Taming a Beast

Xavier looked a bit surprised I was in his office, but with one scan of my mind, he knew exactly why. He shook his head and said, “Shiloh, I can’t help you there. I disagree with allowing Logan to see into his past again. Perhaps there’s a reason he was made to forget it. But if you want to do it so badly, you can do so on your own.”

I scowled at him silently, then stomped out of the room. I ran down to Hank’s lab, knowing that Hank had been around almost as long as Xavier had. I threw open the door and Hank looked over at me, waving as he went back to inspect something underneath a microscope. “Hello, Shiloh. To what do I owe the honor?”

“I have a question for you, Hank,” I said, approaching both him and the subject slowly. Hank looked up from his microscope, noticing my hesitant tone of voice. He gave me a worried look, preparing himself for the question I was about to ask. “Do you know of anybody who could replace Logan’s memories?”

Hank sighed, pulling a hand through his hair. “Not off the top of my mind, no.”

“Oh, because we’re both just so unhappy right now, considering he can’t remember a single thing. It absolutely kills me to see him like this, so desperate and so vulnerable. You know Logan never shows weakness, but there’s days when all he can think about is the past that was taken away from him,” I said in a melodramatic tone. But Hank didn’t catch on to the fakeness of my voice; he looked genuinely concerned.

“I can ask around with some of my colleagues. One of them is bound to know something,” Hank said to me. I ran the rest of the way towards him, wrapping my arms around him and squeezing tight. He patted me awkwardly on the arm.

“Oh, my gosh, thank you so much, Hank! You’re the best,” I said to him, leaving the room. I shut the door behind me, leaning against it and smiling to myself.

It was only a matter of time before someone showed up who knew how to replace Logan’s lost memories.

--

A week passed, and I had nearly forgotten about my quest. Logan was doing an excellent job with distracting me, and half of me was beginning to think that he didn’t want his memories back. Maybe he was afraid for the same reasons Xavier was, that he was meant to forget them. The point was, Logan was doing everything in his power to keep my mind off of finding someone who could give him back his memories, but still keep my mind on him.

I was reading in the courtyard when I got a call from Hank on my regular cell phone telling me to come meet him in his lab. I did as he said, and when I walked in, I saw he wasn’t alone.

Standing with him was an ordinary-looking man in a labcoat and thick-rimmed glasses, a man who looked a bit like a human model. He looked much too beautiful to be a renowned scientist, never mind a renowned scientist sympathetic to the case of us mutants.

“Ah, there you are,” Hank said, motioning me forward. “Randy, this is Shiloh, the girl I was just telling you about. Shiloh, this is Doctor Randall Greene. He believes that he can fix Logan’s memory.”

I looked over at the doctor and said, “Do you really?”

“I do. Worst case scenario, it just doesn’t work. Death is not one of the side effects of any of my procedures, I can assure you that,” Doctor Greene said. I nodded, still a bit hesitant about him. He smiled, relaxing me, and put a hand on my shoulder. “Everything will be alright.”

I felt that tingling sensation I felt in my head whenever Xavier tried to break in. I pushed Doctor Greene out of my mind and said, “Telepath, or persuasive?”

“Persuasive,” Doctor Greene said, looking impressed. “I’ve never met anybody so strong against my power before.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been trained by the best to resist,” I said, rubbing my forehead and pinching the bridge of my nose. “So, when can you do the procedure and what does it involve exactly?”

“Well, it’s just a simple hypnosis trick. I’ve dealt with people who have forgotten certain times in their pasts, but not a huge chunk like your boyfriend. It should be interesting, but it’s worth a try, and I do all my work on mutants for free, so you needn’t worry about that either,” Doctor Greene said. I nodded and he said, “As for the procedure, if you can go find your boyfriend, I can do it right now. It takes up to ten minutes at the most.”

My eyebrows shot up, my heart racing. “Really?”

“Yes, do you know where he is?” Doctor Greene asked me.

“I can go find him right now. Don’t move,” I said to him, turning around and taking off. I ran through the hallways, frantically searching for Logan. I rounded the corner and whammed right into somebody, and somebody else caught me.

“Woah, where you going?” Gambit’s laughing voice asked me as he pulled me back up to face him and Scotty.

“Have you seen Logan? I finally found somebody who can replace his memory, and they want to do the procedure right now,” I said excitedly, nearly bursting at the seams. Gambit and Scotty shared an uneasy look, then they both looked back at me.

“We’ve all been talking a lot about this lately, and we’re not sure it’s such a good idea. What if there’s a reason that he’s forgotten so much of his past?” Scotty said, sounding a bit worried. I gripped my fists, and bared my teeth a bit.

“I would’ve thought you guys had more resistance against Xavier than that,” I said, pushing past them.

“Don’t make me say ‘I told you so!’” I heard Scotty yell after me as I made my way down the hallway. I asked around until finally, a little girl told me Logan was in the kitchen. I ran down there and slid in, and he looked over at me curiously.

“Woah, Speedy Gonzalez, what’s going on?” He asked me, a taunting smile on his face.

“There’s somebody in Hank’s lab right now who can give you your memory back,” I said to him. He lost his smile quickly, and I grabbed his arm, trying to pull him. “Come on, Logan.”

He looked hesitant, but he followed me down to the lab. I introduced him to Doctor Greene, and as he explained to Logan how the procedure was going to work, Logan seemed to relax. He laid down on one of those body-length test tables they tied mentally unstable people to, and Doctor Greene told him to close his eyes. He gave Hank and I each a pair of earphones, and his mouth began to move. The earphones blocked out any noise, and there wasn’t much physical change.

Doctor Greene signaled for us to take our headphones off about seven minutes later, and then he said, “Logan, you my open your eyes.”

Logan opened his eyes and fell to his knees. I ran over to him and helped him up a bit, as he leant into me although both of us were still kneeling on the ground. He looked up into my eyes and whispered, his mind somewhere else, “Kayla.”

I jumped back like I had been shocked. Logan blinked his eyes and looked at me, getting up quickly. “Shiloh, I--”

Of course. How had I been so stupid? How could Logan, who had been eternal for a while and a mutant who never aged, never fallen in love before he met me? How many were there before this Kayla girl?

I could only imagine Gambit and Scotty, waiting with their arms crossed back home, waiting to say ‘We told you so.’

“Shiloh,” Logan said desperately, holding out a hand to me. Every step he took forward, I took two back. He was practically chasing me as he choked out, “Please, don’t...”

“Don’t what, Logan?” I asked him, cries tearing at my throat as Logan looked more torn than I had possibly ever seen him. “Don’t back up? You just got your memory back, the memories of the woman you once loved. If roles were reversed, how would you respond to me calling you somebody else’s name?”

“I...”

He trailed off, and never got to finish. I shifted and-- thanking whatever higher power there was that Nightcrawler was born-- teleported back to my room at the Academy. I let the tears flow as I sat on my window seat, hugging a pillow tightly to my body.

“I’d really like to say I told you so, but I’m not that big of a jerk,” a soft voice said from the doorway. I didn’t have to turn to know how it was. I felt his hand press to my back, and saw him sit down out of the corner of my eye. I felt another presence with us, and looked up to see Gambit had joined Scotty and I.

“I know what I was getting myself into,” I whispered, shaking my head. “I just... didn’t think about all the possibilities.”

“It is hard to imagine anyone else ever loving Logan,” Gambit said, knowing exactly what happened like he always did. Scotty looked surprised, and he tried not to sound too shocked when he asked us who.

“Some girl named Kayla,” I sniffed, and the guys gave each other uneasy looks. I just took it that they were worried about there being another girl, not that they knew her or anything.

“How far away is Logan?” Gambit asked me, rubbing my back consolingly.

“I’m right here,” a deep voice said from the doorway. Gambit turned quickly and I saw him sneak a charged card out of his sleeve. I pressed my fingers to the inside of his wrist, motioning for him to step down. Scotty kept his protective grip around me, giving Logan the full glare like Gambit now was. But Logan didn’t look at them-- he stared directly at me. “Shiloh, we need to talk about this.”

“I know we do,” I said, emotionless. “Guys, please excuse Wolverine and I.”

Logan flinched as I called him by his codename. The guys exited, and I could see Scotty was about to hurt himself with how hard he was trying not to make a rude gesture towards Logan. I sighed-- they couldn’t really blame him for forgetting things.

As if reading my mind, he sat down on the window seat and said, “You’re not mad at me.”

I shook my head, giving him a wet smile. “No, I’m not. I’d have no right to be. I’m upset that you called me by your last lover’s name.” It went silent between us, and I picked at the fluff on the pillow. I asked softly, “Was she...”

I trailed off, unable to finish. Logan continued my sentence. “A mutant? Yeah, she is.”

I looked up at him quickly, my head snapping into place. He couldn’t meet my eyes as I asked him, “What do you mean, she is.”

“She’s still alive,” he muttered, shaking his head. “I don’t know how... I checked with Xavier, he found her on Cerebo. She’s in South America, way away from us right now.”

I only calmed down when I heard Logan’s apparent disinterest in going off to find her. I looked back out the window, and Logan took my hands again. I looked over to his eyes, and he met my eyes seriously, daring me to rip my eyes away. I couldn’t do it, and he knew it. He said to me, “It doesn’t matter who I loved in the past. I’m in love with you now, and the feelings I have for anybody else could never pass the ones I have for you.”

I looked up and met his eyes, and saw that there was an immense amount of truth in them. I leant forward and pressed my lips to Logan’s, lightly at first and then harder. We pulled away and he said, “Thank you so much for allowing me to get my memory back. I’m sorry I didn’t believe that I could get them back. You’re right, I do need to learn how to be more optimistic.”

“The important thing is, you have your memory back,” I said softly.

“And I have you to thank you for that,” he said, tipping up my chin so he could kiss me again. He wrapped me up in a tight hug and said, “I’m just so glad I can remember everything now.”

“I am, too,” I said to him, smiling. And I was happy,

But I felt like him remembering his first love was only going to lead to worse things.