[OOC] App to theposthumans
Player Name: Kathrine
Personal LJ: sp_kathrine
E-mail: spkathrine@gmail.com
AIM: N/A
Other characters currently in-game: None
Who referred you to the game?: Several people! Particularly Kim (Dick Grayson).
Character Name: Laura Kinney/X-23
Canon source: Marvel Comics (up through X-Force)
Personality:
For most of her life, she didn’t have a name. For most of her life, she wasn’t a person. She was a weapon. A tool. A killer. She was whatever The Facility wanted her to be. But someone else believed she could be more than that. Someone else who had hurt her just as much as they did, who let them use her, who had created her for them, but in the end saw what few others were willing to see. That Laura could think and feel and that made her real. That person was her mother, Sarah Kinney-the woman who created a female clone of Weapon X and carried the fetus in her own womb, and even gave birth to her. Sarah was not the first person to see worth in Laura, but she was the one who gave her the chance she needed to break free from The Facility and attempt a life not bound by being a killer for hire.
For most of her life she was X-23 and even to this day she responds to it. Her mother gave her the name Laura, but so many people don’t even bother to remember it and call her “X-23” or “X.” Laura doesn’t like it usually (unless she’s on a mission and it’s more practical to not use her real name), but she doesn’t know how to express her feelings and so she doesn’t. Instead, she has accepted it because she has been called those names for as long as she can remember. She was taught how to fake emotions, to cry on cue, to make herself look weak, vulnerable, pitiful, seductive, and as unassuming as any girl her age can be. But when she tries to show her own true feelings, Laura is disconnected.
Extreme emotions are confusing and uncomfortable for her and she deals with them by cutting into her arm with one of her claws, because feeling the pain helps her to focus and look at it from a logical, distant perspective. She did this even as a young child because she was so used to others inflicting pain on her, that doing it to herself became one of the few ways she could clear her mind. Because of her healing factor, the cuts should heal fast, but Laura’s healing is affected by her emotional and mental state-allowing the cuts she inflicts on herself to linger and scab over before they heal completely. So while many people believe her stoic demeanor means that she doesn’t feel, it’s that Laura doesn’t know how to handle it when she feels “too much” and often cuts herself off from her emotions until she can figure out a way of expressing or repressing them.
This doesn’t mean that she cannot think for herself. Laura often feels conflicted, but she’s been so conditioned to follow orders that she cannot help herself. The orders-the mission-become all-consuming to her. Even if she doesn’t understand why, she locks away her feelings and focuses on accomplishing the goal set before her. Still, she has her own opinions and tastes for things. She enjoys gothic, dark clothing and is used to bland or greasy foods, so when she eats something spicy or flavorful, she takes the time to enjoy it. She isn’t asked what her likes or dislikes are very often, so when someone asks her opinion on something that isn’t a fight, she isn’t always sure how to respond-whether they want the truth or something to make them feel validated in their own opinions. She tends to come across as blunt, stoic, and honest even when she’s missing the point of a joke or sarcasm.
Laura no longer wants to be a killer, but she’s still trying to figure out what that means for her. She’s been an assassin since she was eleven years old-and trained to be one since she was old enough to walk-killing is something she knows as well as the claws in her hands and feet. Even when she tries to distance herself from that past, she knows that it will follow her wherever she goes. It’s a part of her. It eats her up inside. Where before she could dissociate herself to the point that each kill was only a picture, a name, a mission, now she looks back at all of them and feels remorse, shame. It pushed her to the point that she tracked down the man she had been cloned from and was willing to kill him and herself because she believed the world would be a better place with weapons like them dead.
Laura is someone who does not know how to live without some kind of structure in her life. When left to her own devices she drifts, wandering from place to place, unsure of her purpose or direction-such as when she left the X-men and wandered for weeks before ended up back in San Francisco where her cousin Megan and Aunt Debbie used to live. When she had been debating whether or not to seek out Logan a second time, she first chose to work for a pimp and became a prostitute just because it provided order in her life-someone who would tell her what to do and how to live. The fact that she chose that life for herself shows that she will search out structure and order even in places others would judge her for it.
Despite wanting to live her life as a normal mutant (as normal as being a mutant can be), Laura also has to deal with the burden of wondering whether or not she has the right to exist. As a clone of Logan (also known as Wolverine of the X-men), there are many people who will never see her as a real person. Logan is not one of them and although not even he can fully relate to her, he tries to show understanding for her situation and the journey she is undertaking. His support allows her to push on and try to make something of a life for herself. She first went to the Xavier Institute and joined the X-men filled distrust and fear of rejection. So she chose to test them by acting out, behaving like a feral child and barely speaking outside of grunts and growls. Because of her obvious “otherness” even in this group she was found different, hard to get close to. Her actions became a self-fulfilling prophecy and she left them feeling as if she would never belong.
But Logan refused to accept that and asked her to return and try honestly. And she did. She made friends, fought beside allies, made enemies, and still found that some people would not treat her the way she so dearly wished-like her life mattered. If someone else did not tell her that her life meant something, Laura could not believe it did. She was still a tool, only this time she was choosing who she would be a weapon for. And she chose the New X-men, these teens who were just like her only nothing like her at all. These people who were suffering and needed her. She went to them because Logan told her to, but also because she needed to.
Still, she lives with the fear that she’ll never truly be free of her past. The Facility hunts her and other organizations as well. They call her the perfect weapon, which only adds to her belief that she can never be more than that while she’s alive. Her relationship with Logan shows how deeply she wants to belong. She is protective of him, defensive of anyone or anything that might appear like she’s going against him unless she believes it the only way to do things. His opinion matters to her more than anyone else’s, to the point that if he were to tell her to kill herself, she would do it. Not because it is an order-orders being something she still is conditioned to obey and help her feel structured, grounded-but because he’s Logan and she trusts him implicitly. He is the closest thing she has to a father or a sibling, and Logan himself considers her family.
Her desire to connect with others is so strong that she attached herself to the New X-men early on, to the point she was willing to replace Sooraya (aka Dust) when she believed her to be going into a trap only days after having met her. She also found herself fascinated by Julian (aka Hellion), to the point that she protected him in much the same manner she did Logan, and even accepted verbal abuse from him on more than one occasion. She also was willing to hunt down The Facility alone after they kidnapped Cessily (aka Mercury), because she felt responsible for her being captured and used by them. In many ways, Laura will always see any harm that comes to someone she knows as being her fault, whether because it was due to her knowing them putting them in harm’s way or her failure to prevent it.
The problem here is that despite being “free” physically, Laura is still chained in her mind. As soon as Scott Summers asked her to a part of X-Force, she agreed. Because X-Force would be doing what the normal X-men couldn’t do. Taking out the threats X-men would not and could not touch. And because has only spent a few months with the X-men learning about being her own person, it’s so easy to fall back into that expected mindset-to be a killer focused totally on her mission. She is good at killing and in X-Force she believes that killing actually makes a difference. She doesn’t see how great a step back she’s taking in doing so because she still knows she doesn’t want to kill anymore, but killing is becoming easy again, commonplace. But she’ll do what she has to in order to protect the people she cares about, even if that means being nothing more than a killer.
Laura still has a long way to go before she can accept herself for herself, as even now she searches for validation of her existence in others. How useful she is, how many lives she saves over how many she has killed. She knows there may never come a day when she will never have to kill again, but slowly she’s coming to realize that it is not killing that makes her a killer, nor a lack of killing that will make her human. She’s trying to figure out how to create a balance in her life that allows her to feel and reach out to people without putting them in danger just by being near them. She knows that she could be used against anyone she cares about just by being exposed to the trigger scent that sends her into an animalistic rage where she slaughters everything around her-just as she was used against her own mother.
When in the field, she’s efficient and practical, looking at missions from a logical, impartial, and highly intelligent perspective, but when pushed she becomes reckless and shows an extreme lack of care for her own well beeing. Not because she wishes to die (she herself isn’t sure whether she is suicidal), but because Laura sees almost every other person in the world as more valuable than she is and the friends she has made are doubly so. If she dies, then nothing is lost, so putting her life on the line time and time again-with the benefit of also knowing she is not easy to kill, given how advanced her healing factor is-is one of the easiest things she can do. She will sacrifice herself a thousand times over for the people she cares about-such as putting her life on the line against Nimrod and almost dying in order to deactivate it, or throwing herself into an huge drum of acid to destroy the Legacy Virus-and feel accomplished at the end of the day, even if they never know she’s done so.
History: History on Marvel Wiki (I will be taking her from during her time on X-Force after she’s been recaptured by the Facility and has had her arm cut off).
Strengths:
Laura is a clone of Wolverine (although more accurately his twin), meaning that she has all of his abilities, although some are more developed than others. Because her mutant gene was activated so early through radiation, some of her senses are actually more enhanced than his, such as her sense of smell that is capable of tracking people miles away and even recognizing a person’s change in emotion through scent alone. She is physically stronger than the average human, faster, superior eyesight, superhuman agility and stamina, and is immune to almost any foreign chemical or disease that comes into contact with her.
She also has superhuman regenerative abilities, to the point that she can have limbs cut off and they will grow back. Laura has two claws in each hand and one in each foot that were removed, coated with adamantium and then put back in place. Because of this, they are somewhat detachable, although they have never accidentally come out during a fight. Her healing factor also will extend her life, slowing down the aging process after a certain point. Her healing and training also has led her into being able to endure extreme torture with little more than a grunt or gritting her teeth.
Laura was raised as a weapon in deep black ops training. She can think over a hundred different ways to completely a mission, how to kill someone in twenty ways in less than sixty seconds, knows how to fake different personalities so well that people do not notice they aren’t the real her, and while she primarily uses her own body as her main weapon, she’s also been trained to use a large variety of knives, guns, and explosives. She knows how to hack computer systems and is extremely intelligent and well-read for her age, as her training began as early as birth for her.
Weaknesses: Laura’s training has left her crippled emotionally and mentally. She has problems making big decisions on her own, will defer to someone else with higher authority immediately and will follow any and all orders they give her. She doesn’t know how to handle extreme emotions, to the point that she cuts herself with her claws in order to clear her mind and repress them. She also has a conditioned weakness to what is called the Trigger Scent. If she smells it, she goes into a blind bloodlust, having to kill everything and everyone that might be wearing the scent. Once the target is dead or the scent is washed away she can come back to her own senses, and at times she can even break through the control of the scent, but it doesn’t happen often.
Preferred drop-in point: Seattle
What are some of your plans for this character in their new environment? I want Laura to break away from her role as a “killer,” but not in a way that’s too simple. In a world where those she defers to aren’t around to tell her what to do, she’ll have to think for herself and decide how she wants to proceed. Laura will never be able to stop killing completely, but I want her to accept that being capable of killing doesn’t mean that’s all she’s capable of.
First Person Journal Sample:
[The video cuts on to a girl staring intently at the screen, face flecked with something dark and dirty-it’s hard to tell what it is from the shadowed lighting as she holds the PDA away from her-as if she does not care to clean herself up. She does not.] This is another future. Not the only one.
[She pauses for a moment, eyes shifting away as if in debate with herself and then she returns them to the screen.] Are there X-men here? Respond. [another pause, brief] Agent Morales. If you are here, respond.
[She shifts and the video moves, just enough to see her shoulders leading down to her arms…or arm. A bloody stump close to the shoulder blade represents where her other should be, but she doesn’t appear to acknowledge it.] Location: Seattle, Washington. Status: Still functional. Regeneration: 3 hours. Requesting someone with surgical experience to remove bone.
Third Person Sample:
(Canon point: X-Force)
She did not understand why he looked at her that way. They disagreed more than once, their temperaments clashing, but she wanted to understand. He had brought her here. He had told her that she should return, make a life with the X-men. But it had started falling apart even before she arrived.
Still, she wanted to protect them-these new ties she had, these people who called her “friend,” even though she was just as much a threat to them as any Purifier-perhaps more of one. She was a threat, but they had let her stay. She was a killer, but they did not see her as one. They did not know her-did not know what she had done in her life-but they made her feel less damaged, less unclean. Wolverine brought her here for them and she would protect them.
When Cyclops had told her about X-Force, she could not say no. It was a mission, a purpose, a way to protect them in the way she best could. She was a killer. A loaded weapon that only needed to be pointed at a target. Following his orders, obeying the mission, was the easiest thing she did, because the mission became everything, just as it had been before. It was like the feel of her claws piercing out through her hands, familiar and comfortable, even through the pain and the smell of her blood that came every time.
But Logan did not want her there and she could smell the disagreement on him. He did not understand. She kept trying his way. She did as he asked and live life a different way, but she could not. If she were to protect the lives of those he had sent her to, she had to do it the only way she could. Her was like her, and yet so different. She had failed her mission, but he did not care anything for that. All he cared for was the woman, Rahne Sinclair.
His eyes were full of anger and…hate? Rejection? She did not know. His scent was hot, filled with disgust. She did not move as he threw her up against the tree, even as everything in her screamed to defend. She could not. Not against him.
“Sinclair is more important you or me. Our lives mean nothing compared to hers!”
The words echoed in her ears even after he had gone. His actions left her feeling hollowed out, as if the pit inside her had grown and was feasting on everything else until there would be nothing left of her. She did not understand and yet she knew exactly what Logan had meant.
And when she returned to see the blood, the fire, the beast that was Rahne Sinclair clutching Angel’s wings in her jaws, Logan’s words were all she could hear. Laura had a mission. She had a duty. Angel and Elixir were injured and all she could hear was Logan’s words.
When the claws struck, she did not try to stop them.
Personal LJ: sp_kathrine
E-mail: spkathrine@gmail.com
AIM: N/A
Other characters currently in-game: None
Who referred you to the game?: Several people! Particularly Kim (Dick Grayson).
Character Name: Laura Kinney/X-23
Canon source: Marvel Comics (up through X-Force)
Personality:
For most of her life, she didn’t have a name. For most of her life, she wasn’t a person. She was a weapon. A tool. A killer. She was whatever The Facility wanted her to be. But someone else believed she could be more than that. Someone else who had hurt her just as much as they did, who let them use her, who had created her for them, but in the end saw what few others were willing to see. That Laura could think and feel and that made her real. That person was her mother, Sarah Kinney-the woman who created a female clone of Weapon X and carried the fetus in her own womb, and even gave birth to her. Sarah was not the first person to see worth in Laura, but she was the one who gave her the chance she needed to break free from The Facility and attempt a life not bound by being a killer for hire.
For most of her life she was X-23 and even to this day she responds to it. Her mother gave her the name Laura, but so many people don’t even bother to remember it and call her “X-23” or “X.” Laura doesn’t like it usually (unless she’s on a mission and it’s more practical to not use her real name), but she doesn’t know how to express her feelings and so she doesn’t. Instead, she has accepted it because she has been called those names for as long as she can remember. She was taught how to fake emotions, to cry on cue, to make herself look weak, vulnerable, pitiful, seductive, and as unassuming as any girl her age can be. But when she tries to show her own true feelings, Laura is disconnected.
Extreme emotions are confusing and uncomfortable for her and she deals with them by cutting into her arm with one of her claws, because feeling the pain helps her to focus and look at it from a logical, distant perspective. She did this even as a young child because she was so used to others inflicting pain on her, that doing it to herself became one of the few ways she could clear her mind. Because of her healing factor, the cuts should heal fast, but Laura’s healing is affected by her emotional and mental state-allowing the cuts she inflicts on herself to linger and scab over before they heal completely. So while many people believe her stoic demeanor means that she doesn’t feel, it’s that Laura doesn’t know how to handle it when she feels “too much” and often cuts herself off from her emotions until she can figure out a way of expressing or repressing them.
This doesn’t mean that she cannot think for herself. Laura often feels conflicted, but she’s been so conditioned to follow orders that she cannot help herself. The orders-the mission-become all-consuming to her. Even if she doesn’t understand why, she locks away her feelings and focuses on accomplishing the goal set before her. Still, she has her own opinions and tastes for things. She enjoys gothic, dark clothing and is used to bland or greasy foods, so when she eats something spicy or flavorful, she takes the time to enjoy it. She isn’t asked what her likes or dislikes are very often, so when someone asks her opinion on something that isn’t a fight, she isn’t always sure how to respond-whether they want the truth or something to make them feel validated in their own opinions. She tends to come across as blunt, stoic, and honest even when she’s missing the point of a joke or sarcasm.
Laura no longer wants to be a killer, but she’s still trying to figure out what that means for her. She’s been an assassin since she was eleven years old-and trained to be one since she was old enough to walk-killing is something she knows as well as the claws in her hands and feet. Even when she tries to distance herself from that past, she knows that it will follow her wherever she goes. It’s a part of her. It eats her up inside. Where before she could dissociate herself to the point that each kill was only a picture, a name, a mission, now she looks back at all of them and feels remorse, shame. It pushed her to the point that she tracked down the man she had been cloned from and was willing to kill him and herself because she believed the world would be a better place with weapons like them dead.
Laura is someone who does not know how to live without some kind of structure in her life. When left to her own devices she drifts, wandering from place to place, unsure of her purpose or direction-such as when she left the X-men and wandered for weeks before ended up back in San Francisco where her cousin Megan and Aunt Debbie used to live. When she had been debating whether or not to seek out Logan a second time, she first chose to work for a pimp and became a prostitute just because it provided order in her life-someone who would tell her what to do and how to live. The fact that she chose that life for herself shows that she will search out structure and order even in places others would judge her for it.
Despite wanting to live her life as a normal mutant (as normal as being a mutant can be), Laura also has to deal with the burden of wondering whether or not she has the right to exist. As a clone of Logan (also known as Wolverine of the X-men), there are many people who will never see her as a real person. Logan is not one of them and although not even he can fully relate to her, he tries to show understanding for her situation and the journey she is undertaking. His support allows her to push on and try to make something of a life for herself. She first went to the Xavier Institute and joined the X-men filled distrust and fear of rejection. So she chose to test them by acting out, behaving like a feral child and barely speaking outside of grunts and growls. Because of her obvious “otherness” even in this group she was found different, hard to get close to. Her actions became a self-fulfilling prophecy and she left them feeling as if she would never belong.
But Logan refused to accept that and asked her to return and try honestly. And she did. She made friends, fought beside allies, made enemies, and still found that some people would not treat her the way she so dearly wished-like her life mattered. If someone else did not tell her that her life meant something, Laura could not believe it did. She was still a tool, only this time she was choosing who she would be a weapon for. And she chose the New X-men, these teens who were just like her only nothing like her at all. These people who were suffering and needed her. She went to them because Logan told her to, but also because she needed to.
Still, she lives with the fear that she’ll never truly be free of her past. The Facility hunts her and other organizations as well. They call her the perfect weapon, which only adds to her belief that she can never be more than that while she’s alive. Her relationship with Logan shows how deeply she wants to belong. She is protective of him, defensive of anyone or anything that might appear like she’s going against him unless she believes it the only way to do things. His opinion matters to her more than anyone else’s, to the point that if he were to tell her to kill herself, she would do it. Not because it is an order-orders being something she still is conditioned to obey and help her feel structured, grounded-but because he’s Logan and she trusts him implicitly. He is the closest thing she has to a father or a sibling, and Logan himself considers her family.
Her desire to connect with others is so strong that she attached herself to the New X-men early on, to the point she was willing to replace Sooraya (aka Dust) when she believed her to be going into a trap only days after having met her. She also found herself fascinated by Julian (aka Hellion), to the point that she protected him in much the same manner she did Logan, and even accepted verbal abuse from him on more than one occasion. She also was willing to hunt down The Facility alone after they kidnapped Cessily (aka Mercury), because she felt responsible for her being captured and used by them. In many ways, Laura will always see any harm that comes to someone she knows as being her fault, whether because it was due to her knowing them putting them in harm’s way or her failure to prevent it.
The problem here is that despite being “free” physically, Laura is still chained in her mind. As soon as Scott Summers asked her to a part of X-Force, she agreed. Because X-Force would be doing what the normal X-men couldn’t do. Taking out the threats X-men would not and could not touch. And because has only spent a few months with the X-men learning about being her own person, it’s so easy to fall back into that expected mindset-to be a killer focused totally on her mission. She is good at killing and in X-Force she believes that killing actually makes a difference. She doesn’t see how great a step back she’s taking in doing so because she still knows she doesn’t want to kill anymore, but killing is becoming easy again, commonplace. But she’ll do what she has to in order to protect the people she cares about, even if that means being nothing more than a killer.
Laura still has a long way to go before she can accept herself for herself, as even now she searches for validation of her existence in others. How useful she is, how many lives she saves over how many she has killed. She knows there may never come a day when she will never have to kill again, but slowly she’s coming to realize that it is not killing that makes her a killer, nor a lack of killing that will make her human. She’s trying to figure out how to create a balance in her life that allows her to feel and reach out to people without putting them in danger just by being near them. She knows that she could be used against anyone she cares about just by being exposed to the trigger scent that sends her into an animalistic rage where she slaughters everything around her-just as she was used against her own mother.
When in the field, she’s efficient and practical, looking at missions from a logical, impartial, and highly intelligent perspective, but when pushed she becomes reckless and shows an extreme lack of care for her own well beeing. Not because she wishes to die (she herself isn’t sure whether she is suicidal), but because Laura sees almost every other person in the world as more valuable than she is and the friends she has made are doubly so. If she dies, then nothing is lost, so putting her life on the line time and time again-with the benefit of also knowing she is not easy to kill, given how advanced her healing factor is-is one of the easiest things she can do. She will sacrifice herself a thousand times over for the people she cares about-such as putting her life on the line against Nimrod and almost dying in order to deactivate it, or throwing herself into an huge drum of acid to destroy the Legacy Virus-and feel accomplished at the end of the day, even if they never know she’s done so.
History: History on Marvel Wiki (I will be taking her from during her time on X-Force after she’s been recaptured by the Facility and has had her arm cut off).
Strengths:
Laura is a clone of Wolverine (although more accurately his twin), meaning that she has all of his abilities, although some are more developed than others. Because her mutant gene was activated so early through radiation, some of her senses are actually more enhanced than his, such as her sense of smell that is capable of tracking people miles away and even recognizing a person’s change in emotion through scent alone. She is physically stronger than the average human, faster, superior eyesight, superhuman agility and stamina, and is immune to almost any foreign chemical or disease that comes into contact with her.
She also has superhuman regenerative abilities, to the point that she can have limbs cut off and they will grow back. Laura has two claws in each hand and one in each foot that were removed, coated with adamantium and then put back in place. Because of this, they are somewhat detachable, although they have never accidentally come out during a fight. Her healing factor also will extend her life, slowing down the aging process after a certain point. Her healing and training also has led her into being able to endure extreme torture with little more than a grunt or gritting her teeth.
Laura was raised as a weapon in deep black ops training. She can think over a hundred different ways to completely a mission, how to kill someone in twenty ways in less than sixty seconds, knows how to fake different personalities so well that people do not notice they aren’t the real her, and while she primarily uses her own body as her main weapon, she’s also been trained to use a large variety of knives, guns, and explosives. She knows how to hack computer systems and is extremely intelligent and well-read for her age, as her training began as early as birth for her.
Weaknesses: Laura’s training has left her crippled emotionally and mentally. She has problems making big decisions on her own, will defer to someone else with higher authority immediately and will follow any and all orders they give her. She doesn’t know how to handle extreme emotions, to the point that she cuts herself with her claws in order to clear her mind and repress them. She also has a conditioned weakness to what is called the Trigger Scent. If she smells it, she goes into a blind bloodlust, having to kill everything and everyone that might be wearing the scent. Once the target is dead or the scent is washed away she can come back to her own senses, and at times she can even break through the control of the scent, but it doesn’t happen often.
Preferred drop-in point: Seattle
What are some of your plans for this character in their new environment? I want Laura to break away from her role as a “killer,” but not in a way that’s too simple. In a world where those she defers to aren’t around to tell her what to do, she’ll have to think for herself and decide how she wants to proceed. Laura will never be able to stop killing completely, but I want her to accept that being capable of killing doesn’t mean that’s all she’s capable of.
First Person Journal Sample:
[The video cuts on to a girl staring intently at the screen, face flecked with something dark and dirty-it’s hard to tell what it is from the shadowed lighting as she holds the PDA away from her-as if she does not care to clean herself up. She does not.] This is another future. Not the only one.
[She pauses for a moment, eyes shifting away as if in debate with herself and then she returns them to the screen.] Are there X-men here? Respond. [another pause, brief] Agent Morales. If you are here, respond.
[She shifts and the video moves, just enough to see her shoulders leading down to her arms…or arm. A bloody stump close to the shoulder blade represents where her other should be, but she doesn’t appear to acknowledge it.] Location: Seattle, Washington. Status: Still functional. Regeneration: 3 hours. Requesting someone with surgical experience to remove bone.
Third Person Sample:
(Canon point: X-Force)
She did not understand why he looked at her that way. They disagreed more than once, their temperaments clashing, but she wanted to understand. He had brought her here. He had told her that she should return, make a life with the X-men. But it had started falling apart even before she arrived.
Still, she wanted to protect them-these new ties she had, these people who called her “friend,” even though she was just as much a threat to them as any Purifier-perhaps more of one. She was a threat, but they had let her stay. She was a killer, but they did not see her as one. They did not know her-did not know what she had done in her life-but they made her feel less damaged, less unclean. Wolverine brought her here for them and she would protect them.
When Cyclops had told her about X-Force, she could not say no. It was a mission, a purpose, a way to protect them in the way she best could. She was a killer. A loaded weapon that only needed to be pointed at a target. Following his orders, obeying the mission, was the easiest thing she did, because the mission became everything, just as it had been before. It was like the feel of her claws piercing out through her hands, familiar and comfortable, even through the pain and the smell of her blood that came every time.
But Logan did not want her there and she could smell the disagreement on him. He did not understand. She kept trying his way. She did as he asked and live life a different way, but she could not. If she were to protect the lives of those he had sent her to, she had to do it the only way she could. Her was like her, and yet so different. She had failed her mission, but he did not care anything for that. All he cared for was the woman, Rahne Sinclair.
His eyes were full of anger and…hate? Rejection? She did not know. His scent was hot, filled with disgust. She did not move as he threw her up against the tree, even as everything in her screamed to defend. She could not. Not against him.
“Sinclair is more important you or me. Our lives mean nothing compared to hers!”
The words echoed in her ears even after he had gone. His actions left her feeling hollowed out, as if the pit inside her had grown and was feasting on everything else until there would be nothing left of her. She did not understand and yet she knew exactly what Logan had meant.
And when she returned to see the blood, the fire, the beast that was Rahne Sinclair clutching Angel’s wings in her jaws, Logan’s words were all she could hear. Laura had a mission. She had a duty. Angel and Elixir were injured and all she could hear was Logan’s words.
When the claws struck, she did not try to stop them.