Oblivion
by
Dee



DISCLAIMER: No ownership. No money. No nothing.

NOTES: Written originally for another brilliant Kate inspiration - Soul Kitchen (http://soulkitchen.dymphna.net/). This gave me a great opportunity to get down in words a concept of Wolverine that's been swirling around in my skull for quite a long time now.




He can't remember waking up,
So he refuses to believe that he ever was asleep
And he's exhausted.

- Something for Kate, "Feeding the birds and hoping for something in return"



When it got bad - which was more frequently these days - he found a bar, a cage, a fight. Trying to find oblivion in the bite of the whiskey, the sharp slug of pain, the cleansing surge of adrenaline.

It never came, but he kept looking anyway. There was nothing else to do.

It wasn't not knowing. It was the things he did know, the things he did remember, even if only partially, in flashes and glimpses and nightmares woken from sweating and panicked. Sleep was supposed to be free of memories, but his waited there, lurked in darkness, and when he couldn't face them any more he'd try to run the only way he could conceive of. Sometimes he went days without sleeping. A healing factor didn't help with sleep deprivation, though, and soon the memories started coming to find him, walking beside him in broad daylight.

Even the Wolverine, especially the Wolverine, knew when he was beaten. He couldn't escape the memories, couldn't find oblivion. That was all he wanted. He didn't want memories, he didn't want a past, he didn't want a cause or a reason or fucking redemption. He just wanted to be unaware. Blank, black, nothing. He knew it was there. He'd kept pushing, spiralling downwards, reaching for it, aching for it. But it slipped through his fingers, eluded him.

Left him hanging on a thread, living in jagged rasps at the end, at the bottom, on the verge of breaking, except there was nowhere to break to, nothing to break into, and maybe that was all that was holding him together. He'd tried everything, hoping for the one thing that would trigger the blissfull emptiness. He'd never known it, had lived so long without it, wanting it, that he'd become used to the bitter taste of desire unfulfilled, the feel of urgency inside his bones, more a part of him than adamantium.

One day. One day he'd find it. Oblivion. Peace.

He knocked back the whiskey, and turned to the cage, to the fight, to the search.



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