What If? Episode 907

Avoiding Bad Beginnings

The incident with the Hulk had been the last straw. Heather and James Hudson had been a Godsend, but Logan knew he wasn't doing them any good just hanging around the way he was. For one thing, he was pretty sure that whatever it was between himself and Heather was starting to drift away from 'friends'. And he didn't want to get in the middle any worse than he already had.

When he'd met the Hudsons, they had just gotten married - and instead of honeymooning like any other couple, they spent the duration - and most of the time since then - trying to make him into more than what he thought he was.

They'd done better by him than he thought he deserved ... and far better than anyone he could remember - not that the list was long there either. But Logan's memory never really was his best attribute.

Recently, Logan had been battered worse from that big green bastard than anything that he could remember - short of the metal fusing to his skeleton, of course.

But he didn't want to think about that. Thinking about that just made him hurt all over. It seemed to start as a migraine and just ... he wasn't going to think about that if he could help it.

He was tired of waiting for Department H to point him at one massive disaster or another. The kind of missions they were sending him on were getting increasingly more and more disturbing and he couldn't shake the feeling that they were trying to test his boundaries. To make matters more interesting, it seemed that Department H knew they were losing his focus.

They even went so far was to offer him the leadership position on what they said was Canada's answer to the Avengers. But outside of not liking how things were going - he really didn't think he had what it took to head them up. A memory-less near animal? No. That wasn't a decent leadership option. That was an obvious baited trap.

Department H had not taken his resignation well. At all. And since he'd left, they had sent several teams out to try and bring him in, but he just wasn't going to let that happen. What had surprised Logan was how quickly the Hudsons had encouraged him to get moving - Mac even went so far as to empty out his wallet and give him all the cash he had on him while Heather encouraged him to empty out his accounts and just go.

So even they knew things weren't kosher with the Department.

All that was over a year ago and he still had nothing real to show for his troubles. Well, nothing more than a beat up old motorcycle that leaked oil badly enough that he had to top it off every time he stopped for gas.

He had enough to keep himself going. And he stopped his traveling and would work when he needed more money. That or Heather seemed to make sure that the card she'd sent him off with had a balance on it ... just in case.

Logan had been riding hard for over a week, still with zip for ideas on where the heck he was headed when he pulled into the little diner on the north side of Omaha. He'd just sat back and scrubbed his hand over his face as the waitress poured up his third cup of coffee. He was trying to will himself into picking a damn destination when a scent hit him that had the hair on the back of his neck standing up.

Cautiously he looked up without picking up his head to see if he recognized the source.

Aside from the waitress and the cook, there was an old man in a booth alone ... a young couple that looked like they were splitting a meal and a milk shake ... a booth full of workmen ... and a tall dark haired guy that he was sure he'd never seen before.

But as the man passed him by on his way to the counter, it was clear that he was indeed the source of the scent that had him concentrating hard not to growl outright. Just like that, his heart ticked up a notch and he found himself nervous.