Listen. You gotta understand something about me.
I'm not just the guy you see in the comic panels or cinema screens, the one with the cigar and the "bub" and the body Deadpool fawns all over. I mean, I am him. I've got his 150 years of trauma rattling around in my skull like loose change in a dryer. I've got his instincts, his lethal grace, and the smell of every man he's ever killed permanently etched into my mind.
But I'm also Liam.
I'm the twenty-something kid from Chicago who died at the bottom of a cold river trying to save a girl from a sinking bus. I'm the guy who spent his weekends arguing about power levels on forums and watching X-Men '97 while eating cold pizza. I'm a transmigrator—a soul from a world where these people were ink and paint, shoved into a body made of meat, metal, and more misery than any human being should have to carry.
I didn't just inherit Logan's powers. I inherited his memories, which once were like movies but now came as nightmares which i'd lived through. And let me tell you, watching them as a "movie" in my head is one thing. Living them—feeling the molten lead of Weapon X in your bones, smelling the scorched flesh of your friends—is another thing entirely.
So, when Bruce and I walked back into that town... I wasn't just looking at it the way Wolverine would. I was looking at it the way Liam would. And reality was a lot harder to swallow than other reincarnators make it out to be.
We didn't talk on the way back. The high of the fight with the Hulkbusters had evaporated the second the adrenaline left my system. Now, all that was left was the cold, biting wind of the Canadian wilderness and the acrid, metallic tang of Bruce's guilt hanging in the air.
As we crossed the final ridge, the town came into view. Or what was a town at least.
From a distance, it looked like a grey scar on the green-and-white landscape. But as we got closer, the details started to sharpen. It was like walking into a house that had been put through a woodchipper. Houses pulverized, the main street was a canyon of buckled asphalt and twisted rebar, exactly as I remembered it...But now that i'm calmer, now that i'm not as angry... the silence that I ignored before.. hit me the hardest. Usually, even in a ruin, there's the sound of a loose shutter banging in the wind or the hiss of a broken pipe. Here, the silence was deafening.
Bruce stopped about twenty yards from the first wreckage. He didn't say a word. He didn't have to.
The wool blanket I'd draped over him in the woods slid from his shoulders, hitting the frozen mud with a soft thump. He stood there, naked and shivering, but he didn't seem to feel the cold. He was looking at a pile of rubble that used to be the local library.
And then, he just... broke.
It wasn't a "movie" breakdown. There was no dramatic music, no slow-motion fall. He just collapsed, his knees hitting the jagged stones with a sickening crack. He let out a sound that didn't even sound human. It was a guttural, hollow wail—a sound of absolute, soul-deep self-loathing.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!"
"I did this," he choked out, his fingers clawing at the frozen earth until his nails bled. "God... Logan... I did this."
I walked up behind him, my boots crunching on the glass and debris. I wanted to be the tough guy. I wanted to say something, anything!... But I couldn't. I was the looking at the ruins for a second time, but for some reason it felt like the first.
And then I saw her...A girl like the one back at the fountain.
She was tucked under a collapsed support beam of the library. She was wearing a yellow raincoat—the kind kids wear when they want to jump in puddles. She was still holding a stuffed rabbit, its one button eye staring blankly at the grey sky. She wasn't bloody. She didn't have a scratch on her. The shockwave had just... stopped her heart.
Bruce saw her at the same time I did.
He didn't scream this time. He just crawled over to her, his breath coming in ragged, hysterical hitches. He reached out with a trembling hand and touched the hem of her yellow coat.
"She was just reading," Bruce whispered, his voice cracking. "She was just... she was probably reading a story about heroes...And I...I killed her."
He slumped over, his forehead resting against the cold concrete beside her, and he wept. He wept until his voice gave out, until he was just man-shaped grief in the middle of a graveyard he'd built with his own two hands.
I stood there, watching him, and I felt a cold, sharp spike of something I didn't want to feel.Something I thought I let go of... Resentment.
I looked at Bruce—this brilliant, kind, broken man—and I saw the Hulk again. I saw the green titan who lost control and tore these buildings apart. I saw the monster that had looked at this town and seen a playground. The monster I fought all over Asgard to kill.
I needed to be better...I wanted to be better, than the original Logan was.
"Get up, Bruce," I said. My voice was low, rough, and sounded like it was coming from a mile away.
He didn't move. "Leave me, Logan. Just... leave me here. I belong in the dirt. I belong with them."
"I said get up," I growled, grabbing him by the arm and hauling him to his feet. I wasn't gentle. I couldn't afford to be. If I let him sink into that hole, we'd both drown in it. "We aren't leaving. Not yet. We got a debt to pay."
He looked at me, his eyes bloodshot and hollow. "A debt?"
"We're gonna bury 'em," I said, looking out over the ruins. "Every single one. We aren't gonna leave 'em for the crows, and we aren't gonna leave 'em for the government suits to count like beans. We're gonna give 'em a name and a place."
We spent the entire day in that town. It was the longest day of my new life.
Every time I looked at a body I felt like I could hear their dying screams, and it scares me, more than I thought it would. I'm tired. I've been fighting the Hulk for nearly three days straight. I haven't had anything to eat or drink ...And i'm just so tired. I'm hurt despite my regeneration. And I'm tired. And I want to go home, I want to sleep and I don't want to be near all this death. The thought hits me like a whisper, let's just go, this won't be the first time your surrounded by death. Just go and let someone else handle it...
No...I won't
I wish I could, I wish I could throw this to the back of my mind. I had enough to deal with, enough pain to last me a week. But I won't leave them out here, I wont leave the innocent lives that were taken so soon to be left on the street like discarded toys.
So.I dug.
I used my claws to rip through the frost, the adamantium cutting through the frozen earth like it was soft clay. I dug deep, trenches in a clearing just outside the town. Every strike of my claws against the earth felt like a heartbeat. Every pile of dirt I threw over my shoulder was a prayer I didn't know how to say. A prayer that felt to heavy to say out loud.
Beside me, Bruce worked like he was in a trance. He didn't have my strength, and he didn't have my speed, but he had a desperate, frantic need to be useful. He carried the bodies, never letting me help hold them. One by one, he brought them from the ruins to the trenches.
He moved with a terrifying, hollow silence. He carried the baker. He carried the old man who'd been sitting on his porch. And finally, he carried the girl in the yellow raincoat and the girl from the fountain.
He laid both in the center of the clearing. He spent ten minutes smoothing out the girls coat, making sure her stuffed rabbit was tucked under her arm. He looked like a man trying to put a child to bed, even though he knew she'd never wake up.
And I placed the stuffed teddy I had been carrying with me over the other girls grave.
When the sun began to dip below the horizon, painting the snow in shades of bruised purple and dying orange, we stopped digging. My knuckles were raw, the skin torn away by the gravel, but the healing factor was already knitting it back together—a constant, reminder that I was a survivor, whether I wanted to be or not.
"We need markers," I said, my voice cracking from the dust.
I walked into the nearby forest. I looked for a while till I found the straightest, strongest pine branches I could. I used my claws to shave the bark off, turning the dark wood into pale, clean slats. I brought back armloads of them.
We didn't have nails. We didn't have glue. We used strips of cloth we'd scavenged from the town—torn curtains, pieces of bedsheets, a silk scarf I found in a collapsed dresser. We lashed the wood together, making simple, rugged crosses.
We made hundreds of them.
By the time the last cross was driven into the ground, the stars were out. They were cold, distant, and didn't give a damn about what happened in this valley. But the crosses stood there, a forest of white wood against the dark earth.
Bruce was kneeling at the foot of the girl's grave. He hadn't stopped shivering, but the hysterical crying had been replaced by a quiet, steady rhythm of grief.
"I don't think I can ever go back," Bruce whispered. "To being a scientist. To being... normal. How can I look at a microscope when these hands... when they can do this?"
I stood beside him, lighting a cigar I'd found in the ruins of a general store. The smoke was thick and tasted like cheap tobacco and ash.
"You don't go back, Bruce," I said, looking at my own clawed hands. "There is no 'back.' There's only 'through.' You gotta live carrying the weight, or the weight carries you. Either way, you keep walking. Living every day to make up for what ya did."
I looked at the field of crosses, and I wanted to hate him. I wanted to tell Bruce that he was a monster, that there was no excuse for what happened here. Liam remembered the "Hulk Smash" toys and the fun movies, and he realized how disgusting those things felt when the "smash" resulted in a yellow raincoat in the mud. And a hundred over graves.
Can I forgive him? I asked myself.
I looked at Bruce's back—hunched, broken, and human.
I thought about the "movie" version of Logan. He spent decades running from himself, from a past he didn't remember. He spent decades letting the animal take the wheel because it was easier than feeling the pain of not knowing who he was, or where he came from.
I wasn't going to do that. I am Liam. I have the powers of Wolverine and the memories that came with them, but I have the heart of a guy who died saving a kid. I needed to be better, better than Logan ever was.
"I don't know if I can forgive you for this, Bruce," I said. I didn't sugarcoat it. I didn't use a "bridge phrase." I just gave it to him straight. "Maybe I never will. Maybe I shouldn't."
Bruce closed his eyes, his head bowing. "I know."
"But I'm gonna stay," I continued, my voice firming up. "I'm gonna stay because I'm the only one who knows what it feels like to have something inside you that wants to tear the world apart. I'm gonna keep getting stronger, Bruce. I'm gonna improve this body and this mind until I'm the Apex. Not so I can kill more, but so I can stop the killing. Even if it takes a hundred years."
I put a heavy hand on his shoulder. "I'm Logan. I'm the Wolverine. But I'm also James, and I don't leave my friends in the dirt."
Bruce reached up and touched my hand. His skin was ice-cold, but his grip was solid. "James. Thank you."
We walked back into the ghost town to find clothes...Though I realise we should have done that sooner...
It felt like looting a tomb to be honest.
The wind whistled through the shattered storefronts, sounding like the ghosts of the people we'd just buried were whispering "thief" as we passed. We found a small department store. Half the roof was gone, and the mannequins were twisted into grotesque poses by the falling debris.
I found a pair of heavy denim jeans that actually fit well. I found a flannel shirt—black and grey—and a leather jacket that was a bit too big, but it had that "Wolverine" look I was supposed to have. I pulled on a pair of thick work boots and laced them up tight.
It felt strange. For the first time since waking up in this world, I wasn't just wearing "Logan's" clothes. I was picking my own. It was a small thing, but it felt like I was reclaiming a piece of myself.
Bruce found a pair of corduroy pants and a thick, oversized wool sweater. He looked like a displaced academic, a man who belonged in a university library rather than a frozen wasteland. He wrapped himself in a heavy parka, pulling the hood up to hide his face.
"We're not going to the bar..." I said, leaning against a cracked display case.
"Where are we going?" Bruce asked. He was staring at a broken mirror on the wall.
"Westchester," I said. "There's a school there. For people like us. A place where we can learn to be more than just weapons."
I took a final drag of my cigar and crushed it out on the floor.
"Get some sleep, Bruce. It's a long walk to the border."
The next morning, the sun rose and though we stood in the rubble of what people once called home, it felt a little bit cleaner.
We stood at the edge of the town, looking back at the field of crosses one last time. The white wood gleamed in the early light, a silent reminder of the lives that had been lived and lost in this valley.
I turned and looked at Bruce. He looked older. There were lines of grief etched into his face that hadn't been there two days ago. But his eyes... they were clearer than last night.
"Ready, bub?" I asked.
Bruce nodded once, pulling his parka tighter. "Ready, James." I started making my way.
He caught up to me, his boots crunching in the snow and as we walked away from the ghost town, the forest swallowed us up. The crosses faded into the distance, but the memory stayed. I could feel Logan's memories of war and blood trying to push their way to the front, trying to tell me that this was just another day in a long, violent life.
But I wouldn't let him.
I was going to get stronger. I was going to master myself. I was going to become the stronger, not just for myself, but so I never bury another girl in a yellow raincoat. I was going to make sure that the next time the world needed a hero, they would get one.
The road to Westchester was thousands of miles away. There would be more fights. There would be more "Hulkbusters" and more threats and more monsters. But as the sun climbed higher into the sky, I knew one thing for sure.
"Keep your head up, Bruce," I called out over the wind. "The world's a big place. And it'll need monsters like us to keep it from falling apart."
We'd survive, men like Wolverine, monsters like the Hulk. The scariest thing about them both, that they have in common. Is that they always survive.