#doenough

 “ Logan? ”  Steve was caught off - guard for a moment, his shield lowering just a fraction, eyes widening behind his cowl. Last he’d seen his friend, he’d been six feet under, and it hadn’t looked like he’d be coming back any time soon. Or at all. There had been rumors, of course. Murmurs here and there. None of them good. Steve’s lips pressed together, shield raising again as his guard did as well. Despite Steve’s many questions -- when? why? how? -- he wouldn’t let it distract him out of the situation. His priority was to keep the situation contained, to deescalate.  “ Stand down, Logan. I won’t say it again. ”  

THAT’S… a really hard question. It varies wildly. Josh is still incredibly emotionally unstable and can sometimes shift from being neutral on someone to, well. Not.

But his feelings on Logan are incredibly complicated and as much of a mess as anything else in his life.

So, canonically - Wolverine was Josh’s favorite teacher and X-Man for a very long time. Josh looked up to him because of his brutality and savagery, admired his ability to ‘do anything’, and also just thought he was a cool guy. He was Josh’s hero.

 Then he killed Northstar. I didn’t read the surrounding event so I’m not one hundred percent sure what happened, but to my understanding, he was possessed or controlled and it wasn’t his fault. Dani explained it to him and Josh grudgingly accepted it, but Wolverine was no longer the best in his eyes. He saw what Wolverine being able to ‘do anything’ meant, and… you don’t really go back to that kind of blind worship after.

Then things start getting bad. The stuff with Danger happens - this might be before, again I’m terrible with the chronology of things - but there’s an instance where Josh is trying to heal all of the X-Men and just collapses on the floor. Logan’s exact words are, ‘this one’s used up’ and they just leave him on the floor while they go do whatever they need to do. There’s no effort to make sure he’s okay or even to get him up on one of the beds, they just leave him on the floor when he’s exhausted himself to the point where he can’t move. 

So follow that up with his time on the X-Force. Where Logan, again, basically just uses him as a means to make sure everyone else doesn’t die. Rahne tears Josh’s throat out and Logan wakes him up and gives him ten seconds to heal himself before throwing him at everyone else to save them. Josh is in miserable shape and just does it, because that’s what the X-Men have now trained him to do. No sense of self-preservation. No encouragement to take care of securing his own oxygen mask before he helps anyone else, just the demand that he hurries up and fixes someone. Which of course instills the idea that he matters less than them.

( which is why years later, he walks into a trap to save his dying friends and gets shot through the head - learned behavior ) 

Later, he tells them point blank he doesn’t want to be a part of this. He pours his heart out and says, you know, I know what you’re doing and I don’t want to stop you but I can’t become this. But I think Scott and Logan have both decided that if the X-Force is going to exist, they need a healer to patch them up. Since Angel’s gone all Archangel. He gets pulled along on the mission and then ultimately stays because he feels like he has to.

They have him put the tumor in Vanisher’s head and he’s not happy about that. He really didn’t want to but they had him do it, and sure he had fun with it, but he’s also aware that he put a fucking tumor in another living person’s brain. Because he hates this side of his powers and this isn’t a ‘you need to face your darkness to control it’ kind of thing, it’s ‘you use them and you’re embracing something horrific’ and he knows and and tries to tell them to absolute dead silence.

When he kills Kevin that’s his point of no return. He couldn’t heal – and suddenly then they’re fine with him not wanting to be involved and, ultimately, dropping off the map without a word. They make no effort to look for him and don’t seem to care where he is. To Josh, that’s pretty much confirmation that he was only good so long as he could heal. And it gives him such a terrible complex that when the M-Pox hits, he goes into hiding again because he can’t fix it and has a crisis.

He doesn’t know if he hates Logan or not. All he knows is he doesn’t feel like he was ever a person to any of them, Logan especially. He feels more like a tool that was used up and discarded than a teammate or a student whose life and future was valuable. And as a result he internalized a lot of the lessons they taught him by example. He gets into a lot of meaningless physical relationships to try to drown out the noise and guilt in his head, he uses his powers to hurt people and to his own benefit, and then has periods of just not knowing what the hell to do with himself so he does charity work or goes deeper into hiding. He’s fundamentally broken in so many ways because he was never taught proper coping mechanisms, let alone self-care.

( and in my headcanon he found the very basis of schism laughable because he doesn’t think either scott or logan gave two shits about him and there they are fighting over who is better suited to lead and teach mutant kind? )

But he also just desperately wants someone to acknowledge that he did go through something awful and it hurt him in a way he doesn’t think can ever be fixed. He is now one of the most powerful mutants in existence and is also one of the most lost and confused ones.  The entire reason he’s signing up for the Brotherhood Magneto is because Erik treated him like a person, even if it was at Monet’s behest, and his time on the X-Force taught him that killing absolutely a-okay and necessary for the cause. He knows he’s still just a valuable tool to him, but he actually spoke to him and asked him where he wanted to go instead of just pushing him at something that needed to be done with the expectation that he would do it.

He resents and despises Logan in equal measure to how much he admired and cared about him and just wanted to be treated as someone worth teaching and protecting. But if anyone treats him like a kid he lashes out, because he’s not a child anymore and wasn’t afforded the luxury of being treated like one long before that became necessary.

I think all in all what he wants is for someone to guide him and he’s just starting to hate everyone who expected things of him without giving him anything in return. He wants to be acknowledged but he also wants to hurt them the same way he was hurt, but then doesn’t because that’s such a terrible thing to think. He wants someone to tell him what to do but he also wants to be asked. He wants to be thanked at the bare minimum, and apologized to in the most desperate and sad way. He wants a father figure but he also wants to be treated as an equal.

the budget for that movie went to the one spidey suit, garfield’s gel for his hair, and the “good cg” of the lizard

Hey, at least his cg 

looked better than THIS

“They’ve gotta stop burying their dead.” 

He’s hardly intimidating. Hands shoved in hoodie pockets, slouching over, Josh looks no different from the child that he was when he’d tagged along at the heels of the older X-Men. Desperate to prove himself, to be worth something, only to be used up at every opportunity. 

Now here he is. There Logan is. Alive. He wonders absently how long it’ll be before they rip away everything Laura’s worked so hard to earn - before he decides he doesn’t really give a damn because she’s no better than the rest of them. And the only reason he’s here is because he wanted to see it with his own two eyes. He wanted definitive proof.

And because he’s not scared. Wolverine isn’t an easy man to track (not by a longshot, especially with whatever is going on with him right now) but no Brotherhood or x-men is going to tell him to wait for their orders. He’s over that part of his life.

He knew this day was coming.

Every other night he would wake miles from home. Feet aching, heart thrumming, mind racing as the former mutant homeland called to him like a siren. There were good things - oh, always good things. An entire hospice ward was cured of all their ailments, a miracle from heaven the news said. The recently deceased staggered out of coffins and into funeral parlors, their bodies restored to working order regardless of what had been done before.

Alive.

Healthy. 

Miracles.

But the news never focuses on the good. There’s a path illness and destruction ravaging the American costline, and it’s all left by one boy. One boy who rowed himself to his own grave, one boy who never wanted to be this.

Josh isn’t so much a boy anymore. He’s twenty-one as of three days ago (though he’s unsure if he should count it, he’s been dead or comatose so often that he’s lost at least a year of his life) and life had stopped being kind the moment he’d first lain hands on someone to heal them. He’s equal parts mercy and vengeance, the two clashing together so often and so hard that it leaves him muddled and confused.

He should have gotten help well before this.

He should never have been left to wander the streets.

He’d known the Avengers would do something. The school, too. One or the other - they’d be racing to take him out, to deal with this because people were no longer people in their eyes. He’d been there for those meetings once, one hand covering his gashed throat as he tried to mend it, spent from fixing everyone else in the room but unable to sleep because they might need him for something else.  He remembered wishing desperately that his powers had been for something else. How hard it was watching the adults all talk about him like he wasn’t there, make plans for him like he wasn’t a person, all the while feeling like a burnt out bulb they refused to retire.

He just wanted to feel like a person again.

Wolverine hands him a beer and he knows what this is. Some kind of peace treaty, less for him and more for the older mutant trying to come to terms with what he was about to do. Ending things the easy way, snuffing out someone else’s life because at the end of the day, he would go on and they would not. He doesn’t even have the energy to get angry about it, just accepts the drink from the man whose here to end him. Instead he stares into the depths of the small fire he’d made, feeling none of it’s warmth as his insides grow cold.

( wasn’t it enough that he’d gotten away? wasn’t it enough that he’d found a place no one would bother him?

wasn’t it enough that he wanted to live? )

“I never wanted to be on the X-Force,” he says finally, his voice catching on the words. It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair that he’d seen all this coming and had tried so hard to stop it.”  “I... I begged you not to put me on it. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”

His eyes lift. Void of color, empty since the first time he’d crawled his way back from the dead. The first time he felt the terrible pain of resurrection, the first time someone he’d loved like family had left him behind because he wasn’t worth saving. His cheeks are wet, tears of frustration trailing down golden skin, leaving black streaks in their wake. There’s no anger, only a grim acceptance and the fear of death sitting not two feet away from him.

He won’t get up this time.

They won’t bury his body.

He doesn’t want to think about what will happen to it. Only they’ll find a way to extract his secrets, he’ll continue to be of use to them after he’s dead, and then and only then will they truly be happy with what he has to offer.

Because then he won’t be a person. He’ll be a thing. A cold, dead, useful thing.

“Why didn’t anyone try to help me? Why does everyone go out of their way to save you,” Josh draws in a shuddering breath, dropping the can and burying his face in his knees. Men aren’t supposed to cry, this is a show of weakness and he wonders if that confirms that he’s unfit to live.

“ in my defense, i have none, for never leaving well enough alone. ”