Saturday, 14 June 2025, 07:47, Garage — Xavier's Mansion

The carburetor was a stubborn bitch. Three days now he'd been coaxing it—pulling it apart, cleaning the jets with a wire brush that shed copper filings onto the concrete floor, putting it back together only to hear that same cough when he kicked the engine over. Like something with a hairball lodged deep.

Coffee sat on the workbench in a chipped mug with the Institute crest half-worn off. Cold. Had been cold for—he glanced at the window. Twenty minutes? Forty? The light had shifted, that was all he knew. Early summer pressing against the glass, the kind of heat that made the garage air thick with oil and old rubber and the particular smell of concrete that never fully dried this deep in the building.

His hands moved without asking his brain. Wrench. Socket. Rag to wipe the grease that kept beading on the housing. Black worked into every line of his knuckles, under his nails where it would stay until he took a wire brush to them later and even then not fully. The henley was three days old, sleeves shoved past his elbows, and there was a smear of something dark along his forearm that might have been oil or might have been from yesterday's Danger Room session—he hadn't checked.

The mansion breathed around him. Not metaphorically. The old building had a pulse—furnace cycling on and off like something settling into sleep, pipes groaning somewhere in the walls, the faint vibration of footsteps on floors two stories up where the others were moving through their mornings. A door closing. Water running. The building settling into itself the way old buildings do, full of the weight of everyone who lived inside it.

He didn't mind it. Most mornings.

The phone buzzed on the workbench beside the dead coffee. Once. Twice. Then stopped.

Logan didn't look at it. The wrench turned, quarter-inch, and he felt the bolt seat into place with a satisfaction that was small and physical and entirely his own. The phone could wait. Whatever it said could wait. Some mornings he needed five more minutes of being nobody in particular—a man with a broken carburetor and cold coffee and the specific weight of his own body in a chair that knew him.

It buzzed again.

Shit.

He set the wrench down. Slow, deliberate, the way he did everything when he was deciding whether to engage with the world or not. Wiped his hands on the rag tucked into his back pocket—pointless, the grease was permanent at this point—and picked up the phone.

Charles.

Not a text. A notification from the mansion's internal system, which meant Charles wanted him in the office. Not an emergency—those came with alarms and the particular quality of silence that meant everyone in the building had stopped moving at once. This was something else. A summons in the old sense of the word. Come when you can. But come.

He looked at the Harley. The carburetor glistened with fresh oil, patient as a dog waiting for a walk.

"Alright," he said to no one. The garage didn't answer.

He pushed himself up from the stool—knees protesting, back stiff from hunching over the engine, the particular complaint of a body that healed everything except the wear of decades—and headed for the door. The mansion's corridors would be cool this time of morning, the stone holding yesterday's air conditioning like a cave holds water. He'd walk slow because he always walked slow when Charles called, because urgency was a gift and Logan didn't give those away for free.

The door to the garage opened onto the east wing hallway. Somewhere above him, a shower turned off. Footsteps—heavier than a resident's, probably Piotr moving through his morning with that particular silence a man that size learned early.

The professor's office was on the second floor. Logan took the stairs.