Bonjour and welcome to my attempt at a proper story. This is a sort of spin-off from my oneshot song-fic Lies of a Septic Mind. The story's quite long so hopefully those of you who like it'll stick with it. And I promise to update often. Brownie Promise! The quote from the Summary is from Firefly.

Love to all the people who reviewed LOASM.

Candyglue: Lol, I get in the mood for angst an awful lot too, can you tell? I'm really glad you liked it! Hope you like this too!

natdrat00: Aw thanks a lot blushes well you get to see more here, I hope you enjoy!

TheVixenDixon: Thank you so much for your kind words. I'm so glad you enjoyed the one-shot. Laura starts off a bit differently from how she is in LOASM and this is kind of her "descent into madness" as it where. I agree with you about the fact that other stories seem to act as if Laura's trauma doesn't matter (not that I'm dissing these stories in any way I actually really like reading them) but in my head I think this would have a profound affect on Laura and that is what I base my characterisation of her on.

j.d: I agree totally not enough X-23 stories on this sight! So here's my attempt to spread the X-23 love!

Lark Lover: Yay! First reviewer! Much love! She's a poor little bunny isn't she? She needs a hug! Desperately!

Erm…quick few things before I start. This is set about five months after Target X. Laura hasn't told Logan or anyone any details of what happened to her while at Hydra, Logan can only guess because of his experience with Weapon X. Deborah Risman is called Sarah Kinney in this ala the comics cos, well, she just is, I'm used to calling her Sarah Kinney so I'll continue doing so. I know I say Laura's fifteen in LOASM but at the start of this she's only fourteen until about chapter four…or five, can't remember which. I've merged the Brotherhood and the Acolytes together. Oh and Zander Rice isn't dead. I think that's it. So on with the story!

Disclaimer: Yo! Mervin the Microwave here! Marvin the refrigerator has contracted whatever Evil Angel's disclaimer has so I'm totally filling in for the both of them. Evil Angel so doesn't own Marvel, Firefly or Lord of the Rings! If she did then Hellion would not be in a coma, Mal and Inara would be together and Angel would be very, very rich!

The Weapon

Logan sprinted hell for leather up the main staircase. He knew the rest were following but he could not hear them. He could hear nothing, see nothing except what was in front of him. He tore down the corridor off to the right every desperate footstep was bringing him closer to the door.

Please, he thought, don't let this be happening! Let her be alright!

Coming to a sliding halt Logan hammered on the girls' bathroom door.

"Laura!" he yelled. He received no answer. Not caring that the others were now beside him, Logan threw his considerable weight against the door. It crashed open, splintering at the hinges, to reveal hell on the other side.

All over the counters and spilling onto the floor were bottles. Little brown bottles of normal everyday painkillers were lined up empty next to each other. The beer that Logan had bought only that afternoon was gone and their bottles lay about the tiled floor. Hypodermic needles lay glinting on the floor next to glass vials that once contained some of the Institutes strongest drugs. Blood lay here and there, not a lot just spatterings of red leading up to the…

"Laura!"

In one movement Logan was across the room and had jumped into the girls' massive bath and dragged the unconscious Laura from its freezing, bloody water.

Hank and Scott lurched forward, took Laura from Logan and lowered her to the floor. She was cold, she was white, and she wasn't breathing.

"Jean, give me a hand here," Hank said, calmer than his eyes gave away. Jean often helped out in the medlab.

Logan stood back as they worked on the seemingly lifeless body of his only daughter.

"No pulse," he heard Hank say.

Hank desperately tried to get her heart pumping again, and Jean tried to force air back into her lungs but she wasn't responding. They had gotten to her too late.

Twenty or so bottles of painkillers, twenty-four bottles of beer and vials upon vials of hard drugs were coursing through her, poisoning her systems and shutting them down. He was facing the very real possibility that not even her healing factor that Logan knew was stronger than his could save her as the minutes crawled by and Laura was still lifeless.

He heard a noise behind him. He tore his eyes away from the scene before him and turned. There in the doorway stood the students. Kitty, Amara, Jubilee and Rahne were in tears and everyone else just looked shell-shocked.

"Is she gonna die?" whispered Rogue.

Logan's chest, he was sure, was about to implode on him.

"Scott," he spluttered to Cyclops who stood half in the bathroom and half out of it, "Scott…get 'em outa here!"

Scott made a jerking movement with his head quite unable to nod as he too stood pale watching the futile attempts to bring Laura back.

"You heard the man!" Scott said, breaking out of his shock. He pushed the students away from the door, Rogue trying to resist but in the end she was dragged away by Scott and Roberto.

"…two…three…four…" Hank counted his compressions to Laura's chest. Logan ran his helpless hands through his hair frustration boiling over.

"Come on, kid!" he cried. Still nothing was happening, Laura was still dead.

Something caught Logan's eye. He looked to his left and saw something he hadn't noticed in his rush to get to Laura. There written in blood which dripped down onto the white counter was one word.

"Sorry."

One Month Earlier.

Through the deserted corridors of the Xavier Institute while all its other residents slept on a lonely figure wandered. She's scoured the whole building looking for any sign of intruders her animal like senses heightened in the silence and the dark pierced only by moonlight but she'd found nothing. She'd checked the security twice and finding it perfectly adequate she now wandered aimlessly.

On the outside she looked a perfectly normal teenage girl. She was small for her fourteen years, short and slender with long black hair and forest eyes that were windows into her soul, but only when she let them be.

Ask her who she was and she'd give you a different answer depending on who you were. Depending on what she viewed you to be. There was no friend or foe with her, just potential. You were either already her enemy or you had the potential to be.

She is the baby who cried alone in the dark for the first few months of life, then stopped when she learnt that no one was ever going to come.

She is the child who knows that monsters under the bed do exist and who looked into their faces as they hurt her day in and day out.

She is the teenager who has ended more lives than she can keep track of.

If you were indeed her enemy then she would tell you that her designation was X-23 the twenty third replica of the original Weapon X and the first success. And that piece of information would be the last you received before sharp adamantium claws would end you.

But if you were not her immediate enemy then she would tell you that her name was Laura. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl she'd been told once. Other people said it suited her but to her it was just a name, still ill-fitting and still jarred when she thought it.

Ask her what she was and she'd frown at you, unleash her claws and tell you to piss off lest she use you as her new pin cushion. But inside she'd know the answer.

I am nothing. I am a clone, a replica of something that already exists. A creation of unnatural science from greedy scientists wanting to try their hand at being God.

Laura herself had just come back into the foyer of the Mansion for the third or fourth time in an hour and sat herself down on the staircase. She folded her arms around her knees and gazed longingly out of the main glass doors. Her line of sight went far across the front lawn and up into the forest that surrounded the Mansion. She'd lived in those woods once and she'd felt, for the first time, that she was free. She hadn't been allowed back there yet. The tight security was as much to keep her in as it was to keep other people out.

She'd tried so many times to go back, but they'd told her, Logan and Professor Xavier, that it wasn't safe for her, not yet, Hydra were still out there, even though Laura had taken out the Supreme Hydra Madame Viper, and they knew as well as she did that they would never let her go. They'd spent too much time and money to let her go.

There were times she felt she'd left one prison for another.

Granted this was a nicer prison, she didn't have to endure the rigorous testing she did at the Facility, she wasn't constantly being watched and the décor was much nicer than the mind-numbingly white walls of Hydra's secret lab. But it was still a prison, there were still walls, still doors with locks, and there was still a security system holding her in. It wouldn't keep her in forever – it couldn't keep her in forever – Logan knew this too, but at the moment Laura's fear and loathing of Hydra made her accept her new prison. It could always be worse. And in her experience if things could be worse, they would get worse. And she wasn't willing to accommodate that.

Still, she missed the woods.

Laura had been here a month now and her nightly ritual hadn't changed. Her healing factor meant she didn't need a lot of sleep to which she was grateful. She didn't like sleeping, it was the time when her concentration and focus faltered and all her demons came out to play. So she cut her sleep to the bare minimum. She didn't need it anyway, but it left her with several boring hours in the dead of night in which to wander.

For a while when she'd first arrived she hadn't known what on earth to do with herself. Never before had she suddenly found herself with so much free time. Normally she'd have been training hard but there was only so much time Logan was willing to give her in the Danger Room. It wasn't that he couldn't keep up with her or indeed that he didn't want her focussing all that pent up energy in a non-lethal direction it was just that she was so good at what she did she kept on breaking everything. The others needed to train too and by the time Laura was done with the Danger Room (by done this meant she was usually forcibly removed) there wasn't an awful lot of it left so this was almost impossible. So now Laura was restricted to only three hours a day. This left her with twenty-one other hours in the day to fill. Four to six of those were filled with necessary sleep. So all in all fifteen to seventeen hours a day were left to her.

The others went to a place called school. Nearest Laura could figure this was a sort of day prison where people aged five to eighteen were kept for about six hours a day to have facts drilled into their brains against their will. That and move about a thing called a social ladder. Laura didn't know what kind of ladder it was but the way Rogue had described made it sound extremely unappealing. Apparently it was extremely hard to climb and very easy to fall down. She found this quite hard to picture and as talking about it made Rogue even grumpier than usual Laura didn't question it further.

The world around Laura confused and baffled her at the best of times. She came from a simple world where her life was not her own and every move she made was planned out for her in advance. Trained from the moment she could walk her considerable skills were second nature to her. Therefore all she ever had to know was that make a mistake and she'd be severely punished for it. Do it right and, well, get beaten anyway just to make sure the lesson had gone in. It was simple in her mind at least. That was her life. Orders given from above and she'd do them. Now however in the real world things were much more complicated. After only a few overwhelming days of everyone in the Institute trying to "normalise" her, Laura shut herself in her room. She had found a few books in there the first day she'd been there but she hadn't bothered with them, now with only those four walls for company she opened them expecting to find something akin to the "Art of War."

But what she'd found had confused her even more. What the hell was Middle Earth? Where was it? Why was it in the middle? What of? What were Elves? And Orcs? How could a simple bit of Jewellery insight so much death and fear, twisting the minds of those who carried it so much that they were diminished into something so pitiful and evil as that Gollum thing. Hydra would give their right arms for it, Laura thought. Rogue had laughed at her when she'd questioned her about it. She thought she'd been joking. She'd stopped when she saw Laura was deadly serious. It was fiction, Rogue explained, it was just a story, something someone had made up in their spare time to amuse other people. Laura hadn't understood the point of it at all. But she was relieved to know that this weapon at least didn't exist.

It was almost a surprise to Logan when he'd found her reading. He hadn't honestly thought Hydra would have bothered to teach her if all they wanted from her was to kill. Laura had taken offence to this. Of course she could read! What use would she be to Hydra if she couldn't read the dossiers they passed to her on her next mission?

Laura opened one of them now. She'd taken to carrying it with her on these nightly wanders and she'd read it after satisfying herself that the Mansion was still safe. The moonlight was sufficient enough for her to see the tiny print; her eyesight was of course much better than the average human's.

'The realm of Sauron is ended!" said Gandalf. 'The Ring-bearer has fulfilled his Quest." And as the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightening-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent: for even as it leaned over them a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.

Laura stayed there reading the end of the story until the sun came up and the sounds of life began to creep back into the Mansion.

Sighing Laura closed the book and headed back up the stairs and into her room resisting the urge to lock it behind her. As chaos erupted in the corridors with everyone fighting to get into the bathrooms Laura slipped into black jeans and a black tank top. Plain and simple and practical.

She folded up the cotton pyjamas and put them neatly back into the drawers. If you took a look around her bedroom you'd think that no one lived there. It was meticulously tidy, growing up military style had driven that into her and it seemed that no one was in a rush to undo that particularly with the mess the others made around the place.

The thought of going out there into said chaos didn't appeal to her. Boring though it was Laura much preferred it when fewer people were around. There were less looks and less whispered comments that people though she couldn't hear.

Laura sat back on her bed with her book and leant back on her pillows and carried on with it. She was glad no one bothered her that morning, they all sounded too much in a rush anyway it being Monday. Sometimes Rogue and Kitty would knock for her and she'd be dragged downstairs for breakfast. Ororo was a great cook in a different league to anyone else in the Mansion especially Kitty who'd once tricked Laura into trying one of her muffins. Laura ended up in the med lab for two days with a roaring fever and a tummy ache. Part of her thought Kitty ought to be congratulated; making someone with a better healing factor than even Logan ill was no mean feat! Food they were not but Kitty's muffins had the potential to one day be a lethal weapon of destruction. Just what the hell did she put in them anyway? Laura decided she didn't want to know.

Laura liked the food Ororo cooked, she hadn't been aware it existed until a little while ago it was just the chaos surrounding it that bothered her. Powers going haywire, people shouting at each other, people trying to do homework that was late already, small fires going on in the appliances, people diving over each other – all this was perfectly normal around here, apparently. Well not to her it wasn't. She'd only tried this a couple of times and each time she ended up having to go blow off some steam in the Danger Room trying to get rid of a very familiar urge to stab something. Which, the Professor had explained very calmly, after Laura had nearly separated Bobby and his arm after he tried to steal her waffle, was not under any circumstances allowed.

She became aware after an hour or so that the noise levels in the Mansion had died down and the noise levels outside had gone up.

She got up from the bed and walked to the window. Bitterly Laura watched all the others head off for school. Some headed off with Ororo in the X-Van, a couple ported with Kurt and Scott, Rogue, Kitty and Jean hopped into Scott's red car, the one which he had a baffling attachment to. Rogue looked up and gave a haughty, annoyed wave. Laura gave an equally annoyed one back. She didn't like the sound of school it was just another cage but…at least it was out there. She envied them for their freedom. She should be grateful for it, Laura thought.

Her ears pricked at the sound of footsteps nearing her door as the others drove away. She knew who it was even before she caught his scent. There was a hard bang on the door before it opened.

"Hey, kid,"

"Don't call me kid," Laura snapped to Wolverine who was standing in her doorway.

"Well good mornin' to you too, sunshine," Logan said. "Good mood as always I see,"

"I wonder who I get that from," Laura said.

Logan grinned, "Wanna go blow off some steam, kid?"

"By blow off steam do you mean I get to wreck the Danger Room? Yeah why not, I don't have anything better to do."

--

It ends quite abruptly I know. So, what do you think? Good? Bad? Burn the author at the stake? Would love to hear your opinions on this!

Next Chapter: Logan attempts to teach Laura how to control her anger. Good luck with that.