The Boathouse

Posted on Fri Sep 26th, 2025 @ 11:36am by Logan
Edited on on Fri Sep 26th, 2025 @ 11:52am

1,981 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: Episode 7: Pathogens and Contagions
Location: Boathouse by the lake, X-Mansion
Timeline: March 4, 1992

Snow squeaked under his boots as he left the mansion lights behind. Jean had pointed him down the path by the trees—“not far”—and she wasn’t wrong, but distance isn’t measured in yards when you’re half-healed and carrying your own weight out of stubbornness. Every step put a hot nail through his thigh; every step he took the same as the last. He didn’t limp. Not for an audience and not for himself.

The boathouse sat squat by the lake, a dark shape with frost-sugared windows and a porch that faced the water rather than the big house on the hill. The roofline was true, glass clean, path swept. Someone had made it ready. He catalogued that on instinct and felt the edge he’d brought with him ease off half a click.

The latch turned without complaint. Warmth met him—not heat, just the kind that meant somebody had come through earlier, set a stove, aired the place, made sure the pipes didn’t scream. It smelled of wood polish, wool, a faint lavender that clung to clean linens. Beneath that: lake water, iron nails, and the honest damp of old timber that had wintered well.

He shut the door and let the quiet settle. The boathouse was kept, not fancy. A solid bed made tight, a folded blanket at the foot. A small rug cut the chill off the boards. A table with two chairs sat beneath a window; a neat little hotplate held a kettle and a dented pan. A stack of split logs and kindling waited by a compact stove, ash pail standing to the side. On a shelf: a tin of tea, a jar of instant coffee, matches in a small ceramic dish, a handful of paperbacks whose spines had been cracked by honest reading. A narrow wardrobe. Towels folded, first-aid kit tucked beside them. The kind of care you show a guest you’re not sure about but refuse to treat badly.

He crossed to the window and thumbed the latch. Smooth. He cracked it to the lake and took the hit of air: cold, damp, clean. Water lapped under the boards, steady as breath. Out past the trees, the mansion’s glow blurred warm in the dark—close enough if things went wrong; far enough that he could breathe.

The routine came next without him reaching for it. He made a slow circuit, listening and touching like a craftsman checking his tools. Window frames snug. Hinges oiled. Stove flue drawing right. The front lock catching true against the strike. A drawer by the sink offered up a modest toolkit: screwdriver, roll of tape, a small tin of oil, a whetstone that earned the ghost of a smile. He opened the wardrobe and found a wool jumper in his size—issue grey, no labels—folded on the shelf. Someone had guessed the shape of him and guessed right.

Satisfied the bones were sound, he sat on the bed and tested the give. Firm without being a plank. He exhaled a breath he hadn’t admitted he was holding. His hand went to his chest, found the dog tags and rolled them in his palm. Wolverine. Logan. 45825243-T78-A. Steel letters stamped into steel. Two names like two strangers. Numbers that didn’t tell a story. Twenty-odd years of that—of waking up in other people’s wars, of doing work that left him clean only on paper. Of trying to build a life on fog and muscle memory.

The kettle hadn’t been asked to sing yet. He wasn’t rushing it. He let the weight of the place and the quiet do their work. His head ran its old tracks anyway.

It always started with scraps. A hairpin catching light. Paper walls and breath held for the crackle of a candle. Snow and a flash of red as if a memory could bleed. The first time he’d smelled Mariko, he hadn’t had a name for her—just the clean lines of tea and silk and steel; the way honour could sit heavier than armour. Before that there’d been another red, soft and sharp at once, pressed into snow that swallowed sound. He didn’t have the dates. He had the ache.

Other nights the junk drawer in his skull coughed up fragments that weren’t gentle. Tanks and tubing. White tiles that shone back too much light. Straps biting skin that healed faster than leather could scar it, so they tightened them until metal sang. Voices using words like asset and subject to mean man. He could hear a hiss and a click—the rhythm of a programme that had once known the pathways of his nerves better than he did himself. He knew the names now—Professor, Cornelius, Hines—but the knowledge didn’t make the ghosts any politer.

He had new ghosts for the shelf, recent and raw. The Omega overlays like frost spidering across old scars. Prime units in the trees. The mansion’s gates screaming off their hinges. The way his body had moved when a voice that wasn’t his told it to, claws answering to a mission instead of a mind. The look on kids’ faces who didn’t deserve any of it. Jean’s voice cutting through the static, the heat of a fire-bird painting the snow gold and stopping everything that mattered at once. He’d left blood on a place that called itself sanctuary. That sat bad. Sat worse because it could have gone another way if he’d found a way to be stronger, earlier.

He dug his thumb into the tags until the edges bit. The pain was clean; he could use it.

Enough.

He stood and set the kettle to work, water hiss and metal tick filling the quiet. A chipped mug took a generous shot of instant and then more besides; subtlety wasn’t on the menu. He went to his duffel and brought back a squat brown bottle—Canadian rye with a half-peeled label that had been in more pockets than it had any right to. He splashed a heavy finger into the mug; the smell came up sharp and mean, which felt like respect.

While the kettle thought about boiling, he finished the circuit he always finished—the perimeter, this time beyond the walls. Boots took him around the porch and down the short run of planks to the edge of the lake. He crouched, palm to timber, feeling for the way sound travelled through old wood. No hollow drumming where there shouldn’t be. No new nails singing where they’d been driven in recent days. Just age and honest work. He followed the path back and checked sightlines from the tree line, marking the angles where anyone could stand and watch without being seen. He wasn’t planning to run. He wasn’t planning to be surprised, either.

Back inside, the kettle clicked off. He poured, stirred, sniffed the mug like a dog appraising a hand, and drank. It burned perfect, coffee hiding the bite of rye just enough to make the both of them behave. Heat settled behind the breastbone, the way the first swallow always did when you hadn’t had a decent one in too long.

He didn’t sit yet. He took the mug and the small whetstone, set both on the table, and pulled a plain work knife from his belt—nothing special, the kind of steel you use to cut twine or shave a stick. Stone to blade, slow, steady arcs. Shh—shh—shh. Not sharpening so much as reminding his hands what rhythm felt like when rhythm belonged to him and not a machine. When the edge caught the lamp’s light just right, he nodded, oiled it, and put it away. Little things. They added up.

The reflections didn’t stop because you found something to do with your hands. They just got clearer.

Nineteen years and change of not knowing who he was beyond what he could smell, fight, or fix. The moments when a scent would reach in and drag a picture out—sake on a winter night; cordite and mud; the breath of a girl laughing into his collar—and the picture would break in his hands before he could name it. The times he’d almost made a life and then left it because the closer he got to anything true, the louder the ghosts banged on the pipes. The knowledge that while he’d been trying and failing to turn into a man, people with steady hands and clean coats had been turning him into a thing.

The worst part wasn’t that they’d done it. The worst part was how good he’d been at it.

He stared at the dog tags on the table. Wolverine. Logan. He could make a kind of sense out of the pair: one the animal they’d honed, the other the man he kept dragging back out of the snow. He wasn’t sure which name deserved the number. He wasn’t sure it mattered. Tonight, the only label he needed was guest—and he wouldn’t make a liar out of the person who’d written it.

He poured a touch more rye and carried the mug out onto the porch with a cigar he’d been saving for a night that felt like it knew the rules. The boards creaked under his weight; the lake breathed. He thumbed the lighter and watched the ember take, a small, honest fire glowing at the tip of something he could control. Smoke salted the cold air, drifted up into black where the trees cut a ragged mouth out of the sky.

He leaned on the rail and let the cold do him the favour of carving the fever out of his thoughts. In the distance, the mansion hummed—a low, steady sound that read as alive rather than machine. He thought of Jean’s eyes when she said please don’t prove me wrong, how there’d been steel under the heat, and how that mix had made something in his ribcage stop bristling. He thought of the kid wolf tucking tail and then looking back with hope anyway when someone promised her a second cinnamon roll. He thought of the word school and how strange it felt as a scent—chalk dust and old books and a corridor at night with the lights half-on so kids didn’t dream in the dark.

He drew on the cigar, tasted oak and pepper and the hard day finally going soft at the edges. He let the animal in him do what it did best—listen, sniff, decide—and then he let the man say it plain.

Play it straight. Earn it inch by inch. Do the work. If the past came nipping, he’d bare teeth—but he’d do it on his terms. No handlers. No codes in his ear. No waking up with blood on his hands he couldn’t explain.

He drained the mug and set it on the rail, watching his breath turn white and vanish. Somewhere under the porch a fish turned and the water made that small, respectful glup that says two worlds touched and didn’t hurt each other.

He wasn’t home. He doubted he’d ever get that word clean. But he had four walls that didn’t feel like a cage, a roof that didn’t ring with orders, and a promise he intended to keep.

For now, that would do. He lit the cigar again, pulled the collar of the jumper up against his neck, and kept watch with the lake—two old things that had seen worse nights, holding their ground until the light came back.

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