Title: Last Thoughts of a Shrike
Summary: Yet more interplay between the X-2 events and Wolverine’s thoughts.
Rating: PG
Thanks: To Marco, who makes me write :P and keeps it all goin’!
Disclaimer: Alas, how I do not own these people, this universe. Stan Lee, thou art a good and clever Marvel man. Thou dost deserve to hold the copyrights of these lovely people.

He was stuck as a chaperone again, this time at a zoo for the biology classes. He stood back, self-shunning, as the students crowded around penguin habitats, monkey cages, and reptile exhibits. Nothing particularly interested him on this trip, except for one rather grizzled lone wolverine flashing a dazzling set of teeth and claws. He couldn’t suppress a smug smile.

It would have been right for Jean to be there, giving “mini-lectures” on the variety of fauna. Obviously, she wasn’t. Instead there was Storm, acting like she knew what she was talking about and Kitty giving her insistent corrections. It didn’t feel right at all. Grimacing, he shifted his feet, alternatively smoking a cigar or folding his arms across his broad chest, depending upon outdoor and indoor exhibits. One would think it was just like always.

The bird house was next. Lots of cute flamingoes and parrots and fluffy baby chicks for the girls to faun over. Pathetic. He rolled his eyes again, wondering if he could sneak away to get a hot dog and get some kind of pleasure out of the day. Not that he’d been successful in finding pleasure at all since… well, since everything seemed to happen all at once.

“So this is, uh, a falcon,” Storm indicated with languid enthusiasm.

“It’s a *shrike*, Ms. Munroe,” retorted an exasperated Kitty after glancing at the sign beside the cage window.

A shrike? Well, so then he finally saw one. He knew it was some kind of rapacious bird, but he’d never come across one before. The bird in question suddenly leveled her eyes at his and flipped her wings in what he could have mistaken as a greeting. Those intense, yellow eyes, wanting to stab, to rip, to kill…

It was so like her, the Deathshrike, when she was Stryker’s pawn, a slave to his caprice. Her adamantium talons so lethally poised paralleled the ones of the bird before him and both the girl and the bird seemed so mythically beautiful to him then; well- crafted denizens of death. But, he thought, one was shaped by nature, and one was twisted away from it…

He hadn’t realized his kinship with her until the very end, when she was dying and the fever of Stryker’s mind control left her eyes. True, they both had animal names and unbreakable skeletons to boot, but her dying eyes *smiling* at him… That was when they both found their freedom. She was grateful to die with a clear mind, her thoughts not dictated by any earthly being. And seeing this, the Wolverine fought free of the visage that Stryker had made for him; the cold killer, the bar freak without a life. He decided then, that he didn’t want to be what Stryker said he once was.

But then Jean died and he wanted his old life back. Wanted to fade into the screen of cigar smoke and disappear.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rogue and Bobby trying to sneak off. “Hey kids,” his voice rumbled. They froze. He jerked his head in the direction of the students with a stern look and they followed his meaning. Why should he care if they left and had some fun? That’s what he wanted to do. But one look at those ice white streaks in a sea of brown locks got him thinking again. Heck, he promised, didn’t he? Last thing she needed was a whole head of white hair, he thought. One moment of caring enough to make a promise… But maybe that was the point. *I’ll take care of you.* And he’d meant it. Did he still mean it? He looked back at the shrike, whose eyes were still fixed on him. She gave a little screech and stretched out her wings, nodding her head up and down in an empty movement. He glanced heavenward. *Some kind of way to send a message, eh?* He tossed a yet unlit cigar into a trash can and glanced back at Marie, holding hands with that ice guy, Bobby. Logan let himself smile. “If he ever hurts her I’ll kick his icy butt clear to Mars,” he mumbled to himself.

finis