Laura didn't know what time it was. She had been taught how to tell the time of a watch. That wouldn't have mattered here anyways since she didn't have a watch. She didn't have much of anything right now. She tried to stay focused on finding food, but unlike Jamaica, she didn't know what plants were edible and that left only hunting. She wrapped her arms around herself as she tried to look for tracks, something that the facility had taught her. The tracks they had planted was always human, though. She didn't know many animals. Only the beasts from the stories Gabriella used to tell her and most of those she had told from her memory and not a book. Because of this she knew that a bear was big and hairy, with a long nose and rounded ears. She could imagine that animal in many different ways but she didn't know if anyone of them was correct. She shook her head and tried a different tactic. She started to follow her nose. There were a lot of animals in the forest, most of them were birds that were too quick and too high up for her to catch. So she continued, straight ahead, following so the wind always was on her right side. She stopped, she had smelled something upwind. She started to quickly move through the forest, focusing completely on moving as quietly as possible. She didn't want to think about anything else. On weak legs, she told herself over and over that she needed to be strong now, stronger than ever.

She crouched down, upwind from the animal and hidden behind a bush and started to wait for her moment. She could still smell it, whatever it was, and it was slowly coming towards her hiding place. She continued lie in wait while trying to suppress her anxiety, hunger and impatience. She saw it now and it was huge. A brown-furred animal with large horns on its head grazed towards her hiding spot. It had a large nose and what Laura could see, horse feet. After a few moments of observation, it seemed to be constantly vigilant, always turning its head this way and that to let its large black eyes scan the area. Laura could hear it sniffing in the air before it kneeled down on its front legs, lowered it's head to some bushes and take large bites out of it. Laura didn't hesitate, even though she didn't know the anatomy of the beast she knew that the jugular always was located in the throat, no matter the mammal. She jumped out of the bush with as much speed as she could muster, released her claws while flying through the air and levered a strike towards the big animal. It didn't have the time to get up on its feet before Laura had sliced two big cuts under its massive head. It made a wailing sound that turned into a gurgle as the blood flowed into its respiratory passage before it butted Laura with one if it's horns when she landed. She felt one of her ribs crack as she fell backwards and she screamed in pain as her claws sliced off a big chunk of the horn. The beast tried to run away, but it was too late. It's movements became clumsy as it struggled to get its massive body through the narrow forest before it came to a complete halt and fell down on the ground, frantically panting. Laura didn't feel much better than the animal, the difference was that she would heal, slower than she was used to because of her hunger. After a few minutes of painful healing she no longer heard the beast breathing she rose and walked to the animal. She couldn't make a fire as the Reavers might find her. She knew that she could eat any flesh, raw or cooked because of her healing factor, one of the little tests they had performed after her change. She prefers the cooked variant but didn't have a choice now. With her claws out she began to carve the animal, piece by piece and started to eat there and then. After this, she needed a shelter and a source of water. After that she could try and figure out what to do.

"Alright Ricky, the first thing we need is to find some fresh tracks,," Shawn said while adjusting the rifle on his shoulder. He looked at the young teenager behind him that had a worried expression. "You're not getting cold feet now? I'd hate to cancel this little expedition, It's a 30-minute drive home."

The teenager shook his head.

"I'm just tired and carsick, Dad. Forest paths aren't the smoothest ride, you know."

"That'll pass after a while in the morning air." Shawn said dismissively, "Do you have your equipment?"

Ricky nodded and adjusted his rifle as his father had. This was his first time out hunting and he seemed uncomfortable in his newly purchased gear.

Shawn looked at his son, he still couldn't believe he was alive. After the day that now had been named The day of Ashes half of the earth's population had been wiped out in a flash, he and his wife Delilah had been survivors, Ricky had not. They had watched as their son vanished before their eyes without having any power to stop it. The worst part was that they had been fighting over some stupid shit like they always did. It had been a hard couple of weeks for everyone, the entire planet was going to hell as world leaders randomly died as well as their replacements. The governments of the world had been in chaos, and the UN tried desperately to contact the Avengers to no avail. Then, after a few weeks, something had happened. The sky had lit up in a flash, and an immense sound of thunder could be heard. Suddenly, lightning came down from the sky with colors that usually only was reserved to retro neon clubs. And Ricky was back. Looking the same as he had ever done. Black hair, like his father, brown eyes like his mother with a gaunt face that had a confused look on it. Wearing the same band-branded T-shirt that seemed to scream 'No one understands the real me.' Shawn had never cried as much as he had done that day, even more so than when Ricky had disappeared. It had been a week since then and the world, still not even close to recovering, still seemed to return to a sense of normalcy.

"Alright then, let's go hunting," Shawn said and entered the forest.

Since this was Ricky's first time hunting, Shawn had settled that they start out with small game. No use in starting out with the big stuff like deer or moose until he had grasped the basics. Shawn had already gone over the 101s of hunting with him many times and he thought that Ricky had listened once or twice to what he had said, but there was no better teacher than experience, especially first hand. They delved deeper into the forest, only whispering to one another to not scare the prey. Suddenly Shawn sniffed and looked down on the ground.

"Hold up" he raised one of his hands toward Ricky.

"What is it?" Ricky had been quiet for most of the time while they were walking, but now when his car sickness was gone and most of what Delilah called TMS (Teenage Morning Syndrome) was gone, Shawn could actually hear some excitement in his voice.

"Come look at this Ricky, something's been here" Shawn pointed at the ground in front of them.

"Okay, so what?" Ricky said a little too loud and Shawn raised a finger to silence him.

"Something has been dragged here, something large. See the ground here? The vegetation is torn up, there is also some fur in the bushes over there."Shawn said as he went up to the track examining it closer with as much eagerness as you could have when also tried to stay completely silent.

"So why is that strange? Some predator took out a deer or something?"

"Probably a moose And It looks a little weird," Shawn said stroking his black-gray mustache absentmindedly kneeling down to see better.

"Still haven't told me why." Ricky said impatiently.

"Hell son, I'm not gonna give you all the answers, try and figure it out for yourself," Shawn said with as much impatience as his son. Ricky sighed and knelt down beside his father to examine the track. He didn't see much at first but after a few minutes of standing up, following it for a little bit, he noticed something.

"There is a piece of horn here," Ricky said half-whispering to his father.

"Good, don't pick it up," Shawn said as he went to his son and looked at the horn. He looked at how it lay and picked it up to examine closer. It wasn't a complete antler, but he could see that it was part of a moose. It had been sliced perfectly, it looked like it had been done with a water jet cutter, so perfect was the cut.

"There's another piece here," Ricky said and pointed at a point where Shawn hadn't looked yet, even if it was practically next to them. He picked up the other piece and fitted the first and second piece together. There wasn't even a seam. He got a sinking feeling in his chest.

"Tell me son, why is this weird" Shawn said as he gave the pieces to Ricky who held them up closer to examine the perfect cut.

"I don't think this was done by an animal. It looks too clean." Ricky said after a few seconds, Shawn was already examining the rest of the scene.

"So if this wasn't done by an animal, why would the tracks be strange?" Shawn asked, he sat down on a nearby log, he took his thermos of coffee and poured into his cup. He waits for Ricky to completely analyze the scene, tapping impatiently with his foot. Ricky looked at the scene again before he took out his map and compass, he looked confused at it for a second before going to his father pointing at a part of the map.

"We're around here, right?" he asked, Shawn nodded but didn't elaborate, he took a sip of coffee.

"Then why are the tracks leading to over there? That would only lead them deeper into the forest, not to any settlement or road."

Shawn nodded, drank the rest of his coffee with one quick motion and rose.

"That'll have to do; time is of the essence," he said as he adjusted his pack and started to follow the track, not bothering to mind his movements anymore.

"What do you mean?" Ricky said, struggling to keep up with his dad in the underbrush.

"That horn wasn't cut by an animal, that was manmade, from the small prices of flesh infested with insects nearby, the kill was probably made about a week ago. The animal wasn't cut up into smaller pieces to make it easier to carry, instead, the whole thing was dragged on the ground. This tells me that we're dealing with an inexperienced hunter who probably lost his way and maybe lost in the woods."Shawn concluded, keeping a close eye on the trail and his compass.

"Wait, couldn't have been a predator that dragged both the animal and the hunter with them. Like a bear?"Ricky asked with a voice that broke even more than it used to.

"Maybe, even so the hunter would be dead and eaten by now and it's our responsibility to find out." Shawn said determinedly.

"Isn't it the park rangers job or something?"

"Sure, but out here I don't have any reception on my radio or on my cell phone and this could literally be a life or death situation." Shawn showed Ricky his cell phone that currently showed no bars.

"But what if the predator found us?" Ricky sounded more and more homesick the more time went on.

"If it was a predator it has probably moved on by now. It's been a week since the kill after all. Animals usually don't own freeze boxes and meat turns bad very fast."Shawn looked back at his son that had gotten an even more pale complexion than he usually had. He didn't want to lose him again, he thought the risk to his sons well being so minuscule though that his duty to other hunters overtook that fear.

"Listen" He stopped, turned around, looked into his son's eyes and said calmly "I will never let anything bad happen to you, You just stay behind me and watch my back, you hear? I have done similar rescue missions before so I know that nothing is going to happen, alright?"

"Alright…" Ricky said hesitantly but it seemed to make him lose the fear a little bit.

"Alright, now then, let's be superheroes and help a person in need, yeah?" Shawn said with a slight smirk and plenty of sarcasm. He always liked to make fun of people like the Avengers, especially that goody-two-shoes Captain America.

Authors note:

So, let's get some things out of the way;

1. This is my first fanfiction though I have written some short stories before. I do want honest critique, so if you liked it, please tell me why, and if you didn't like it then the same goes to you as writing is a skill I want to improve.

2. English is not my native language, so if I did some typos or bad grammar please tell me where but have some consideration here as well.

Now, some lore stuff. This takes place after Avengers 4 (which at the time has not gotten a name yet) so this becomes very much an AU after that movie comes out. Needless to say, the Avengers, somehow, managed to reverse the death-snap at the end of Infinity War and therefore, every character that turned into dust is now alive again, hurray for having things in stories that make characters omnipotent. In the X-men timeline that Logan took place in was destroyed because of the immense power of the infinity stones and because otherwise there would be no plot.

So… welcome, have fun. Grab a beer, soda or cat and enjoy X-23: The Making of a life