The bed wasn’t comfortable, but that didn’t matter. He’d slept in worse places. Metal floors. Dirt. The back of a pickup once, with a bullet still in his shoulder. You don’t get picky when your body can heal itself. You just shut your eyes and wait.

But tonight, he wasn’t in pain. Not the kind that bled.

It was quiet. Not the eery silence that follows a fight, or the kind that means something’s coming. Just the one where you can hear your own breathing and know no one’s about to kick down the door. He hated it. And needed it.

Your fingers in his hair were warm. Steady. You didn’t flinch from him. You never had, even when you should’ve. Even when his knuckles were bloodied and he smelled like smoke and everything about him screamed leave. You didn’t.

He wondered if it was because you didn’t know enough, or because you knew exactly what he was and stayed anyway.

That was harder to live with.

Logan stared at the ceiling. It had a crack running through it, like the one in his chest. Deep, and growing. He didn’t know when it started. Japan, maybe. Alkali Lake. Jean. He’d stopped keeping track of the exact count a long time ago, but his bones remembered every war, every mission, every hand he'd had to pull away from.

He’d tried to forget so many things. The harder he tried, the more they stuck. Names. Faces. Screams. There was always something. Always someone he couldn’t save. And now he was here, in a bed that wasn’t his, beside someone who hadn’t given up on him yet. It felt like holding his breath.

“Can’t remember the last time I felt like this,” he said, not meaning to. Didn’t say what this was. Peace? Softness? Someone staying? Didn’t matter. You didn’t ask.

The world outside didn’t care what he felt. It kept grinding forward—gunshots in alleys, mutants disappearing off the grid, kids turning up dead with needle marks in their arms and mutant slurs carved into their skin. He'd seen too much of it. Caused too much of it. Some days, he wished he could just disappear.

But here, now, with your legs tangled in his and your hand resting at the base of his neck, there was no war. No mission calling. Just this.